Motherboard

…And the Van Gogh and the Monet and the Rembrandt. Browse a slideshow of his work above.

You may not know his name, but you definitely know the artwork of Robert McCall, who died on Friday at the age of 90 in Arizona. His ecstatic visions of the past, present, and future of space exploration have graced U.S. postage stamps, NASA mission patches, and the walls of the Smithsonian, capturing and inspiring the farthest reaches of human endeavor.

Once described by author Isaac Asimov as the “nearest thing to an artist in residence from outer space,” McCall’s paintings first attracted the public’s attention in the 1960s on the pages of LIFE, illustrating the magazine’s series on the future of space travel. His vision drew the attention of Stanley Kubrick, who asked McCall to paint the advertising posters for his seminal 1968 science fiction film, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” His painting, “Orion Leaving Space Station,” which shows a space vehicle darting from the lit bay of a wheel-shaped space station, was used for the “2001” movie poster.

Perhaps his most famous piece, the six-story “The Space Mural – A Cosmic View” greets visitors to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. Painted over the course of eight months in 1976, McCall’s depiction of the creation of the universe leading to astronauts walking on the Moon is seen by an estimated ten million annually.

Other large murals of his can be found at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, at the Dryden Flight Research Center in Lancaster, California, and at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson. A number of his paintings decorated the walls of the former Horizons pavilion at Walt Disney World Resort’s Epcot in Florida, and one remains on display at the entrance to the park’s iconic “Spaceship Earth” attraction.

But his paintings weren’t just for selling space operas or decorating exhibits. They stand for what’s so exciting about science-fiction: that impulse to take what’s possible and imagine what could be and what if. Between the subtlety and realism of his paintings and their more fanciful imaginations, he was drawing colorful maps for the future of science and space exploration.

What he couldn’t have imagined was the decade’s long retreat from deep space exploration, and recently, from NASA’s mission to the moon and Mars. McCall dies alongside the nebulae of space age dreams that his fantastic, technicolor artwork celebrated. The art just got a lot more nostalgic and more quaint too, like an old MVP card for a baseball player who ended up broke and in rehab.

More than ever, the art asks what could be—or perhaps what could have been.

“I think when we finally are living in space, as people will be doing soon, we’ll recognize a whole new freedom and ease of life,” McCall was quoted as saying. “These space habitats will be more beautiful because we will plan and condition that beauty to suit our needs. I see a future that is very bright.”

See a short video about McCall, see a feature on him at NASAgallery.html, and visit his online gallery._