Some of my favorite science-fiction stories are about space travel. Now, there are obviously a lot of stories that fit into that sub-category, but my favorite ones are about space travel before mankind could actually do it. Think about it: now that humans actually can live and work in space, or on the moon, how might that have influenced the fiction writers and illustrators of today, as opposed to before the concept really began to take form in the 1960s? Science-fiction movies and TV shows of the time before the NASA program had a much more simplified concept of space suits, rocket ships, aliens, and technology. Novels and comic books showed space travelers as pretty basic explorers, wearing jumpsuits with domes attached to the head and a small breathing apparatus. Planets very distant from a sun would simply be cold, as opposed to housing liquid methane, and planets close to the sun might be kind of hot, rather than instantly-boil-your-face-off hot.
I've always viewed these kinds of stories as a bit more 'pure' in their imagination. Though the NASA program--and others like it--have become a spring-board for a great number of fantastic ideas, science fiction stories preceding space travel had a tendency to focus more on the 'fiction' as opposed to the 'science.' A lot of this quality has been lost because audiences today simply can't stretch their disbelief as much as they used to: for many decades, space suits must be depicted as bulky, multi-layered, vacuum sealed costumes, in order to keep out the harmful environments that all people know exist in space.
In this sketch, I tried to imagine a space suit of someone walking around on Saturn's moon Titan--a moon extremely distant from the sun. One of my goals was to imagine the suit as if it would have been imagined in the 1950s. The man is wearing a flight suit, with a few attachments for the airless, freezing, icy environment.
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