(click picture for next vision)

That was then...

Chesley Bonestell painted fantastic space art for Collier's Magazine in the 1940s-50s. His images defined a generation's idea of what the future would be like.

This was the generation of NASA pioneers like Willy Ley and Wernher Von Braun, who in fact worked alongside Bonestell on numerous publications outlining the vision- with scientific accuracy.

Walt Disney's Man in Space, featuring Von Braun, and early scifi moviemakers (think, The Day the Earth Stood Still), grabbed the vision and put it into the public imagination.

Bonestell's spaceplane, called by him a "transcontinental rocket ship", is shown flying over Manhattan. It appeared in The Conquest of Space" (1949).