The Planetary Society Blog
By Emily Lakdawalla
Bob McCall
Mar. 2, 2010 | 08:29 PST | 16:29 UTC
by Donna Stevens
Robert McCall, the famed space artist, has left our midst. He died (at 90) of a heart attack on Friday, February 26, in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Since the birth of the space age, Bob had been there, illustrating our visions of the future and chronicling our efforts to get there. He was one of the first artists invited by NASA to be a part of their Fine Arts Program and, alongside such diverse artists as Andy Warhol and Normal Rockwell, he documented the many stages of our journeys off Earth. The public was introduced to Bob's work when he illustrated LIFE magazine's 1960s series on the future of space exploration. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick, asked him to illustrate the posters for his seminal film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Bob designed postage stamps and NASA mission patches and served as art director on Paramount's 1979 film, Star Trek, The Motion Picture. His murals adorn the walls of NASA's Johnson Space Flight Center and Dryden Flight Research Center. The most famous of these works, however, is the six-story "The Space Mural—A Cosmic View." This 1976 piece, depicting the beginning of the universe to the days humans walked on the Moon, is seen by about 10 million visitors a year to America's temple of space exploration, the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum.
Bob McCall gave his time and talent to the creation of Arizona's Challenger Space Center. His passion for space travel can be seen in his many works of art throughout the facility dedicated to encouraging children to dream.
He was always gracious and generous in his dealings with The Planetary Society. To have one of his works appear in the pages of The Planetary Report never lost, for me, the feeling of a special treat.
Bob's multitude of paintings, his awards, acknowledgments, and charitable works are too many to mention here, but they illuminate every step of our path to the stars.
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