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Spaceships: An Illustrated History of the Real and the Imagined
This revised and expanded second edition of Spaceships includes sixty-four pages worth of the newest developments in space technology
Spaceships: An Illustrated History of the Real and the Imagined explores how art and science have merged in the creation of real and fictional spaceships, from Mercury and Apollo spacecraft to Millennium Falcon and Starship Enterprise. This second edition is thoroughly updated to offer a complete history of spaceships. It builds off the original book with new information and developments in topics that include:
• Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne
• Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch Systems
• Bigelow Aerospace’s B330 inflatable space stations
• SpaceX’s Falcon 9
• Future Mars exploration, moon landers, and interstellar ships
• New foreword from Bobak Ferdowsi, an American Flight engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Award-winning author Ron Miller and new Smithsonian coauthors Matthew Shindell and Margaret Weitekamp take readers on a visual journey through the history of the spaceship, both in our collective imagination and in reality. Vivid illustrations trace spaceships through their conception, engineering, and building. The exquisitely detailed book charts the ubiquity of spaceships in the golden age of space travel (1950s and '60s) and their broad influence in popular art, television, film, and literature. Spaceships is a vibrant and visual book on the history of spaceships, past, present, and future.
Spaceships: An Illustrated History of the Real and the Imagined explores how art and science have merged in the creation of real and fictional spaceships, from Mercury and Apollo spacecraft to Millennium Falcon and Starship Enterprise. This second edition is thoroughly updated to offer a complete history of spaceships. It builds off the original book with new information and developments in topics that include:
• Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne
• Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch Systems
• Bigelow Aerospace’s B330 inflatable space stations
• SpaceX’s Falcon 9
• Future Mars exploration, moon landers, and interstellar ships
• New foreword from Bobak Ferdowsi, an American Flight engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Award-winning author Ron Miller and new Smithsonian coauthors Matthew Shindell and Margaret Weitekamp take readers on a visual journey through the history of the spaceship, both in our collective imagination and in reality. Vivid illustrations trace spaceships through their conception, engineering, and building. The exquisitely detailed book charts the ubiquity of spaceships in the golden age of space travel (1950s and '60s) and their broad influence in popular art, television, film, and literature. Spaceships is a vibrant and visual book on the history of spaceships, past, present, and future.
320 pages, Hardcover
Published January 24, 2023
5 people are currently reading
78 people want to read
About the author
Ron Miller
189 books21 followersRon Miller is an illustrator and author living in South Boston, Virginia. Before becoming a freelance illustrator in 1977, Miller was art director for the National Air & Space Museum's Albert Einstein Planetarium. Prior to this he was a commercial advertising illustrator. His primary work today entails the writing and illustration of books specializing in astronomical, astronautical and science fiction subjects. His special interest is in exciting young people about science, and in recent years has focused on writing books for young adults. To date he has more than 50 titles to his credit. His work has also appeared on scores of book jackets, book interiors and in magazines such as National Geographic, Reader's Digest, Scientific American, Smithsonian, Air & Space, Sky & Telescope, Newsweek, Natural History, Discover, Geo, etc.
Miller's books include the Hugo-nominated The Grand Tour, Cycles of Fire, In the Stream of Stars, and The History of Earth. All of have been Book-of-the-Month Club Feature Selections (as well as selections of the Science, Quality Paperback and Astronomy book clubs) and have seen numerous translations.
Considered an authority on Jules Verne, Miller translated and illustrated new, definitive editions of Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth as well as a major companion/atlas to Verne's works. He has worked as a consultant on Verne for Disney Imagineering and for A&E's Biography series.
Miller is also considered an authority on the early history of spaceflight. The Dream Machines, a comprehensive 744-page history of manned spacecraft, was nominated for the prestigious IAF Manuscript Award and won the Booklist Editor's Choice Award.
As an artist, Miller has designed a set of ten commemorative stamps for the U.S. Postal Service and has been a production illustrator for motion pictures, notably Dune and Total Recall. He has also done preproduction concepts, consultation and matte art for David Lynch, George Miller, John Ellis, UFO Films and James Cameron. He designed and co-directed the computer-generated show ride film, Impact! and has taken part in numerous international space art workshops and exhibitions, including seminal sessions held in Iceland and the Soviet Union (where he was invited by the Soviet government to take part in the 30th anniversary celebration of the launch of Sputnik). His original paintings are in numerous private and public collections, including the Smithsonian Institution and the Pushkin Museum (Moscow).
