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The Art of NASA: The Illustrations That Sold the Missions is a huge 192-page hardcover artbook featuring illustrations commissioned by NASA. This book is published by Motorbooks.

The artworks in this book are for visualising how space exploration and travel would look. This book has illustrations and designs for spaceships, explorers, space buggies, satellites, space stations and astronaut suits. This technically is a sci-fi artbook but the designs were actually drawn with real world application in mind. There are exterior and interior renders. For interiors, there are cutaways for spaceships with all the buttons and controls, space suits and living quarters.

Some of the designs are ahead of their time, especially the designs from the early days. The idea back then was to have astronauts wear utility belts with their spanners and ropes hanging by the side, kinda like a car mechanic but one wearing a space suit. The more recent designs are more realistic, as in they look more like what we see on TV and print nowadays.

Illustrations from the early days, eg 1960s onwards, were all hand drawn and painted. The more recent artworks have shifted to using 3D models and graphics with more realistic textures.

There's a lot of text talking about the designs of the vehicles, equipment and their applications, the various NASA missions, All the artists are properly credited.

It's a great book on NASA and space art. It could be used as a reference or inspiration for sci-fi artists too. Oh, there are no alien artworks.

This book was borrowed from Basheer Graphic Books for review purposes. You can order the book from them. Check with Basheer on Facebook.

The Art of NASA: The Illustrations That Sold the Missions is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | AU | JP | CN)

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