Episode 17: Imagining Space with Lois Rosson

Written By Emily Olsen

Emily and Alexa chat with NASA Historian Dr. Lois Rosson about the history of illustration in space exploration, how the NASA Art Program came to be, and the dark story behind the rocket emoji. 🚀

Show Notes

Transcript

[Intro Music: “Space” by Music Unlimited]

Emily

Hello and welcome to the Art Astra Podcast. I’m Emily Olsen.

Alexa

And I’m Alexa Erdogan. 

Emily

Today we have an incredible guest with us. Lois Rosson is a historian of science and technology based in Los Angeles, where she currently works as a field historian in the NASA History Office. At NASA, Lois just completed a history of the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, and is currently working on a history of exoplanet research at the agency.

Her current book project traces the impact of Los Angeles's art and special effects industry on the look of the space environment in planetary science and in popular culture. She has held the Guggenheim Pre-Doctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum and the Octavia E. Butler Fellowship at the Huntington Library. Her work has been supported by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Berggruen Institute, and the American Philosophical Society. Lois, thanks so much for joining us! 

Lois

Oh my God. Thank you guys. The pleasure is really all mine.

Alexa

So how did you become a space historian in the first place? What does that path look like? And especially what did it look like for you?

Lois

Yeah. Okay, so I am so excited to be here talking with you guys about this because I arrived at space history really by way of art practice, which I feel like is sometimes like a wacky, like left field answer for people. But I actually studied painting as an undergraduate. I did painting and printmaking and as a 19 year old, I was like, “Wow, it's so crazy that you can spend many hours painting or drawing something like a coffee mug, right? And that two dimensional representation that you have just created has some sort of mysterious connection to like the actual like three dimensional object.”  

Then eventually I learned that there's like a whole vocabulary for this, like mimesis and representation. But you know I think that that was a relationship that I was really interested in, especially when thinking about photography, right? Like, you know: is a drawing of a mug or a photograph of the same mug the more trustworthy image, right? Like how do images also contain information about the subjects that they depict? And, you know, so I was really interested in things like portraiture, right? Why certain paintings can look like a human, right? Like what makes likeness and and legibility? And then through a very random set of collisions, my first job out of undergrad was working at NASA Ames doing graphic design in their tech transfer office. I have always been a history buff. And so I started hanging out in the history office at NASA Ames and also in the archive. 

The archive at Ames, if you ever have an opportunity to go, I highly recommend it! It's this incredible space that is inside of a decommissioned wind tunnel. Walking into the building feels kind of like walking into this modernist cathedral because it's got these like huge, sweeping ceilings. And then the archive is inside of this little trailer inside of the wind tunnel, it's like this little pearl in this like incredible structure. The walls of the archive are covered in paintings and illustrations. What was so fascinating to me and like  really kind of the thing that like set me on this trajectory was that there were really two types of images that were on the walls: fine art commissioned for the NASA Artists Cooperation Program, which was the fine arts residency program that NASA had in the 1960s, which I had no idea existed. And then astronomical illustrations, which were treated more as visualizations of the space environment. And the bulk of those had been commissioned for unmanned interplanetary satellite missions of like the late 1970s. So like Pioneer Venus, Voyager, or Viking, you know as we started to explore the outer solar system.

But both sets of images…everything was hand-painted. And the fine art was…the painting was like the object, right? But for the illustrations, the final stage was always to circulate in print. So they would get circulated on like the cover of like NASA special publications or technical reports or press kits that got sent out to the media. But when you encounter the actual paintings in person, like a lot of them are large and very stately, right? And so they occupy this interesting liminal space between utilitarian image and art object, right? Whereas like the fine art images were like, “This is fine art.” The way that that manifested, I thought was so fascinating because the sort of colloquial shorthand just like in the archive, if you were like pointing to the different paintings was like, “Oh, that's a Rauschenberg” or like, “Oh, that's a Bonestell.” 

But then if you were talking about one of the illustrations or the visualizations, it was like, “Oh, that's Pioneer Venus” or like that’s the bus or the probe, right? The relationship to authorship was completely different. And so, I was so fascinated by that because I was like, first of all, the language that I want to use to describe these astronomical illustrations is like the language of photography. I wanted to say that these illustrations looked photorealistic. But we did not have any photographs of the places that these people were painting. So I was like, “Where is this photographic clarity? This like pictorial resolution, like where is it coming from? What is the reference material? Like how are these images of these distant, largely unseeable landscapes being materialized? And how are they being produced in conjunction with this agency?” And, because of this convention, which is true largely in scientific illustration where the illustrator is anonymized because it's like not an art object like the image that they have produced.

