Midcentury Dreams

Chesley Bonestell and Willy Ley's The Conquest of Space

In the 1958 film Bell, Book and Candle, James Stewart plays a New York publisher whose office sports a floor-to-ceiling wall of books. Whoever dressed the set for the movie used real books, presumably chosen for their contemporary appearance, and as an inveterate browser of other people’s shelves I was able to recognize a few titles from their spines even without pausing the video for a closer look. (I’m not proud of that biblio-voyeuristic compulsion, but I suspect some of you share it.)

In among those books was the distinctive amber-brown spine of The Conquest of Space, a volume that, for me, is emblematic of the American era it represents.

The Conquest of Space, with text by Willy Ley and illustrations by Chesley Bonestell, was first published in 1949, and it popularized the idea of space exploration many years before the launch of the first artificial satellite. The Conquest of Space—along with its earlier iteration as a series of magazine articles, its influence on the animated Disney documentaries “Man in Space,” “Man and the Moon,” and “Mars and Beyond,” and subsequent volumes including The Conquest of the Moon and The Exploration of Mars—sparked the public imagination and created expectations that survived well into the NASA years. The Ley/Bonestell vision of American space exploration was a useful prop for the rocketry agenda of the Cold War—Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi missile engineer who became a pillar of the US space program, contributed to the sequel volumes—but it was serious enough to seem almost inevitable, and it mapped an array of possibilities that postwar science fiction writers eagerly explored.

The copy of The Conquest of Space I own is the 1959 revised and updated edition, and I thought it would be interesting to look back at it from the year 2025.

Many of you will instantly recognize Chesley Bonestell’s iconic astronomical art. Willy Ley is less remembered these days, but—briefly—he was a German science writer and rocket enthusiast who served as a technical advisor on Fritz Lang’s 1929 film Die Frau im Mond, fled the Nazi regime in 1935, and finally settled in the United States. Some of his first English-language writing appeared in Astounding magazine, and he was a regular columnist for Galaxy for many years. An unabashed science fiction fan, he was Guest of Honor at the 1953 World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia. He died in 1969, just a few weeks before the first manned landing on the moon…and only three years before the last, in the collapse of the man-in-space enterprise he had worked so hard to promote.

So how do the book’s text and images compare with the real thing? Let’s look.

The Moon Landing

In his painting Bonestell imagines a sleek rocket poised on its tail in the shadow of a jagged mountain range; in a photo from the Apollo 12 mission, Alan Bean clambers down the ladder of his Lunar Excursion Module onto a dusty, featureless plain. The photograph, in a sense, is Bonestell’s vision drained of all romance and reduced to a gritty industrial pragmatism, but it remains startling in its immediacy: this is a real place, where real people left bootprints in the powdery grey regolith. What Bonestell got right was the razor-sharp glint of unfiltered sunlight, the monochrome landscape, the fathomless blackness of the lunar sky.

Mars from Space

Bonestell’s Mars as seen from space is recognizable as the planet in the photo, although it retains trace of the “canals” first described by 19th century Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli and later interpreted as engineering works. The Martian canals were in fact an optical illusion, as most mid-century astronomers would have acknowledged, although Willy Ley was more optimistic: “As of 1949,” he wrote, “the canals of Mars do exist. What they are will not be decided until astronomy has entered into its next era.” The canals, although illusory, remained an irresistible draw for postwar science fiction writers: see Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950) for instance, or Robert A. Heinlein’s Red Planet (1949).

The Surface of Mars

The surface of Mars in Bonestell’s painting is desolate but not entirely dry, with suggestions of water (those canals again!) and hints of vegetation. Mars as our robotic landers have revealed it is an arid, hazy desert, as Willy Ley anticipated: “The main feature of the Martian landscape must be stark monotony. No mountains, no real cloud formations, no bodies of open water, not much weather except for the daily temperature changes.” But “we are justified in believing in life on Mars—hardy plant life.” No such luck, as it turns out, although the existence of microbial life remains a faint possibility. What we do know is that the planet more closely resembled Bonestell’s Mars some three or four billion years ago, when surface water persisted long enough to leave its mark in sinuous dry riverbeds and the stony traces of rippled shorelines.

Titan

The outer planets and their moons were hardly more than blurry astronomical enigmas in the postwar years, fully available for speculation. Bonestell’s gorgeously imaginative painting of Saturn from its moon Titan makes the real surface of Titan look drab by comparison…even though the real Titan is a far more complex and interesting place, an ultra-frigid world with mountains of ice, a dense nitrogen-methane atmosphere, and lakes of liquid hydrocarbons.

Where Did It Go?

So where did it go, that Bonestell/Ley future in space?

One of its last cinematic reflections was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its stately revolving space station and sprawling moon base. But by 1969 something uneasy had crept into the Bonestellian vision. The sterile white lunar corridors are more ominous than inspiring; the spacecraft bound for Jupiter is stalked by a rogue AI with delusions of grandeur; and, in the end, the prospect of transcendence is less technological than metaphysical.

Manned space travel foundered in the aftermath of the Vietnam war and the economic crises of the 1970s, and the Bonestell/Ley vision of the future collapsed along with it. Skylab, NASA’s first slimmed-down version of an orbital space station, was to Bonestell’s vision what a rowboat is to a battleship, and it was allowed to disintegrate as it tumbled back to Earth in July of 1979. Science fiction reflected some of that retrenchment. George Lucas’s 1977 Star Wars revived a genre of pre-war space opera that was explicitly distanced from any plausibly imagined future. The starship of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) is equal parts abandoned factory and haunted house. And on bookstore shelves, multi-volume reiterations of Tolkien’s hobbit fantasies displaced more conventional science fiction.

But even in a more prosperous and confident America, the colonization of space as Ley and Bonestell imagined it would have been impractically difficult and prohibitively expensive. What we got instead was the multinational robotic exploration of the solar system, enabled by advances in computing and the availability of boosters designed for putting military and commercial satellites in orbit. Some seventy-five years after the publication of The Conquest of Space, Earth’s moon still marks the furthest outpost of human space travel. But any smartphone will show you vivid images of the surface of Mars, the rings of Saturn, the marbled clouds of Jupiter, the icy plains of Pluto.

We should probably appreciate those small miracles while we can. The demonization of science and defunding of research in the United States right now—including massive budget cuts to NASA—almost certainly marks the end of that era and the beginning of a much darker one.

What remains of the Bonestell/Ley vision in popular culture circa 2025 is a disillusioned echo—in the corporate-driven and brutally exploitive colonized solar system of The Expanse, for instance; or in the alt-history nostalgia of AppleTV’s For All Mankind; or in the announced ambitions of a narcissistic multibillionaire whose spaceships explode with startling regularity and whose planned Martian cities sound more like penal colonies staffed with indentured labor.

Midcentury Dreams

The Conquest of Space was another generation’s dream-book, something to dazzle the imagination of the ten-year-olds who borrowed it from their local libraries in the long, slow years of the 1950s. It remains an artifact of its time, remarkable not for its accuracy but for what it captures of a moment in American history. Three quarters of a century have stolen its plausibility but lent it the quiet poignancy of a Roman aqueduct drowsing for centuries in the European countryside. It no longer serves its intended purpose, and time has made a ruin of it…but it still invites dreaming over, should you chance across it on a lazy summer day.

Who wants to see the Future, who ever does? A man can face the Past, but to think—the pillars crumbled, you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry…? But there they are. I see them. Isn’t that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter what you say. — Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

Photo credits: NASA/JPL/USGS, NASA/JSC, ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona, NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS. Other images are from my own copy of The Conquest of Space,