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Comment by kurlberg | Hacker News Reader

As a kid I loved reading "Great Space Battles" and "Spacecraft, 2000-2100 A.D.: Terran Trade Authority Handbook", by Stewart Cowley, from the late 70s. My impression is that the art (very beautiful airbrush(?) space ship pictures) inspired the stories than the other way around.

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Reminds me of Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design[0]:

> 30. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Engineering Design) If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist's concept.

[0] - https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html

Awesome: Scott Manley has a youtube video about it (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8abMJhmvss.) Heh, some of it did not age so well:

2012: work starts on Mars station.

Elon, hurry up! :-)

I had lots of space books as a kid... there's a certain aesthetic from the late 1970ies that makes me nostalgic.

I wonder if there's a name for it or a collection of some of those book covers and art.

The art for the book OP mentioned was, IIRC, by a particular British artist. One sec... he was very prolific in the late 70s / 80s.

Chris Foss: https://www.chrisfossart.com

Nice! Yeah, some of those are what I'm thinking of. Not cartoony, nor particularly 'dated' looking like some stuff from, say, the 50ies.

https://www.instagram.com/seventiesscifiart/

Possibly contained within "cassette futurism".

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