Name: CHESLEY BONESTELL (1888-1986)
Brand: CROSSING THE LAST FRONTIER
Price: 110000.00 USD
Availability: SoldOut

CHESLEY BONESTELL (1888-1986)
CROSSING THE LAST FRONTIER
signed Chesley Bonestell (lower left)
oil on board
15 x 31 in. (38.1 x 78.7 cm.) (sight)
Executed circa 1952.

Wernher von Braun (1912-1977), Huntsville, Alabama.
Frederick I. Ordway III (1927-2014), Huntsville, Alabama; acquired from the estate of the above on 9 May 1979.
Acquired by the late owner from the above, 2003.

Wernher von Braun, "Crossing the Last Frontier," Collier's, 22 March 1952, pp. 24-25, illustrated (Schuetz 95).
Cornelius Ryan, ed., Across the Space Frontier (New York, 1952), endpapers, illustrated (Schuetz 80).
Wernher von Braun, Fred Whipple, and Willy Ley, Conquest of the Moon (New York, 1953), p. 11, illustrated (Schuetz 117).
National Commission on Space, Pioneering the Space Frontier (New York, 1986), frontispiece, illustrated (Schuetz 600).
Frederick I. Ordway III and Randy Liebermann, eds., Blueprint for Space: Science Fiction to Science Fact (Washington D.C., 1992), pp. 140-141, illustrated (Schuetz 659).
Frederick I. Ordway III, Visions of Spaceflight: Images from the Ordway Collection (New York, 2001), pp. 2-3, 130-131, illustrated.

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Lot Essay

The lead artwork for the first article in Collier's "Man Will Conquer Space Soon" series: Wernher von Braun's essay entitled "Crossing the Last Frontier."

"Scientists and engineers now know how to build a station in space that would circle the earth 1,075 miles up. The job would take 10 years, and cost twice as much as the atom bomb. If we do it, we can not only preserve the peace but we can take a long step in uniting mankind" (article lede).

The painting depicts a space station with a three-deck design, ferry rocket and space telescope 1,075 miles (1,750km) above Central America. It was captioned in the original article: "Men and materials arrive in the winged rocket and take "space taxis" to wheel-shaped space station at right. Men wear pressurized suits. Three 'space taxis' can be seen—one leaving rocket, another reaching satellite, a third near the already-built astronomical observatory" (p. 25).

This image in particular was an important inspiration for both George Pal's Conquest of Space (1955) and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Part of Chesley Bonestell’s appeal was his facility not just with alien landscapes, but also imagining how the earth would look from space. The image of Central America below is close to what an actual photograph would look like, especially impressive since the very first orbital satellite–the Russian Sputnik–was not launched until 1957. Images of the earth from low orbit were taken between 1946 and 1950 by cameras mounted on captured Nazi V2 rockets launched from New Mexico.