Here is an elegantly spare illustration of a solar wind ship by Frank Tinsley from 1959. Approaching Titan, the largest of Saturn's moons the aluminium foil covered sail ships trail a nuclear powered ferry rocket for lunar landing missions. This is a very effective illistration just using a black, white and yellow pallette.
This is one of a series of pictures that Tinsley did for advertisements for the American Bosch Arma Coporation between 1958 and 1960. Arma was originally founded in 1918 and supplied searchlights to the US Navy. They merged with the American Bosch Corporation in 1954. ABAC supplied theinertial guidance system for the Atlas missile and some of the electronics for the Apollo Lunar Module.
This 30 foot tall unicycle's purpose was for exploring the moon. A spare tyre acts as a bumper for when exploring narrow defiles. A solar powered "parasol" provides power.
The picture for this advertisement related to the realisation that in the future the world would be encircled by dead satellites. Rather then letting them fall to earth at random this pictuire contemplates a salvage tug positioning them so that when they drop there is no chance of them landing on inhabited areas.
This 1958 picture shows the construction of a space station in the traditional, for the fifties and sixties, wheel shape. Presumably this shape was because it was contemplated that they would spin, in order to create artificial gravity, something we haven't managed yet.
Here is a supply rocket landing at a moon base. The advertisements contemplated rockets the size of the Empire State Building being powered by a nuclear pulse engine firing out atomic bombs.
The final picture is of another nuclear powered rocket approaching Mars. It is designed to fly nose first as a rocket and then tail first when it reaches the Martian atmosphere as a ramjet.
AgentTriple P loves these views into a future that never was from the height of the space race.
Aviation and space specialist illustrator Frank Tinsley was born in Manhattan in 1899. After high school he worked as an apprentice artist in the research department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His brief military service in World War One was spent in the Design Section of the War Department.
By the twenties he was a freelance illustrator selling pictures to magazines such as Air Stories, Air Trails, Bill Barnes Air Trails, Lariat Story, Sky Birds, War Birds, and Western Story. By the forties he also had his own newspaper comic strip, Yankee Doodle later changed to Captain Yank.
In the fifties he wrote and illustrated articles for Mechanix Illustrated. He died in 1965.
Frank Tinsley