Miller's books include the Hugo-nominated The Grand Tour, Cycles of Fire, In the Stream of Stars, and The History of Earth. All of have been Book-of-the-Month Club Feature Selections (as well as selections of the Science, Quality Paperback and Astronomy book clubs) and have seen numerous translations.
Considered an authority on Jules Verne, Miller translated and illustrated new, definitive editions of Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth as well as a major companion/atlas to Verne's works. He has worked as a consultant on Verne for Disney Imagineering and for A&E's Biography series.
Miller is also considered an authority on the early history of spaceflight. The Dream Machines, a comprehensive 744-page history of manned spacecraft, was nominated for the prestigious IAF Manuscript Award and won the Booklist Editor's Choice Award.
As an artist, Miller has designed a set of ten commemorative stamps for the U.S. Postal Service and has been a production illustrator for motion pictures, notably Dune and Total Recall. He has also done preproduction concepts, consultation and matte art for David Lynch, George Miller, John Ellis, UFO Films and James Cameron. He designed and co-directed the computer-generated show ride film, Impact! and has taken part in numerous international space art workshops and exhibitions, including seminal sessions held in Iceland and the Soviet Union (where he was invited by the Soviet government to take part in the 30th anniversary celebration of the launch of Sputnik). His original paintings are in numerous private and public collections, including the Smithsonian Institution and the Pushkin Museum (Moscow).
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 28, 2016
Spaceships: An Illustrated History of the Real and the Imagined by Ron Miller is an illustrated history book of space travel. The author touches on real, as well as fictional spaceships.
This is a beautiful coffee table book with inspiring images and interesting essays about space travel and its history. The book features forewords by Lance Bush, president & CEO of the Challenger Center for Space Science Education, and Tom Crouch, senior curator, Aeronautics Department Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (my all time favorite museum).
I tremendously enjoyed flipping through the book, taking in all the wonderful pictures and stopping in places I found fascinating to read a bit more about them. I appreciated that Mr. Miller took the time to comment how science-fiction has influenced science fact. Besides scientists and enthusiasts I never see that mention, but it is important. Many people believe that reading novels is a waste of time, but here is proof that you need imagination to progress forward in both industry and society.
The Spartans found that out the hard way, killing all the weak babies who would have been the poets and scientists, they found themselves several millenniums behind the rest of Greece.
This wonderful, hard cover coffee table book, is a visual trip through space and time of spaceship, rockets and their influence on pop-culture and art.
For more reviews and bookish posts please visit http://www.ManOfLaBook.com
This is a beautiful coffee table book with inspiring images and interesting essays about space travel and its history. The book features forewords by Lance Bush, president & CEO of the Challenger Center for Space Science Education, and Tom Crouch, senior curator, Aeronautics Department Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (my all time favorite museum).
I tremendously enjoyed flipping through the book, taking in all the wonderful pictures and stopping in places I found fascinating to read a bit more about them. I appreciated that Mr. Miller took the time to comment how science-fiction has influenced science fact. Besides scientists and enthusiasts I never see that mention, but it is important. Many people believe that reading novels is a waste of time, but here is proof that you need imagination to progress forward in both industry and society.
The Spartans found that out the hard way, killing all the weak babies who would have been the poets and scientists, they found themselves several millenniums behind the rest of Greece.
This wonderful, hard cover coffee table book, is a visual trip through space and time of spaceship, rockets and their influence on pop-culture and art.
For more reviews and bookish posts please visit http://www.ManOfLaBook.com
January 7, 2017
If you're interested in rockets and spaceships, then read this book! It has tons of interesting and entertaining information, plus page after page of color photos.
June 23, 2023
No one knows for sure, but it looks like space exploration is still in its infancy, while humanity appears to be in its twilight. We have managed to put sentient beings into orbit (monkeys, dogs, humans) and have even touched down on the surface of the Moon. No crewed flight has come close to reaching the far reaches of interstellar space, but unmanned vehicles (launched in the seventies) have made it pretty darn far.