I actually had to do quite a bit of legwork to figure out who had actually made some of these illustrations. And then I discovered that in the early 1980s, a lot of the people who are making illustrations like this professionalized into a guild of astronomical illustrators.  So I was so fascinated by this that I ended up going to grad school to write about this single topic. And I ended up in a history of science program because I was interested in these images as truth claims, basically, right? That this is a realistic depiction of the space environment… Because I was interested in like, “OK, well, like if that's true, where is the science in this process, this visualization process, right?” And, yeah, it turned into just this like wild rabbit hole of, you know, like people who went to art school, who developed this extremely niche form of professional expertise in the 1980s. And really late seventies / early eighties for this type of illustration, I sort of see of like a golden age and there's earlier examples too. The dissertation that I wrote is now my first book project. And I start with Chesley Bonestell in sort of the early space age illustrations. But yeah, that's kind of how I got into all of this. I wasn't really a space person before I arrived at NASA. And then I was like, “Wait, is outer space actually like the most interesting philosophical case study for like everything?”  And yeah, I've been doing that ever since.

Alexa

That’s so interesting that you mentioned the photorealism part of it, because even with some of the space photography that we get now from telescopes…

Lois

Mm-hmm.

Alexa 

…They're adjusted to different spectrums to see different quote unquote colors, which if you were just like floating in a little probe right outside where that is actually taken, you wouldn't see it the same as we're processing it on Earth. But it doesn't mean that it's necessarily a false representation of it. It's just a different way.

Lois

Exactly. And like that was what I was so interested in, right? Because it's like suddenly when you consider what an accurate image is beyond Earth's environment, right, like the rubric is actually completely different. And so it's such a useful vantage point to kind of rethink what we think of visual legibility even is, right? And we can get into some of the historical nuts and bolts, but one of the things I thought was so fascinating about this guild of illustrators was that  they cultivated this very coherent professional identity, but one of the questions that drove them was like, “No, no, no. Like, if you got into a spaceship and you flew to the thing, like what would you see?” Like, trying really hard to stay true to this concept of like a naked eye representation of these places that can only be mediated for us with machines.

Emily

The other thing that strikes me as you were describing your trajectory was the coming at it from an art making perspective…

Lois

Mm-hmm.

Emily

…in this archival environment, because so much of these early images…There is this element of art making to them. I'm thinking of the lunar mosaics needing to be pieced together. And also there is a very specific painting of Mars at Pasadena…

Lois

Oh, mm-hmm.

Emily

….that a lot of people don't think of these images as fine art in that context you were referring to.

Lois

Yeah. Right. Absolutely right! And I think that that's what's so interesting to me about…because in some senses this becomes an interesting case study in visualization where it’s like the visualizations are not being made by computers or machines, but rather by human beings. And so it's an easier way to kind of open the black box up and be like, “Oh, OK.” The visualization process is not a passive one where information goes in and like a true indexical [laughs] representation of like the physical phenomenon comes out at the other end. There are so many choices that have to be made.  And so you know, I really…I see this history as being a useful one to kind of help us think through now, right? Like, why do certain images look trustworthy to us?

I think that this is a really - especially now with AI generated images, kind of like entering into the fray of this, right? Like why things that look like photographs we're so much more likely to trust as opposed to other images. Because I think that's a dynamic now that's being kind of like newly destabilized, even though I contend it was never really true to begin with.

Alexa

That definitely just sparked a new fear in me of like AI generated stellar imagery. Oh no…

[laughs]

Lois

Yeah, right?

Alexa

No. I don't want that timeline.

[laughs]

Lois

Yeah, I found myself saying that a lot this year.

[laughs]

Alexa

Yeah, curiously enough.

Lois

Ah, yeah.

Alexa

You've spoken in the past and done a lot of really interesting research about how space is depicted. And so I'm curious about what drew you to the area of research of the history itself of space art?

Lois

Gosh, this is going to sound so trite. But the images are so cool! [laughs] Like the images are so cool. And I think that like they are so...they are so distinct because this batch of images was so contingent on like a specific set of parameters. The Cold War made the space environment a very important geopolitical arena quickly, like overnight. And we suddenly had a need for compelling images of this environment, but machines couldn't take those yet. Or the images that they were able to produce or what we could see through telescopes were just like fuzzy and abstract and didn't have the sort of first person narrative that a lot of these really cinematic illustrations could offer. 

