Nasa's Visions of the Future posters

NASA creates mid-century space travel posters

The space agency hope its Visions of the Future posters will inspire a new generation of cosmic explorers

NASA has brought out a second series of inspiring if tongue-in-cheek posters, extolling the joys of extra-terrestrial sojourns. The agency’s in-house Jet Propulsion Laboratory is behind the 14 posters, which are free to download.

The hope is that these graphic fleets of fancy will inspire young people to pursue a job in the aerospace sector. “As you look through these images of imaginative travel destinations, remember that you can be an architect of the future,” says the team at JPL.

 

One of Nasa's Visions of the Future posters
One of Nasa's Visions of the Future posters

The series is titled Visions of the Future, and each one comes with a sales pitch for that destination. So the poster for Mars “imagines a future day when we have achieved our vision of human exploration of Mars, and takes a nostalgic look back at the great imagined milestones of Mars exploration that will someday be celebrated as “historic sites.”

While the ideas being promoted are encouraging us to think again about the future, the graphic style and imagery is firmly rooted in the past. The poster for a visit to planet Earth is in a naturalistic 1950s style, while other such as Mars and The Grand Tour borrow from 1960s and 1970s geometric shapes and bright colours. Still others, such as Europa and Ceres have a B movie feel to them, and the posters for Kepler-16b and Kepler-186f feature art deco and art nouveau graphics respectively.

 

One of Nasa's Visions of the Future posters
One of Nasa's Visions of the Future posters

Visions of the Future is a follow-up to JPL’s Exoplanet Travel Bureau posters, which were released last January. As an awareness-raising campaign, NASA obviously feels this fantastical campaign has mileage.

 

One of Nasa's Visions of the Future posters
One of Nasa's Visions of the Future posters

To download them all go here; and For more down-to-earth, inventive, humorous graphics, take a look at A Smile in the Mind.