Space Art 5-- What’s a spaceship look like?

From where did the shape of a spaceship originate? In the movies and on TV, I guess it was Mélièse who came up with the original form in the shape of an enlarged artillery shell to describe Verne’s lunar lander. The Flash Gordon and Buck Rodgers series of the 30’s kept the basic shape, added the fins, the forward shooting cannons, and the concept that it could be landed and taken off like a whacky sled. It did have a cool sliding door hatch! Then along came the finned flying bomb that after Werner’s V-2, become the SOP rocket all the way to Apollo 11 and beyond. This was quite evident with the vehicles portrayed in “Rocketship XM” and “Destination Moon,” both of 1950. It would suffer retro-alterations as artists, designers, engineers and movie producers tried to take an aircraft back out into space. This concept was best illustrated in the rocket plane built in “When Worlds Collide,” in 1951. Nevertheless, this first concept of the atmosphere penetrating aerodynamic foil probably reached its highest point with the George Pal’s “Conquest of Space” in 1956. Simultaneously an animated version for “The World of Walt Disney” was launched by Von Braun, visualized by Chesley Bonestell, and distributed by Walt Disney. I believe that it was in the 60’s that the ideas of the flying bottle and the modified space plane were slowly replaced by the concept of a vehicle that would never have to land on a planetary surface.




However, with the help of the barrage of satellites that followed Sputnik 1, a new concept for interplanetary and interstellar vehicles slowly crept into view. Never ending orbits along with the feasibility of self-sustaining human space colonies eliminated the necessity of romantic spaceports to handle deep space traffic. Forever doomed to never touch land like the cursed Flying Dutchman, aerodynamics and winged airfoils were left on the drawing board. Perhaps the first massive public view of this new concept was the Star Trek series that began in 1966 showing the Enterprise being permanently relegated to interstellar voyages. In 1968, Clark’s USS Discovery in Kubrick’s “2001, A Space Odessey,” would smack the general movie public’s eye furthering the idea of a non-rocket spaceship. This was followed by Trumble’s flying forest in the self-contained hydroponics farm in “Silent Running,” in 1971. Uncovered machinery, globes of all shapes, cylinders, and different kinds of tanks, all strung together like elaborate constructions, surreal erector sets, or floating oil refineries started to make their appearance. We all remember the deep space ore freighter, the Nostromo, of “Alien” in 1979. Even the operatic “Star Wars” epic while largely retaining the romantic rocket-plane surface-to-space vehicle, showed signs of radical design changes, as in the “Millennium Falcon,” the bad guy TIE Fighters, and the good guy X-Wing Fighters.



As we all know, a space vehicle’s purpose is threefold. First it must safely contain, sustain and protect human life as long as possible, preferably indefinitely. Second it must be able to go precisely where its crew and inhabitants desire. And finally it must travel as fast as its propulsion technology allows. As long as it stays in space, its final design only has to consider these three premises. On its design our only limits for a spaceship are time and technology. And for time and technology we have our imaginations. And as in all things some imaginations are more imaginative than others. Anyway, I’m having fun.