And I think that this distinction between illustration and fine art in the United States is one that I'm always interested in. It's one that's one that I've been like endlessly fascinated by just because it's like what happens also in the 20th century, right, is that there's this explosion in print culture and it's like books, but it's like comic books. Like suddenly there's just so much commercially available visual material that institutions have to suddenly clamp down and be like, “This is fine art and like this is something else.” 

But I think that what's so interesting to me about astronomical illustration is that it did fall into that second category of like commercial. Even a lot of the illustrators themselves didn't necessarily talk about the work that they were making as fine art. But because this set of conditions of illustrating the space environment by hand and having it circulate as like a utilitarian image of the space environment, those conditions didn't last that long. And so by like the 1990s, we started to see computer generated or, you know, images of the space environment made with digital tools really kind of supplant this moment. And so now all these illustrations for a lot of people are like deeply, deeply nostalgic because they were only made for like a couple decades. 

And so now they're like becoming fine art objects because people are so nostalgic for them. There is this kind of like revisiting of these objects. The best concrete example of this is… Have you guys seen “The Martian?”

Emily & Alexa

Mhm, yes. Yes. 

Lois

Okay, yes, classic. So the illustrator who I start the book project with, Chesley Bonestell, who is arguably like the most famous American astronomical illustrator of all time, and who the… the illustrators who I write about who come later really sort of situate him as the forefather of the genre.

His most famous painting is called “Saturn as Seen from Titan.” And he painted it in the mid-1940s for a series in Life magazine on…it was like views of the solar system. But he painted a bunch of different views of Saturn. But “Saturn as Seen from Titan” is like the blockbuster image. And Bonestell, he was a working illustrator. His background was in architecture. He got a job doing Hollywood matte painting in like the golden age of Hollywood. But he was always very open with the fact that like he wanted to make money. So when he made these illustrations, he was like churning them out. 

And “Saturn as Seen from Titan…” and a lot of people don't know this, but it's actually a photo montage. He would build these models in his studio and then photograph them. And then sometimes he would just paint directly on top of the photograph. So the like mountainous portion of “Saturn As Seen from Titan” is actually like a photograph of a model that he had built to save time.

And just like with the illustrations that I encountered in the archive at [NASA] Ames, the sort of final form of it was not the painting itself, but its existence, its circulation in this print environment for which it was commissioned, right? That was why it was produced, was to live in print. So it's a small painting. The painting itself is really not very big because it didn't need to be.

But in the movie “The Martian,” there is a scene where we see the office of the director of Johnson Space Center. He's got his feet on the desk and we can see out the window and his window is overlooking the rocket garden. And on the wall in his office is Chesley Bonestell's “Saturn As Seen from Titan,” but it has been transformed into this huge, magnificent oil painting. And I think that that's such a tidy explanation of the transformation that these images have seen, where it's like in reality, they were produced for these extremely specific commercial reasons. But because the American space age was such a crucible for the manufacture of a national mythology, we’re so nostalgic for those images that now they are art objects, even though they weren't when they were produced.

Emily

Is there a space artist or a specific artwork that resonated with you or that piqued your interest?

Lois

Hmm. So my book project is a history of this genre of astronomical illustration that became scientifically viable for like a short period of time. One of the chapters that I have in the book is about the astrogeology branch at the USGS, which in the early 1960s made all of the maps for Apollo. Because in order to plan the lunar landings, we had to actually see the surface of the moon in a lot greater detail. 

We didn't understand the properties of lunar regolith in the early 1960s or we had no idea what to expect in terms of like what's the surface gonna actually be like to land on for humans. So this branch that emerged, they were based out at Lowell [Observatory]. Basically, this office… so Gerard Kuiper, who is like also one of the forefathers of just planetary science writ large and also like a very visually attuned astronomer. 

He was like, “I need an artist. I want someone who knows how to draw to look out of the telescope at the lunar surface and draw what they see with their naked eye because I need a higher degree of resolution than what these photographs are capable of producing.” And so one of the artists that he hired was a young woman who was fresh out of art school in St. Louis. Her name is Patricia Bridges. And she made some of the most beautiful maps of the lunar surface that I have ever seen. Like they're so stunning and they're super detailed. And she developed this technique using an airbrush. 

