These NASA ‘Space Tourism’ Posters Are Amazing

A section from a new Space Tourism poster commissioned by NASA (Invisible Creature).

For 2016, NASA staff members were treated with a special “Visions Of The Future” calendar featuring imagined travel posters from distant decades ahead, where a trip to Saturn and Neptune will be as accessible as a cruise in the Caribbeans today.

Each poster has neatly printed words like “now boarding” and “booking tours now” in the style of classic travel posters.

The space agency commissioned the design firm Invisible Creature to produce the posters, sketched in a retro style reminiscent of the dawn of the space age. The firm released the images of three of those posters on its website, and the artwork for the entire calendar will soon be downloadable from NASA.

One poster, “The Grand Tour,” depicts the announcement of a NASA travel package that will take advantage of a rare alignment of the outer planets to allow passengers to explore them all in quick succession---from Jupiter to Neptune, tourists can “experience the charm of gravity assists.”

NASA's Voyager mission took advantage of a once-every-175-year alignment of the outer planets for a grand tour of the solar system. The twin spacecraft revealed stunning details about Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—using each planet's gravity to send them on to the next destination. (Invisible Creature)

The next poster offers a trip to Enceladus, an icy moon orbiting Saturn, where signs of a global ocean make it one of the best candidates for the discovery of extraterrestrial life.

The discovery of Enceladus' icy jets and their role in creating Saturn's E-ring is one of the top findings of the Cassini mission to Saturn. (Invisible Creature)

The last poster imagines a future where the current missions on Mars—the rovers and orbiters and labs—are considered legendary accomplishments in the distant past, remembered as fondly and nostalgically as we remember Neil Armstrong’s first step on the Moon today.

NASA's Mars Exploration Program seeks to understand whether Mars was, is, or can be a habitable world. Missions like Mars Pathfinder, Mars Exploration Rovers, Mars Science Laboratory and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, among many others, have provided important information in understanding of the habitability of Mars. This poster imagines a future day when we have achieved our vision of human exploration of Mars and takes a nostalgic look back at the great imagined milestones of Mars exploration that will someday be celebrated as "historic sites." (Invisible Creature)

Limited editions of the posters are available for sale on Invisible Creature’s website.