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LEXLOTHOR β Men on Mars
Published: 2012-12-16 02:06:49 +0000 UTC; Views: 906; Favourites: 26; Downloads: 14
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More of my space art can be seen in my DA "Paleo & Sci Illo" gallery:[link]
WE SHOULD BE WALKING ON MARS BY NOW!
I prepared this illustration for a magazine article on the furture of spaceflight in 1983. Never in my dreariest depressions did I ever think that there would NOT have been human bootprints on Mars by the year 2013! The U.S. or international space programs should have sent 20 manned missions in as many launch windows since the 1980's. 30 years later we are no closer to Mars than we were before.
It is a VERY small consoulation that I have lived long enough to see a sophisticated robotic probe such as the Curiosity rover driving around on the Red Planet and sending back daily post cards. That could have been accomplished in the 1970's but the U.S. Congress and a series of know-nothing Adminstrations killed that possibility.
This illo was done so long ago that the method I used to make it is probably no longer manufactured. The medium was called "Duoshade". The paper had two layers of cross hatching embedded in it. One painted two different chemical developers to bring out each shade pattern. This material was used to create instant halftones for newspaper publication. Today it would all be done digitally. How far we have come in 30 years technologically, yet we as a species have gone nowhere.
art & text (c) John P. Alexander
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Comments: 5
When I drew this picture in the 1980's I genuinely thought thatΒ people would have traveled to Mars many times over by 2015.
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Very true, like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton crushed the Star Trek vision in our country. even tough born 1995
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Despite the fact that Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer and educated at the US Naval Academy, his indecision cost NASA the opportunity to participate in the international armada that visited Halley's Comet. Bruce Murray of JPL documented this in his autobiography.
Both of the Bush Administrations attempted to advance manned space exploration through major initiatives only to have work undone by their respective successors.
Obama is the worst enemy of manned space exploration that the United States has had since the dawn of the Space Age. He is every bit as scientifically illiterate as Reagan was.
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