And so airbrushes are also like a character in this story because it's a pretty idiosyncratic drawing tool that gets popular in the 60s and then 70s as an advertising tool.  But Bridges used the airbrush to like nail the shadows of craters on the surface. I think that her work is really fascinating because she is one of those artists who also, in oral histories that she gave about her time out at Lowell, didn't use this language of art object to describe what she was doing. She was like, “I was making maps. This is like a utilitarian form of image making.”

But what's so interesting about that is that...There's an artist named Vija Celmins, which I don't know… Do you guys know her work?

Emily

No, sorry.

Lois

No, oh no. 

Emily

I keep shaking or nodding and it's like… this is an audio podcast.

[laughter]

Lois

So she was an artist who makes these very incredible, large, often like graphite drawings of the surface of the ocean or different terrestrial landscapes. So she did a series of drawings in, I think like the late 1960s, of the lunar surface using Mariner photos as her reference material, which Patricia Bridges was also using. It's so fascinating to me and so indicative of some of these dynamics that we've already been talking about that like Patricia Bridges was working in a lunar mapping office, making these extremely careful drawings of the lunar surface using Mariner images as reference. And then Vija Celmins was making these very careful illustrations of the lunar surface using Mariner images. And then one set of those images went into lunar atlases and the other set went into art galleries as high conceptual art.

It's so interesting because like when you read some of the criticism of some of these Celmins' drawings, it's like a curator’s being like, “it's like the cyborg eye… like Vija Celmins has inserted herself into this mechanical seeing process.”  And it's just so interesting to me because what is so striking is that their illustrations look so similar, right? And were produced using so many of the same tools, right? But the context is so radically different, and it has such a profound impact on how we read the images. And as a historian, I feel one of the things that is extremely motivating to me is to tell this story, because I think that these objects have value in a way that was not recognized at the time that they were made.

One of Patricia Bridges' protégés was Don Davis, who has made some of the most famous space settlement illustrations of all time. I'd argue that his impact on the visualization of space as an environment is probably just as significant as Chesley Bonestell's, but he was one of Patricia Bridges' protégés. And she taught him how to use the airbrush. I asked Don in an interview that we had done because he met her at the USGS where he got started as an intern doing some lunar drawings for Gerard Kuiper. I asked him,  “what happened to a lot of these atlas drawings?”

He said a lot of them were thrown away because after they were printed, right, people were like, “Well, I guess we don't need these anymore!” precisely because this treatment of them as art objects was not part of the equation. That was never the point of them. And in thinking about the way that telling this story is also a form of cultural heritage work, I really see this as like trying to sort of rattle the cage and view, like no, these images actually are extremely culturally significant and they deserve to be preserved.

Alexa

It's interesting that there was a decision to throw some of them away instead of archiving them, like the concept of people not realizing they're making history while they're in the moment.

Lois

Yeah. Oh, it happens all the time. [laughs] It happens all the time, right? Because it's like, you don't have the benefit of historical hindsight to be like, “Oh, like some random grad student…

[laughter]

…. like, you know, [laughter] like 50 years from now is going to be really upset that we threw these away.”

[laughter]

But you never know. [laughs] Yeah.

Emily

You've touched on the value and the different contexts of these images and also of their makers, but I was so excited when we connected with you. One question I'd love your take on is: what do you think the role of the artist is in space exploration in general, especially with, as you've pointed out, originally they didn't have naked eye visuals of these terrains. And then what does that look like now that we do have different technologies?

Lois

Yeah, it's a great question. I think that the sort of easiest answer is visualization, right? To conjure images of otherwise unpicturable subjects, right? And I mean that of literal physical places and literal physical phenomenon, but also of visualizing things like cultural significance, or ideas about the space environment. Because I mentioned already, one of the things that so fascinated me about these astronomical illustrations that I encountered the first time in the archive was that they were also in this room with fine art that had been produced for the NASA Artist Cooperation Program and that they were all kind of jumbled together. But the fine art was this really clear foil to the utilitarian nature of these illustrations. 

The artist cooperation program, I think, is a really fascinating case study in precisely this question, right, of like, “What is the role of the artist in space exploration as a human project?” One of the people who actually really went to bat for the art program in the early 1960s was none other than James Webb himself, because James Webb was not a scientist. He came from the State Department. He was a hearts and minds guy.  

