Every so often, a blog or e-zine posts a set of Chesley Bonestell‘s wonderful space paintings. Here is good collection posted today: The Beautiful Art That Helped Inspire Space Travel – io9.
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SpaceX has posted three excellent Mars travel posters in their Flickr gallery:
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Find lots of space art and links to galleries and artists in the HobbySpace Space Art resources.
Another chance to send a drawing into space. This time for kids in ESA affiliated countries:
Send your drawing into space with Cheops
6 May 2015: Do you want to send your art into space on the new Cheops satellite? ESA and its mission partners are inviting children to submit drawings that will be miniaturised and engraved on two plaques that will be put on the satellite.
Cheops – for CHaracterising ExOPlanets Satellite – is a space telescope that will observe nearby stars known to host planets, and is being built as a collaboration between ESA’s Science Programme and Switzerland. The planned launch date is at the end of 2017.
With the data from Cheops, astronomers will be able to characterise the sizes and masses of many extrasolar planets, to gain new insights into the formation of planetary systems.
Children between the ages of 8 and 14 from any ESA member state or cooperating state can be part of this otherworldly enterprise by creating a drawing inspired by the mission.
While it would be great to collect colourful drawings, the artworks can only be in black-and-white, created with a black pencil or felt-tip pen. This is necessary to ensure that the engraving process accurately captures the drawings as they are transferred to the metal plaques.
Up to 3000 drawings will be shrunk down by a factor of about 1000 and engraved on the metal plaques that will fly into space on Cheops. If more than 3000 entries are received, ESA and its partners will organise a lottery to select the drawings for engraving.
To take part in this competition, you will need to download and print out a standard template provided here, make your drawing on it, and complete your contact details. Then send it via letter to either your local Cheops mission partner institution, if there is one in your home country, or to ESA directly.
Entries will be accepted until 31 October 2015, and the postmark will be considered proof of the date of posting.
This competition is an initiative of the University of Bern, Switzerland, the overall coordinator of the activity. Mission partner institutions in the countries that are part of the Cheops consortium (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK) are also open for entries, as is ESA directly, representing all of its member states.
Full rules, terms, and conditions can be found here.
The standard template for the drawings can be found here.
Contacts and mail addresses for the national competitions here.
Feedback questionnaire about the competition (optional) here.
The Moon Arts Project at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has partnered with the CMU Planetary Robotics Team and Astrobotic Technology team in the Google Lunar XPRIZE to open the Moon Drawings project. It is
an initiative at Carnegie Mellon University to extend the reach of artistic expression to the Moon. Using this web site, you can contribute a drawing—which will be micro-etched on a sapphire disc, sent to the Moon aboard a robotic lander/rover, and potentially traced by the rover into the Moon’s soil. The disc of drawings, contained in a sculpture called the Moon Arts Ark, and generously conveyed to the Moon by our partners at Astrobotic Technology and the CMU Planetary Robotics Team, will be shuttled to the Moon from Cape Kennedy in 2016 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. It will remain there for potentially millions of years.
Go to Make a Moon Drawing where you can try your hand at drawing something compelling with a continuous line of no more than 1000 points.
Artist Katie Paterson‘s re-cast meteorite, which was returned to space for a visit, has put her on the short list for a major prize:
Space artist nominated for prestigious prize
23 April 2015: Katie Paterson’s ESA-supported work Campo del Cielo, Field of the Sky – which included a symbolic return to space for a chunk of meteorite – has been shortlisted for the International Prize for Contemporary Art, granted by the Foundation Prince Pierre de Monaco.
Inspired by dreams of space exploration, Scottish artist Katie Paterson, then based in Berlin, imagined sending a piece of her meteorite artwork back to space in a celebration of science, art and human technology.
![Gerst_with_meteorite_node_full_image_2[1]](http://hobbyspace.com/Blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Gerst_with_meteorite_node_full_image_21.jpg)
ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst with the
Campo del Cielo, Field of the Sky meteorite fragment
on the International Space Station.
In 2014, ESA helped to make this a reality, when a fragment of the original 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite that comprises Campo del Cielo, Field of the Sky, was taken to the International Space Station inside the Agency’s Automated Transfer Vehicle.
Campo comprises a sample of meteorite that crashed into our planet over 4000 years ago. The artist made a cast of the object, arranged to have it melted in a furnace at 1700°C and then recast into a copy of its original self.
![Katie_Paterson_node_full_image_2[1]](http://hobbyspace.com/Blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Katie_Paterson_node_full_image_21.jpg)
Katie Paterson (Credit: Bjørvika Utvikling
by Kristin von Hirsch, 2014.)
The work, which has been displayed at events and galleries in Europe, presents curious visitors with a newly formed yet still ancient meteorite, imbued with cosmic history.
“The iron, metal and dust inside have been reformed, and the layers of its cosmic lifespan – the intermixing of space and time, the billions of years of pressure and change – have become collapsed, transformed and then, by the hand of human technology, renewed,” she says.
Now, Katie’s work is one of the three nominees for the Prix International d’Art Contemporain / International Contemporary Art Prize, which is awarded every three years for a recent work by an artist at the forefront of their practice.
![Campo_del_Cielo_meteorite_node_full_image_2[1]](http://hobbyspace.com/Blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Campo_del_Cielo_meteorite_node_full_image_21.png)
“I am really pleased to have been nominated for this tremendous prize, which demonstrates the value of testing the intersection of art and science,” says Katie.
“I am delighted that my vision of combining art with spaceflight was achieved with assistance from the engineers and scientists at the European Space Agency.”
In October 2013, Katie visited ESA’s ESTEC technical heart in the Netherlands to deliver a 680 g fragment of her Campo work. There, it was coated with protective paint by materials experts for delivery to the International Space Station, and was launched aboard ESA’s fifth and final ATV cargo ferry, Georges Lemaître, in July 2014.
The fragment was stowed inside ATV-5 for undocking and a destructive reentry over the Pacific on 15 February 2015, giving it the rare distinction – for a meteor – of having entered Earth’s atmosphere twice.
“ESA can be proud that we contributed to the success of this project,” says Fernando Doblas, ESA’s Head of Communication.
“It shows how artists and scientists mutually inspire each other’s work. Indeed, it demonstrates that imagination is a critical part of science and space exploration.”
Established in 1965, the Prize has been organised by The Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco since 1983. In recent years, it has been awarded to artists of international repute, each nominated by a leading art world professional.
Neil Smith has created an excellent 3-D animation showing each of the Apollo mission patches form from its respective symbols: