Visions of Spaceflight by Frederick Ordway, Four Walls Eight Windows,
拢35, ISBN 1568581815
LONG before the space programme began, Frederick Ordway III stumbled across a
copy of the 1940s pulp magazine Amazing Stories. The futuristic images stuck in
Ordway鈥檚 mind. He began to hoard pulps, amassing an unrivalled collection of
rare illustrated books on space.
Visions of Spaceflight is the result of his obsession鈥攁 beautiful
collection of space art. As a showcase of little-known images, the book would be
sensational enough, but it has added authority. Ordway was one of the 1950s
space pioneers, along with rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. He is a close
friend of Arthur C. Clarke and was a technical advisor on the Stanley Kubrick
film 2001: A space odyssey.
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The images range from ancient woodcuts to glossy artworks produced for
Colliers magazine in the 1950s. Expeditions to the Moon are a popular theme,
featuring ever more ingenious means of getting there, including birds, demons
and the evaporation of dew. My favourite is the notion of pulling the Moon down
to Earth with a giant electromagnet in the Sahara.
All the legends of space art are here, such as Chesley Bonestell, Ron Miller
and Fred Freeman. Their work is undiluted 鈥渞ight stuff鈥�: real men sweat it out
in centrifuges, while frilly-skirted women play daintily with test tubes away
from the action.
Towards the end of the book, the line between real space and space fiction
begins to blur. For the Colliers series in 1954, von Braun wrote a
fictitious account of a 70-man expedition sent to find life on Mars. In
1970鈥攁fter the success of the Apollo missions鈥攙on Braun was actually
planning to get humans to Mars by 1983.
Ordway鈥檚 book makes it clear that images have always been as important as
engineering in driving the space programme forward. Visions of the future have
an uncanny way of becoming the future.