CHESLEY BONESTELL …

                                       CHESLEY BONESTELL



       What makes astronautics uniquely special among the sciences is that its roots lay so deeply

buried in imagination and fantasy. For centuries it existed only in the works of such torchbearers as

Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and those scientists--professional and amateur--who

believed in such a patently unlikely proposition as the possibility of flying into space and visiting

other planets. Given the very real influence of literature on the history and development of

astronautics--where would it be today had Hermann Oberth, Robert Goddard and Konstantin

Tsiolkovksy not read science fiction?--it's not the least bit surprising that an artist could also have

had a major impact on that history. That artist was Chesley Bonestell.

       Bonestell was raised in San Francisco, where he had been born on New Year's Day, 1888. As

a youngster, visits to the Mt. Wilson observatory sparked an early interest in astronomy. However,

after experiencing the great earthquake of 1906, during his earliest attempts at space art were lost in

the fire, Bonestell fled the family's paper business to study architecture at Columbia University in

New York City. Though he never earned a degree he quickly found jobs as a designer and renderer

with some of the top architects of the day. For William van Alen in New York he designed the façade

of the Chrysler Building, including its famous gargoyles, and while working for Joseph Straus in San

Francisco he contributed to the design of the Golden Gate Bridge. Bonestell also designed the

Plymouth Rock Memorial and co-designed the famous 17-Mile Drive along the Monterey coast.

When the depression brought the building industry to a skidding halt, Bonestell went to England,

where he worked as an artist specializing in architectural subjects for the Illustrated London News.

This same magazine was also publishing astronomical illustrations painted by Britisher Scriven

Bolton and Frenchman Lucien Rudaux and Bonestell found his old interest in astronomy

reawakened. After returning to the States in the late 1930s, he went to work in Hollywood as a

special effects matte painter--contributing to such classic films as Citizen Kane, The Magnificent

Ambersons and the Charles Laughton Hunchback of Notre Dame. Bonestell quickly realized that he

could combine the knowledge of perspective, light and shade from his experience in architectural
rendering with the techniques he was now learning about camera angles and oil painting to create an

entirely new kind of astronomical art. "The planets of our Solar System," he said, "had never been

accurately depicted from their satellites. Always before it had been an `artist's conception' . . ." He

began researching the subject and filling sketch books with exquisite oil sketches of the planets.

        He took his first set of paintings--an imaginary journey to the planet Saturn--to Life

magazine, which promptly paid him $30,000 for the use of the artwork. One of these paintings, a

view of Saturn seen from its giant moon Titan, has been such a seminal influence on the development

of spaceflight and astronomical art that space art entrepreneur Kim Poor has described it as "the

painting the launched a thousand careers." It has been reprinted scores of times in the fifty years

since its first publication and requests for it still arrive every month.

        Bonestell published more of his remarkable astronomical paintings, in Life as well as other
magazines. In a 1947 issue of Pic he introduced American public to the extraordinary invention of

Tsien Hseuh-Sen, Goddard Professor at the California Institute of Technology, who had recently

proposed a hypersonic rocket-powered aircraft--a "spaceplane"--that could make the 3,000-mile

flight from New York to San Francisco in less than an hour. In eight full-color paintings, Bonestell

showed what such a flight would look like, from takeoff to landing. The images--created nearly forty

years before the Space Shuttle--are uncannily reminiscent of photos taken by orbiting astronauts.

        Bonestell finally collected 58 of his paintings in book form. The Conquest of Space, with a

text by space expert Willy Ley, was published in 1950 and became an immediate best-seller.

"Chesley Bonestell's paintings," Ley wrote in the book's introduction, "should not be considered

`artist's conceptions' in the customary sense of the phrase...but a picture which you might obtain if it

were possible to get a very good camera with perfectly color-true film into the proper position and

have it manned by a good photographer who could use just the right exposure with the proper artistic

touch. It is obvious that this involves, not just a special talent, coupled with special studies, but really

an entire life history." Perhaps the extraordinary effect of Bonestell's paintings derived from his total

absorption in the subject. "Sometimes when I am painting," he said, "I . . . lose myself in the scene

and feel for a little while that I am actually there."

        The realism of the artwork convinced an entire generation of post-World War II readers that
spaceflight was possible in their lifetime. There are countless professional aerospace engineers and

scientists working today who decided their careers when they saw The Conquest of Space when they

were only eight or ten years old--such as Carl Sagan, who said he didn't know what other worlds

looked like until he saw Bonestell's paintings of the solar system. Robert Richardson, an astronomer

with the Mt. Wilson and Palomar Observatories, thought that "...Bonestell's paintings far surpass

any portrayals of astronomical scenes that I have ever seen. They are real contributions to descriptive

astronomy quite aside from their intrinsic artistic merit. I only wish that a book containing such

illustrations could have fallen into my hands when I was a youngster. What a prize it would have

been." Arthur C. Clarke, who was then working on his first book, wrote for the January 6, 1950 issue

of The Aeroplane: "This beautiful book, which has become something of a best-seller in the United
States, is an outstanding example of co-operation between art and technology...

        "The result of this collaboration is a large sumptiously produced volume whose 16 colour

plates are at once a delight to the eye and stimulus to the imagination. It has aroused more covetous

greed in one heart than any other book this reviewer has ever handled...

        "Mr. Bonestell's remarkable technique produces an effect of realism so striking that his

paintings have often been mistaken for actual colour photographs by those slightly unacquainted with

the present status of interplanetary flight...

        "To many, this book will for the first time make the other planets real places, and not mere

abstractions. In the years to come it is probably destined to fire many imaginations, and thereby to

change many lives." Clarke had no idea how right he was.

        Partly as a result of the publicity surrounding the release of his book, Bonestell was invited by

producer George Pal to participate in the production of several now-classic science fiction films:

Destination Moon, War of the Worlds, Conquest of Space and When Worlds Collide. For the first of

these, Bonestell worked closely with technical advisor Robert A. Heinlein--the science fiction author

whose novel was the basis for the film--both of whom strove mightily to make the movie as

scientifically accurate as possible. The artist even went to the trouble to make certain that the phase

of the earth was correct when it is seen in the lunar sky. Heinlein was impressed, as was Wernher von

Braun later, by Bonestell's attention to detail. "I had selected," he wrote later, "the crater Aristarchus
[for the landing site]. Chesley Bonestell did not like Aristarchus; it did not have shape he wanted, nor

the height of crater wall he wanted, nor the distance to [the] apparent horizon. Mr. Bonestell knows

more about the surface of the moon than any other living man; he search around and found one he

liked--the crater Harpalus, in high latitudes, facing the earth. High latitude was necessary so that the

earth would appear down near the horizon where the camera could see it..." Destination Moon

proved to be sensationally successful, garnering producer George Pal an Academy Award for special

effects and a firm place in film history as a genuine classic.

       Meanwhile, Bonestell space paintings were appearing major magazines all over the United

States. Scientific American, Pic, Coronet and Mechanix Illustrated all published covers and

illustrations by Bonestell, as did many of the science fiction pulps, such as Astounding, Galaxy and
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Bonestell's artwork quickly began to define how the

public perceived the future of spaceflight. Not only were his paintings as believeable as the photos in

National Geographic, there was a consistency in their vision that made it seem as though Bonestell

had a direct feed from the future.

       In 1951, Bonestell received a wire from Collier's magazine editor Cornelius Ryan--who was

to later write The Longest Day--inviting him to attend a spaceflight symposium at the U.S. Air Force

School of Aviation Medicine in San Antonio, Texas. Among those present would be Wernher von

Braun, along with key members of his famed German rocket team. This resulted in a series of

illustrated articles that outlined a complete space program from unmanned satellites, space stations

and lunar landings to a manned trip to Mars.

       "...Chesley Bonestell's pictures," von Braun wrote later, "...are far more than...beautiful

ethereal paintings of worlds beyond. They present the most accurate portrayal of those faraway

heavenly bodies that modern science can offer. I do not say this lightly. In my many years of

association with Chesley I have learned to respect, nay fear, this wonderful artist's obsession with

perfection." Even Wernher von Braun, as Robert Heinlein before him. was not immune from

Bonestell's criticism. "My file cabinet," he said, "is filled with sketches of rocket ships I had

prepared to help in his art work--only to have them returned to me with penetrating detailed

questions or blistering criticism of some inconsistency or oversight."
       For his part, Bonestell neither understood nor approved of those who criticized von Braun's

connections with the German military. "[H]e had more successful experience building rockets, and

more faith in going into space, than anyone else . . ." Bonestell argued, adding pragmatically: "What

did I care that they came down on London?"

       It is difficult to overestimate the impact and influence of the Collier's articles--and the books

spun off the series--on the burgeoning U.S. space program. Written with expertise and confidence,

and illustrated by Bonestell's extraordinary paintings, they demonstrated that spaceflight was not

something for the distant future, but was instead literally right around the corner. Von Braun's

mission was to demonstrate that it could be accomplished with present day technology and

materials--that given the will and the money, the United States could be in space within a few years.

He accomplished his mission brilliantly. It is no exaggeration to say that the articles and books came

at exactly right moment to kick start the fledgling American space program. The images that

Bonestell created for this series appeared in hundreds of publications, and not all of them

legitimately, as pirated versions of his work were printed in magazines and books all over the world.

In the heyday of American enthusiasm for spaceflight--the period between the end of World War II

and the end of the 1960s--Bonestell's illustrations and spacecraft designs appeared not only in print,

but in games, motion pictures, television, jigsaw puzzles and toys, and in doing so significantly

shaped expectations of what space flight would look like.

       Over the next few decades Bonestell created more than half a dozen other books, though his

masterwork was undoubtedly the 40-foot mural of the lunar surface commissioned by the Museum of

Science in Boston. The painting is now in the collection of the National Air and Space Museum

which plans to restore the mural for display in the museum's new annex near Dulles International

Airport.

       Bonestell's final years were heaped with honors. He received a Special Award and medallion,

as well as a bronze medal, from the British Interplanetary Society; the Dorothy Klumke-Roberts

Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific; and even his own eponymous asteroid. In the

renaming of the former (3129)1979MK2, Carl Sagan commented that "it is only fitting that we give

back a world to Bonestell, who has given us so many." Posthumously, Bonestell was inducted into
the International Space Hall of Fame and made a member of the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame,

where he joined such luminaries as N.C. Wyeth and Norman Rockwell. The International Association

of Astronomical Artists made Bonestell one of the first five recipients of their prestigious Lucien

Rudaux Memorial Award, in recognition of his seminal contributions to their genre. There has even

been a rock and roll song in his honor. "I believe," he once said, "that everyone, to be happy through

life, should have a hobby to enjoy until death. Then, at least from a purely selfish standpoint, your

life will be a success." Bonestell's hobby not only brought him pleasure, it changed the world.

       Bonestell died in 1987. Today his books and paintings are highly sought after by collectors as

his reputation--and his influence--continues to increase with every year.



Ron Miller

Bonestell Space Art

Copyright © 2005 by Ron Miller