The Moon as It Should Have Been: Chesley Bonestell and the Pre-Apollo Lunar Landscape

Even by the late 1950s, the easiest way to produce a clear image of outer-space was to have someone paint it by hand. In March of 1957, this was exactly how the Boston Science Museum presented visitors with a new view of the lunar surface; installed in the Astronomical Exhibits lobby in front of the Hayden Planetarium, a sweeping ten-by-forty foot mural immersed visitors in a detailed recreation of the Moon’s topography. The mural was painted by America’s leading space illustrator, Chesley Bonestell, whose collaborations with well-known scientists lent his paintings a singular degree of technical credibility. However, the mural’s installation in the Boston Science Museum as a “scientific” view of the Moon would only temporarily be the case. In 1969, Apollo astronauts landed on the surface of the Moon and produced photographs that countered the dramatic topography described in the mural. This paper explores the conventions that helped the painting read as an authoritative view of the lunar surface in the pre-Apollo period, and the post-Apollo breakdown of these legitimizing elements. What functioned as an empirical representation of the Moon in 1957 was by 1969 recast as an artistic interpretation. Despite this revision, Chesley Bonestell’s depiction of the Moon’s surface was defended as scientific by some of his most famous contemporaries. I explore how Bonestell’s biography was edited to support claims about the empiricism of his work, and why this was useful to the scientists with which he collaborated.