Science

Recursion

(56,582 posts) Sun Feb 14, 2016, 11:46 PM Feb 2016

NASA’s Giving Away Brilliant Space Travel Posters For Free

Cool WPA-style space exploration posters, downloadable for free (you have to pay yourself to print them, obviously; come to think of it that usually costs more than just buying a poster somewhere).

http://www.thedrive.com/article/2171/nasas-giving-away-brilliant-space-travel-posters-for-free

This may come as a shock to you, but we’ve never been to Mars. We’ve never dived beneath the icy crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa, strolled beneath the twin suns of Kepler 16b or watched the acrid clouds of Venus float past. Never skydived under the heavy gravity of the Pictor constellation’s HD 40307 g or sailed across the icy methane seas of Titan. But these retro-style space travel posters from the design studio at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs are fine consolation prize for the time being.

The posters are a continuation of the Exoplanet Travel Bureau poster series first created by JPL’s design studio last year. The studio, first put together 13 years ago, helps JPL’s scientists and engineers plan out future missions, which means they’re always aware of the latest and greatest ideas being bandied about the lab. When NASA came to them asking for additional posters in the series, they were able to integrate many ideas the agency had already been spitballing for the future—such as floating cities hovering above Venus.

NASA’s faux travel agency is, obviously, a tad grandiose in their claims. Mankind won’t set foot on another planet for at least another decade, and even that’s optimistic. Zipping off 42 light-years for some super-Earth skydiving will probably remain science fiction forever. But anything that keeps the public aware of the grandeur of space exploration is cool with us.