Historic Robotic Spacecraft Series I & II
With the recently completed airing of a new Cosmos television series, a new high-tech rover on Mars, Europeans landing on a comet and New Horizons finding it’s heart at Pluto — the public is excited again about deep space exploration. Despite this fact, designs that celebrate planetary exploration missions seem to be almost non-existent. The posters that do exist are generally data-driven, more appropriate for the walls of a high school science lab. We wanted to make something you would be proud to display prominently in your living room.
Chop Shop Studio successfully crowd-funded a series of nine screenprints in 2014 & 15 on Kickstarter. The missions featured were selected through a popularity based poll conducted by The Planetary Society. Series one included Voyager, Cassini, Curiosity, Mars Exploration Rovers (Opportunity & Spirit) and Sputnik with a special edition created for The Planetary Society’s LightSail Mission. Series two added New Horizons, Rosetta and Galileo to close the set out.
This is the video used in the Kickstarter campaign for Series 1.
This was the video used in the Kickstarter campaign for Series 2.
The Full Series (above)
All nine limited edition prints, framed and mounted. Including a special archival digital Spacecraft Only print lower-right.
Stickers (below)
Circular stickers were also produced for the campaign are are currently for sale independently or as a full set on chopshopstore.com.
Cassini Design Process (below)
The original idea to design a poster celebrating the spacecraft mission started around 2007, inspired by a composite of Saturn created by Ian Regan (image #1). The following year a poster for the Cassini mission was started, but it was never completed and the file remained lost for several years (image #2). Years later in 2013, when the Historic Robotic Spacecraft Series was funded, I borrowed the overall layout from the incomplete design for a rough sketch (image #3). Finally, the actual rendering begins in Illustrator (image #4). The final design can be seen in poster thumbnail #2 at the top of the page.
