By 1949, Willy Ley had spent over two decades popularizing rocketry, first with the VfR in Germany and then, after emigrating, in the United States. The Conquest of Space paired his text with the paintings of Chesley Bonestell, a former architectural illustrator whose meticulously researched, almost photographic renderings of rockets, planets, and alien landscapes gave readers their first visually convincing look at what spaceflight and the solar system might actually look like.

The book’s influence is hard to overstate: it helped shape the visual language of the American space program years before Apollo, and directly inspired the generation of engineers, scientists, and artists who built it. Bonestell would go on to collaborate with Ley again and with Wernher von Braun on the influential Collier’s magazine space series in the early 1950s.