And he was like, “What we need in the early 1960s now at this moment when landing on the Moon is not a thing that we even fully know is possible, but we're about to like spend a lot of money on, is artists to come in and stamp the high technology work that we're doing with cultural legitimacy.” With a cultural lasting power that he didn't think was possible with things like press photography. 

You can take a gajillion-and-one photographs of a launch gantry. But he wanted something that was gonna again emphasize that this work was also culturally significant. It started, I guess, that he saw like a beautiful oil painting of Alan Shepard. And he really wanted a set of oil paintings of all of the Mercury 7 astronauts.

And it was like way too expensive. By that point, you know, it's like the idea was kind of seeded and he was really on board. And so they brought on a man named James Dean, who is not that James Dean. 

He's another James Dean. He did a lot of the heavy lifting behind the scenes, talented water colorist in his own right, and Hereward Lester Cooke from the National Gallery of Art, who sort of oversaw the project, but they brought in artists to come and draw and paint on site they were paid a very modest honorarium most of the time. It sometimes didn't even cover all of the travel and lodging to….a lot of them went to Cape Canaveral.

That's how Bob McCall got his start – the artist who did all of the promotional artwork for 2001: A Space Odyssey. I already mentioned Robert Rauschenberg did some lithographs for them, too. But a lot of the early artists in the early 1960s when the project was really, really active actually came from the U.S. Air Force art program. And that was the case of Bob McCall because he had served in the Air Force and he painted…. I know you guys have seen these. It's like aviation painting. It got really popular in the ‘50s as a way to commemorate the aircraft that helped the United States win the Second World War.

Lois

And so it's, you know, these really realistic-looking paintings of aircraft where it's like shiny metal. They're basically like the equivalent of when people make oil paintings of their thoroughbreds. [laughs] It's like…”Here's like a B-52 bomber!” 

[laughter]

And like, “Here, this object is significant,” right? And so basically, a lot of these guys were brought over to just do what they had done for the Air Force art program for the NASA Artist Cooperation Program. And that, I think, is actually a really important piece of the story that is not often told, because sometimes people see that NASA had a fine arts program in the 60s and they try to narrativize it in like a moment in the 1960s where funding for the arts expanded. 

And so they're like, “Oh yeah, it's like the NEA. It's like the NEH.” But the NASA Artist Cooperation Program actually predated the NEA. It came first. And I actually think that the way to historicize it is not as another example of expansion of the Johnson administration's funding for the social safety net and then like arts and culture, but rather in the history of military painting…of the military bringing in artists to draw battlefields and to like record, like the artist as documentarian. And I think that that's really kind of what the NASA Art Program was about certainly early on. It got a lot more high profile the closer we got to the launch of Apollo 11 and so then that's when you got like artists who were already kind of famous who were brought on board. 

And definitely a big drop off after Apollo 17, though there were some other artists who came… Annie Leibovitz did some shuttle astronaut photography, and Chakaia Booker did a sculpture for them after…after, I think, Columbia. 

And so the art program still existed technically for a while, but it was really like an Apollo program. But it's interesting: artists as visualizer versus artists as documentarian. But in many ways, it's the same thing, right? It's like the production of this document is so ripe with artistic choices. And it like stamps the artist all over it, so…

Emily

Yes, it's so funny. I was just vigorously nodding when you were talking about “Surely you're familiar with these these types of paintings.” There was a really wonderful exhibition at the Air and Space Museum called Artist Soldiers. I want to say in like… 2017/ 2018.

Lois

Oh my God.

Emily

Yes, I haunted that exhibition…

Lois

Wow.

[laughter]

Emily

…so it was just one of my favorites. [laugh]

Lois

It's so interesting. It's objectively just like so interesting. But then it's like another example of  how you bring in humans to bridge this gap! You know, it's like… we made so many drawings of  active battle scenes of the Civil War because you couldn't bring a camera to go and photograph them where people are fighting.

And so it was like the only way to transmute the spectacle.

Emily

Absolutely. I will have to aggressively go back and fact check myself on this one. But I believe, for example, the postcards, as we think of them today, started, I think, in… it was a war context. It was to send people scenes from... I want to say it was a French war? I don't know enough about this to be talking about it -

[laughter]

Lois

….That sounds right! I choose to believe.

Emily

…it was specifically to do with, with updates from a front.

Lois

Wow.

Emily

But It is really interesting. I had not clocked that the art program at NASA predated the NEA because the way that I have always seen it framed, especially when you have these stories, as you say, like the more famous artists come in later, like we've got also like Norman Rockwell…

Lois

Mm-hmm.