Spaceships does a wonderful job of showing the early imagined history of space exploration, from the time of the ancients to the early days of the pulps. It does a capable enough job of describing actual achievements, giving a good balance between Soviet and American contributions during the Golden Age. Its main fault is rushing the third act of the story, giving short shrift to the cutting edge and even shorter-shrift to the highly speculative technologies of the current age.
It’s charming and even a little inspiring to see the Victorian futurist craft—implausible hot air balloons or other fantastic steampunk impedimenta— reach the stars. Even the wholly unscientific projections from Attic antiquity to the Enlightenment—flocks of geese or angels—are gorgeous to behold.
Why, then, such a short amount of time spent on hypothetical-but-plausible superluminary methods of space travel? Even the most workable method of circumnavigating the speed of light problem—the interstellar ark—only gets a couple pages of treatment.
The photos, illustrations, and glossy pages and hardback presentation make this one a worthy addition to any collection (or at least coffee table.) And it is humbling to see the centuries of supposedly idle dreaming paying off real world dividends, even now, when our space program is on the wane (at least the public one.) I just wish that the curators’ open minds hadn’t snapped shut like a vice when they went from ancient speculations to the more current ones. Then again, being a fan of science fiction, fantasy, and the speculative, I’m naturally biased in favor of seeing more extrapolation into the future than photographic evidence from yesterday.
Spaceships does a wonderful job of showing the early imagined history of space exploration, from the time of the ancients to the early days of the pulps. It does a capable enough job of describing actual achievements, giving a good balance between Soviet and American contributions during the Golden Age. Its main fault is rushing the third act of the story, giving short shrift to the cutting edge and even shorter-shrift to the highly speculative technologies of the current age.
It’s charming and even a little inspiring to see the Victorian futurist craft—implausible hot air balloons or other fantastic steampunk impedimenta— reach the stars. Even the wholly unscientific projections from Attic antiquity to the Enlightenment—flocks of geese or angels—are gorgeous to behold.
Why, then, such a short amount of time spent on hypothetical-but-plausible superluminary methods of space travel? Even the most workable method of circumnavigating the speed of light problem—the interstellar ark—only gets a couple pages of treatment.
The photos, illustrations, and glossy pages and hardback presentation make this one a worthy addition to any collection (or at least coffee table.) And it is humbling to see the centuries of supposedly idle dreaming paying off real world dividends, even now, when our space program is on the wane (at least the public one.) I just wish that the curators’ open minds hadn’t snapped shut like a vice when they went from ancient speculations to the more current ones. Then again, being a fan of science fiction, fantasy, and the speculative, I’m naturally biased in favor of seeing more extrapolation into the future than photographic evidence from yesterday.
February 14, 2023
A really terrific overview of the history of spaceships from the imaginary to the real and how they feed on each other. Lots of stuff I either didn’t know before (what the proposed Soviet lunar lander looked like) or hadn’t seen before. One side thing I find really fascinating is all the life-size Rocket props given away back in the early days of TV. I wonder where all those things are?
I’d give it 5 stars except it’s marred by some errors throughout, such giving the creator of Flash Gordon, Alex Raymond, the birth and death years of 1929-1946. That would’ve made him 17 when he passed. He actually was born in 1909 and died in 1956, just shy of his 47th birthday. Other than minor stuff like that, this is a treasure trove of photos and info.
I’d give it 5 stars except it’s marred by some errors throughout, such giving the creator of Flash Gordon, Alex Raymond, the birth and death years of 1929-1946. That would’ve made him 17 when he passed. He actually was born in 1909 and died in 1956, just shy of his 47th birthday. Other than minor stuff like that, this is a treasure trove of photos and info.
May 12, 2017
A very enjoyable tale of how science fiction and science fact influenced each other in the creation of spaceships.
January 6, 2020
A tremendous visual resource as well as a comprehensive overview of humankind's dreams of space travel.
April 9, 2017
This book would get 4 stars if it wasn't for the extremely thin, small typeface used, against a busy background, making it really difficult to read. The illustrations and photos, though, are amazing, and any fan of older science fiction, retro-sci-fi spaceships, and the history of rocketry will find it enjoyable. This could also provide all sorts of ideas to the scratch building model rocket builder.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews