Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957–1962

A study of the advertising the American aerospace industry ran in its own trade journals between Sputnik and the Apollo commitment, assembled by the historian Megan Prelinger from the pages of Aviation Week and Missiles and Rockets.

Nearly 200 advertisements from Lockheed, Douglas, Convair, Republic, North American and smaller subcontractors are reproduced and read as a visual record of the early Space Race. Aimed at recruiting engineers and at the military and government buyers who funded the work, the ads promised orbital stations, lunar bases and crewed flights to Mars in an idiom borrowed from science-fiction illustration. Prelinger organises the material thematically, in chapters on satellites, the body in space, spacecraft form, the landscape of space and mid-century modern design, and traces the shift in tone from speculative imagery to sober systems engineering by 1962.

Prelinger is co-founder, with Rick Prelinger, of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, an independent research collection of periodicals, ephemera and government documents; this book draws on its holdings. A companion volume, Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age (2015), extends the same method to electronics advertising.