Emily

… and Paul Calle. And they have access to the astronauts and the suits, and they're able to capture these moments in a way that helps get like this public support for it, but also it is this interesting context of witness, but also very much art and not like an embedded artist as much.

Lois

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. No, totally. I think it gets to the very nature of images as, like, a record. I think Paul Calle's drawings of the Apollo 11 astronauts getting suited up are so beautiful. They remind me a lot of just very good figure drawings. Because that is what they are, right? I don't know if you guys have ever done any figure drawing, but figure drawing as an exercise is so couched in the language of study. It's really about knowing and, like, seeing. You're studying the subject and drawing it so that you can replicate it in paper. 

The other thing I think that makes his drawings so striking is the fact that when the Apollo 11 astronauts were getting suited up, they didn't allow any press photography in the room. And so actually the only visual record that we have of that moment is his drawings.

Alexa

As the artwork that's been created, as our space exploration capabilities have developed over time as well, how have you seen the role of art change in all that? And are there any specific changes in form and content that you've noticed?

Lois

Yeah, you know, one of the things that's interesting about this guild of illustrators that I keep talking about is that they were doing this work to visualize the space environment accurately. But at the same time that they were doing that, a lot of them were also working in science fiction publishing and the film industry. And so what you get is this just like revolving door of the people who are making the most accurate looking representations of the space environment for scientists and institutional collaborators were then also able to monetize that skill set by going to science fiction and being like, “No, the way that I'm able to represent this is more accurate,” which has always been an interesting aspect of science fiction, right? That like, historically one of the metrics by which we have judged sci-fi as good or not, is like, “Oh, well, how accurate is it, right?” 

And so that ended up being a skillset that they were really able to spin kind of in both places,  which is why I make the argument that this group of illustrators, that their story does need to be told because they actually did have a really outsized impact on the look of the space environment in the 20th century because they were doing all of this work for NASA, but they were also working on like Star Trek. They were also doing all of the illustrations for Dune, right? Like they were doing cover illustrations for all of like the popular sci-fi and popular science magazines. They had this incredible reach, even though not all of the images had a NASA worm logo or NASA meatball on them. And so I've always kind of seen science fiction films and like films about the space environment really as also just kind of being another artifact of the way that we conceptualize this environment visually. 

The biggest difference is one that I've already alluded to, right, is that so much of the bulk of the work now that purports to make these remote environments known visually are done with computers. It's so obvious when you see an image that was produced with digital tools or computer generated versus something that was handmade. I think that that represents the most dramatic aesthetic jump. But what I think when we look back on depictions of the space environment, when we look back on this period, I think we're going to look at film. I think we're really going to look at video games. I think that like a lot of the video game environments are so immersive. I think that's like where a lot of the actually like really innovative, creative work is happening to see outer space.

Emily

Yes, Alexa and I talk a lot about video games, particularly Starfield -

Lois

Yeah! Mhm.

Emily

…comes up a lot and how they partnered with the European Space Agency on real world applications of getting people into space.

Before you also mentioned comics very briefly… 

Lois

Oh yeah! 

Emily

…Your work recently is included in the comic anthology Metal Hurlant “Space Stares Back,” which I was so excited to see because I'm currently working on an exoplanets and comics project right now. But what was it like to collaborate on that project? How did it come about?

Lois

Oh my God, what a dream project! I honestly was like, “It's time for me to just hang up my hat because I'm just never going to publish anything in a… in an outlet as cool as that ever again.”

[laughter]

Lois

It was really incredible to work with. Shout out to Amanda at Metal Hurlant for really making that all come together. I first learned about that publication because my favorite piece of sci-fi that I watched in 2024 was “Scavenger's Reign.” I don't know if you guys saw that. It was like an animated... 

Emily

No. 

Lois

I was so just moved by how teeming with life all of the alien environments are. And I read a lot of Octavia Butler and I think that one of the things that's so profound to me about Butler's vision of space hardware is that it's often very intensely organic. And so I really loved “Scavenger's Reign.” And then I like went down all of these internet rabbit holes. And that was when I learned about Mœbius the French illustrator, whose work the artist who did Scavenger's Reign  based a lot of the show on. It was very heavily influenced by Mœbius' work. And Metal Hurlant was like the French publication in which he was publishing a lot of his artwork. It's a publication that has its own really fascinating history.

But it was revived recently. And Amanda reached out to see if I had anything on space that I wanted to write about for this space issue. And,[laughter] when I've had too many drinks at the bar, one of the things that I yell about is “isn't it crazy that the Apple emoji for ‘Rocket’ is like a V2 rocket?” 

[laughter]

Isn’t that just like a wacky thing?  

Alexa

Oh yeah!

Lois

That's it’s like a Nazi terror weapon and we're all just like “This is such a cute rocket!”

[laughter]

Lois

So I wrote an article for them that you know was basically just me doing some hand waving about that, but writing about how like it's indicative of a pretty profound aesthetic transformation that literally a Nazi terror weapon that was developed at the end of the Second World War using concentration camp labor could by the 1950s be transformed from weapon to vehicle.

In all of the sci-fi movies of the fifties, people literally get inside of the rockets and then they go to outer space. It's like the rocket is like the ship. It's a literal rocket ship. And it's crazy, all of the anti-German propaganda that characterized the 1940s, and then by 1953, you've got Heinz Haber and Wernher von Braun, doing, like a Disney Channel special with Walt Disney…

[laughter]

Lois

…about rockets!  Like, literally rockets! Like— Werner Von Braun was the chief architect of the V2, which— they dropped V2s on European allies! It killed people in its explosions. It was not very accurate, but it was a very effective tool of psychological warfare because people could hear it. And that's pretty terrifying. 

Yeah. And so I basically told Amanda that. She was like, “Great! Write that!” And so they gave me a tremendous amount of latitude to write this article, which was an incredible...

Yeah, it's just like… This reissue also includes archival Mœbius drawings and comics. Yeah, so it was just like…what an opportunity to get reprinted alongside someone who had such an incredible impact on science fiction. The team there went the extra step. They found this archival cover of the magazine from the 70s.

And it's a robot chewing on a V2, but it's not a V2. It's actually the rocket from Tintin.

[laughter]

Lois

…which is a V2, right? [laughter] But it was intended to be like a symbol of the old guard giving way to this new guard of science fiction illustrators, right?

So he's like gnawing on this thing. But I was like, ”Oh, it's too perfect of an image!” So yeah, that was a really fun project.

Emily

It's so cool.

Lois

Yeah, thanks. 

Emily

I was so excited to see it.

Lois

Yeah, thank you.

Emily

As we're gearing up for the Artemis missions…

Lois

Mm!

Emily

….with the context of the Apollo program and all of the different iterations of space art and illustration that we've covered, are there any trends that you've noticed in the terms of imagery and marketing around Artemis that surprises you?

Lois

Yeah, you know, that's a really good question. I think it's a little too early to tell. I think that that's really where a lot of the promotional images that I've seen come out of the Artemis program. Those are interesting because those are like one off illustrations, but they look often like shots from video games. 

I think that that's one of the places where that relationship is also very aesthetically present. 

Again, it's because the tools that are being used are computer generated. And so like, I don't know, like maybe that will inform if we're nostalgic for these images 50 years from now. Maybe that's going to be partially like what informs that.

To your question, right, of what's surprising about it for me, I think that the thing that's most surprising is just like how explicitly the Artemis program is a twin of Apollo. The program does have grand designs to eventually reach Mars, but, you know, in Greek mythology, Artemis is literally Apollo's twin sister. I feel like occasionally there are these sort of like graphics that are reminiscent of the sort of high modernism that characterized a lot of the graphics that were produced during Apollo. And so, yeah, like I think that was a curveball that I was not expecting [laughs] of like, oh, that when we eventually did go back to the Moon, that the iconography of it would be so predetermined by the 1960s. And so I think what I'm curious to see is where are we going to start seeing departures from that?

Alexa

You've done so many cool things, and I feel like your breadth of knowledge is so fascinating.

Lois

Aw.

Alexa

We could listen to you talk about like all of this stuff for probably like five more hours… But we won't keep you for five more hours!

[laughter]

Alexa

But I wanted to ask, your path also to space history has been so interesting. If there's anybody who is also interested in space history, do you have any advice or resources that you'd like to share for people who might be interested in that path?

