An extremely early astronautical illustration by Chesley Bonestell for Willy Ley.

"Two decades before the first Apollo landing in 1969, Bonestell created this eerily accurate depiction of astronauts in the hard-shadowed light of the lunar surface" (Brosterman).

Willy Ley (1906-1969) was an immensely influential German-American popular science writer. He was an early rocket enthusiast growing up in Berlin and was even the rocket model maker for Fritz Lang's 1929 film Die Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon), which became the first realistic depiction of spaceflight in movie history. He fled Germany in 1935, both because of his personal abhorrence for the Nazis and because he faced special scrutiny as a rocket scientist who published his work internationally.

After Chesley Bonestell's paintings appeared in Life magazine (see preceding lot), he met Willy Ley. It was Willy Ley who encouraged Bonestell to add spacecraft and astronauts to his paintings. In Willy Ley's imagining, and depicted here, the lunar explorers have discovered ice, from which they can extract hydrogen for fuel for the next launch.