Wernher von Braun’s Martian Chronicles

From 1952 until 1954, the weekly magazine Collier’s published a series of articles on space exploration spread out across eight issues. Several of the articles were written by Wernher von Braun, the former Third Reich rocket scientist who began working for the U.S. after WWII.  The Collier’s series is said to have inspired countless popular visions of space travel. This impact was in no small part due to the gorgeous, colorful illustrations done by Chesley Bonestell, Fred Freeman and Rolf Klep.

Mark Rober, "Curiosity’s Landing From the Perspective of the 3,000 People Who Built It"

Mark Rober is an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. In that role, Rober spent seven years working on the Curiosity project as NASA made its plans to explore Mars. “That’s nearly my entire professional career,” Rober notes, “and a quarter of my life.”

Rober has produced a video of the landing — a video told from his personal perspective, and from the perspective of the more than 3,000 people who, in some way, contributed to Curiosity’s success. “Appropriately,” Rober says, “there’s been a lot of focus on Curiosity, the rover. But what I think makes JPL really great aren’t its robots. It’s the people who build them.”

He made the video, which focuses on Curiosity’s climactic touchdown, to celebrate those people.

Apollo 12: Wrist Cuff Manuals by Ernie Reyes and Ulli Lotzmann

Wrist cuff manuals held the step-by-step procedures for each of the astronauts’ extra-vehicular excursions. Ernie Reyes, chief of pre-flight operations for NASA back on Earth, spiced up the checklists with little “Snoopy” cartoons. Snoopy, from Peanuts, was an unofficial mascot of the Apollo program (their black and white radio caps were named after the dog).