The images gathered below were created in the mid-1970s during O’Neill’s summer research programs on space colonization held at NASA’s Ames Research Center. The artists include Don Davis, who would later help design the visuals for Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series, and Rick Guidice, who illustrated space projects for NASA across fifteen years. In an interview about the project, Davis discusses how his images of O’Neill’s ideas still have a “freshness”, for they continue to embody “the aspirations people have had ever since the space age began”. While this is certainly true — and the artists’ visions of artificial cylindrical worlds have had an outsized influence on science fiction — these psychedelic vistas populated by high-tech homes and cocktail-sipping residents were also a product of their cultural climate.
Image sourced from the Public Domain Image Archive / NASA
