Dreams of the Earth and Sky

This article examines how artists, writers and filmmakers inspired by scientific ideas imagined space flight and how engineers and scientists were inspired by these fantasies. The first section discusses Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's impact on images of interplanetary flight and the promotion of outer space in the early twentieth century. The second considers the emergence of popular science films about space as conceived by director Pavel Klushantsev as well as the role of artist Yuri Shvets in the Soviet space epic and the impact of technological modeling on science fiction in art. Finally, the author surveys the “space work” of artists-cum-inventors Bulat Galeyev and Vyacheslav Koleychuk.