Republic Ion Drive

[Barrington Bond]

Could be wrong withe title?!

Air Revue July 1961.

 

[Michel Van]

Nice Find Barrington Bond !

French text translate
one model for Ionengine spacecraft
at stand of Republic Aircraft Coperation
is a model for Spacecraft with a unclear function

the form of this Lifting body show similarity with this one here:
http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,3189.msg25707.html#msg25707

 

[archipeppe]

The ion spacecraft seems to resemble this one appeared on a Fortune number of 1961

 

[blackstar]

That artwork reminds me of something:

http://www.amazon.com/Another-Science-Fiction-Advertising-1957-1962/dp/0922233357/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264556499&sr=1-1

This is a book due out soon that contains a lot of examples of aerospace company advertising from 1957-1962. I served as a fact-checker for the book and so I worked on the galley proofs. It is filled with a lot of great artwork that has not been published since this time period. There are a lot of ads from companies like Lockheed, Convair, Goodyear, various electronics companies, etc. And it's some wild stuff, similar to the image you posted earlier. These ads date from a time before people had an idea of what human spacecraft would look like (pre-LM selection, for instance), so the artists frequently let their imaginations run wild. It's neat stuff.

 

[prolific1]

That's some cool stuff. I like seeing hypothetical work from manufacturers. In fact I've been making some of my own in the Bar.

 

[archipeppe]

That artwork reminds me of something:

http://www.amazon.com/Another-Science-Fiction-Advertising-1957-1962/dp/0922233357/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264556499&sr=1-1

This is a book due out soon that contains a lot of examples of aerospace company advertising from 1957-1962.

Cool, I would order it.
Many Thanks.

 

[blackstar]

What's great about the book is that 95% of the artwork has probably never been seen since it originally ran. If you look at a lot of space art books, they tend to be collections of things that have been printed again and again. Often they are collections of art produced for the NASA artist program. I like a lot of that stuff, but it's nice to be surprised by new material. A lot of the ads reproduced in this new book may have run once or twice in the late 1950s in trade magazines and then have never been seen since then. Many of the ads were intended to recruit young engineers to come work for these expanding aerospace companies. And what the author demonstrates is that the artists and commercial illustrators were often very good.

Part of her thesis is that this period (1957-1962) was unique because the artists were using science fiction ideas to illustrate things like satellites that were just starting to become real. They used a lot of imagination in their work. But by 1962, reality was taking hold, and commercial illustration was fading in favor of photographs. The result is that after 1962, many aerospace ads featured either photographs of real hardware, or illustrations that were inspired by real hardware. As an example, a "Moon Ship" in a 1958 ad had fins and was massive, but by 1963 or so an advertisement would simply show an LEM model or painting.

The book also features some examples of abstract art. Rather than show a rocket engine, for example, an artist might paint jagged lines to evoke the sound of a rocket engine. Rather than showing a computer, an artist might have drawn an abstract image of a circuit board.

If you are familiar with the television show Mad Men, this book will make you think about that show--it deals with the same period of time, when commercial advertising was transforming (and not necessarily for the better).

So I highly recommend buying it, and when it is published, it might be possible to show some of the illustrations here.

 

[blackstar]

Here's an example of a piece of artwork in the book I mentioned. There are a lot of images like this. I'm not a fan of the color scheme (they were limited in the colors they could use in the ads, and a lot of them used yellow more than they should have). But the artwork was often dramatic.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Here's an example of a piece of artwork in the book I mentioned.

Ah, good ol' Tinsley...

 

[magnus_z]

Here's an example of a piece of artwork in the book I mentioned. There are a lot of images like this. I'm not a fan of the color scheme (they were limited in the colors they could use in the ads, and a lot of them used yellow more than they should have). But the artwork was often dramatic.