Lois

Oh my gosh. Yes, I do! I feel like I want to like stand on the street sometimes and like hand out flyers that say, “Hey! You can download for free immediately so many incredible books about the history of spaceflight.” And they are all on the NASA History Office website. And there's so many books. It's like such a capacious scope. And we have been writing books for the agency from within the agency since like 1958. It's an incredible repository of scholarship, of primary documents, of collections of oral histories that look very intimately at the history of the space program. That's something that I feel like people don't know about that's a resource that's available to them. And so like I read so many NASA history monographs when I was a grad student and just trying to get my sea legs in this literature of just like, you know, what are the different projects? What has NASA's science portfolio looked like across the decades, right? One of my favorite books… it's a history of graphic design, like the graphic design of all of the logos at NASA, which are really, really fun. It's called Emblems of Exploration. It's by Mark and Joseph Chamber. So, if you're like a fan of the NASA meatball, they go into the entire history of  “What's the red swoopy thing? What do the stars mean? Why is it like a round ball? 

And so it's a really fun book. Yeah, and so that's like my, what that's like my actual like hot tip, like get all those books. They are all literally free for you as a taxpayer. So it's there for you to capitalize on.

Emily

That's amazing.

Lois

Yeah.

Emily

And speaking of projects, can you tell us about what you're working on now?

Lois

Yes, yes! So I've got a couple of fun writing projects queued up for 2026. The most fun and interesting one is I am working now on a history of exoplanet research at NASA with an eye towards the Habitable Worlds Observatory, which is a future NASA flagship space telescope that will be optimized to direct image exoplanets to search for biosignatures. The more that I learn about biosignatures, the more that I learn about astrobiology, the more that I learn about how we see exoplanets, like my mind just gets like repetitively blown.  And so that has been a really fun project to get started.  Everybody in the Hab[itable] Worlds Project Office has been so generous in talking to me about all of the different telescopes that had to like molt into new instantiations for us to get to where we are right now. So, it's a recent history, right?  We didn't actually confirm the existence of the first exoplanet until 1995. So this stuff is all… it's happened really fast.

So that's on the docket. I've got an essay that I'm working on for like a larger edited volume that's exploring historically the concept of habitability, which is really fun. There are architects who are working on that project, looking at like human habitability in space. There are people who write about extremophiles who are working on that. And so I think that that would be a really fun project. And then I have, I'll have to, I'll have to come back on the podcast and talk about this essay that I'm working on for the Wende Museum, which is out in Culver City. They are organizing a show on Soviet and American space art. And so I have an essay I’m writing about Frederick Durant III, who was a Smithsonian curator and one of the biggest space art dealers of the 1980s who facilitated a fair bit of exchange between Soviet space artists and American space artists in the 1980s. So it'll be fun.

Emily

That's so exciting, but it sounds like such a busy year.

Lois

Yeah, I know. It's a lot of stuff, but, you know.

[laughter]

Emily

But all of it's extremely cool.

Lois

Thank you.

Alexa

Very, very cool.

Lois

Thank you, guys. Well, it's been such a blast talking to you, so...

Alexa

Yeah, likewise, it's been such a pleasure.

Lois

Yeah. Yeah.

Alexa

If folks wanted to follow your journey or connect with you online, where would they be able to find you?

Lois

Oh, yeah. So I do have a website, loisrosson.com. It hasn't been updated in a while, but I do post usually PDFs of stuff that I write up there. And if folks are interested - the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, that history that I just finished, is also up on the NASA monographs section. So if you're interested in airborne observation, the heavily refurbished 747 SPs or infrared astronomy, I do recommend it. It's also a fun story about some really passionate astronomers doing infrared science. So yeah, that's that on that.

Emily

Yes! Thank you so, so much for joining us!

Lois

Yeah, of course.

Alexa

Thank you, Lois.

Emily

This has been so fun.

Lois

Thank you guys. Yeah, I had a blast.

[Interlude music: “Space” by Music Unlimited]

Emily

Thank you so much for joining us in our chat with Lois Rosson! Since we recorded this episode, the Artemis II mission has taken place. If you followed along with Artemis II, you may have heard the lead scientist Kelsey Young call the human eye “the best camera that could ever or would ever exist.”  We found that moment in the mission especially resonant after Lois’s conversation describing the history of lunar cartography. 

Alexa

As ever, if you enjoyed this episode please share it with your friends, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Show notes for this episode, including links to the resources and artists that Lois mentioned throughout the episode, are available on our website along with a full transcript at artastra.space.

See you later! 

Emily

Catch ya next time! 

[Outro music: “Space” by Music Unlimited]

Emily Olsen
Next

Episode 16: The Art and Design of Space Suit Replicas with Ryan Nagata