Advertising the Impossible Earth: The Visual Culture of Post-Apollo Space Colony Concept Art

Abstract

In post-Apollo America, speculative visions of life in space were shaped by the unabashedly optimistic space colonization proposals of physicist Gerard Kitchen O’Neill. O’Neill presented these self-contained artificial worlds as affordable solutions to the swelling economic, environmental, and industrial problems that threatened late twentieth century life. Proponents of space colonies commissioned concept art to translate their technical designs into accessible, attainable, and, most importantly, appealing places in their audiences’ imaginations. To paint attractive pictures of life aboard space colonies, however, artists first had to decide what made contemporary life on Earth desirable to their audiences. Pieces of space colony concept art produced in the mid-1970s thus advertise a specific vision of life in space, one unequivocally shaped by popular anxieties and fantasies about postmodern American life. By interpreting these artworks as advertisements, I aim to understand how artists and scientists alike employed concept art as a place-making tool to code space colonies as both bountiful natural oases and novel [American] cities – places ultimately designed for and inhabited by a new class of citizens.