Jenam 2011Astronauts flying on the next mission to the International Space Station must love vintage nostalgia.
NASA recently released a new poster to celebrate SpaceX Crew-4’s upcoming launch into the orbiting lab, and it has a distinct retro flavor. Astronaut Bob Hines, who will pilot the flight, said in a tweet wednesday that national park posters from the 1930s and 1940s inspired the look. Past promotions in the park were done by the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration.
Private astronauts dock then seriously crowd the space station
The tweet may have been deleted
Astronaut Kjell Lindgren thanked Johnson Space Center graphic designer Cindy Bush for bringing the concept to life.
If you find it hard to believe that a serious federal agency makes such official marketing material, you may not have been paying attention. Previous NASA posters have spoofed star warswith the whole crew dressed as Jedi Knights, the Beatles Abbey Road album cover, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Harry Potterand The matrixJust to name a few.
Expedition 45 Poster
Credit: NASA
Expedition 42
Credit: NASA
Expedition 26
Credit: NASA
For the Crew-4 mission, NASA astronauts Lindgren, Hines, Jessica Watkins and ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti began their official quarantine on Thursday. The flight will take off on April 21 at the earliest.
This generation of astronauts is the fourth crew rotation for the space station under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. To get there, the crew will board a new SpaceX Crew Dragon named Freedom, atop the company’s Falcon 9 rocket. The spacecraft will launch from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
NASA has delayed Crew-4 to expand missions to the space station. The Axiom mission, the first fully private expedition to the space station, arrived on Saturday, slightly later than originally planned, to give teams time to “complete final processing of the spacecraft” before the flight, according to NASA.
