The men who sold the moon: advertising the early space race.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: Book review

A DECADE into the far-flung future of the 21st century, manned spaceflight seems to be on the verge of completing a cycle from science fiction to science fact to history. The Space Shuttle Atlantis took its last flight to the International Space Station, as NASA's shuttle program--the main way human beings have slipped the surly bonds of Earth these past three decades--will finally be mothballed this year.

Meanwhile, moon-stepping astronauts Neil Armstrong and Eugene Cernan were cursing Barack Obama before Congress for his plan to abandon governmental efforts to free us from the gravity well. The president wants to cease funding NASA's Constellation program, which had been tasked to develop a new means to get people to space and also to fund a possible moonbase.

Megan Prelinger's Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957-1962 (Blast Books) takes us back to the days when the extra-terrestrial human future seemed expansive, endless, and fecund in a hundred ways. It illustrates this history through a fresh lens: industry advertising.

Another Science Fiction combines art, history, and criticism. The art is the military-industrial-space complex's surprisingly imaginative efforts to sell--to would-be employees, to the government, and to each other--the wonders of bringing man and his machines to earth orbit, the Moon, and outer space.

The selections are stylish in that manner that today is most closely associated with the TV show Mad Men. The graphic designs, influenced in turn by constructivist, modernist, minimalist, and expressionist art, are epitomes of the advertising that the show simultaneously criticizes and valorizes. (Willi Baum's work is particularly startling and fresh.) Mad Men prop master Gay Perello gave the book a glowing back-cover blurb, aptly calling it "a concise visual-historical reference of mid-century advertising."

As in Mad Men, this sense of cool, smart, unexpected genius was deployed not just to sell a product but to evoke and steer a romantic longing--in this case, escape from the eternal bonds of gravity and atmosphere and the conquest of the last possible frontier (and last possible territory to colonize). There is a more rational longing as well, the desire to solve the many technical problems inherent in getting people and their artifacts off the planet, while keeping them alive and reasonably comfortable in the process.

Between the lush and lovely reproductions of more than a hundred ads, most from...