TIME Rush Hour in Space - June 6th, 1960

“Artist Boris Artzybasheff was a master at drawing incredible personalities out of seemingly ordinary objects – evident in these two imaginative space covers. Decades before man landed on the moon, he captured that human spirit way beyond the confines of Earth.” – D.W. Pine, Creative Director of TIME For the June 6, 1960 cover on the rise of competing satellites orbiting our planet, Artzybasheff again mastered the whimsy of personas, but he also decided to get a lot more technical. Starting with a dilettantish 0-119 trying to catch a Discoverer capsule with a butterfly net, he proceeded to produce (in clockwise order): a Vanguard III with a nose, "because that satellite was sent up for micrometeorite and magnetic studies, sniffing out information in space"; a shutter-ready, lens-eyed Tiros, taking pictures of the earth's cloud cover; a svelte medicine man of an Explorer I, using "a thermometer and stethoscope, since it measures temperature and cosmic rays"; a buxom flapper of a Pioneer V, absorbing a last swift kick from its booster rocket; an Explorer VII counting cosmic rays with a Geiger counter; and a loudmouthed, loudspeaker-toting Transit iB, sending back navigational signals.” TIME wrote of this cover: “All of this brings up the thought that if there are beings on other planets watching these things sent up from earth, are there Boris Artzybasheffs up there who can do as good a job of depicting the devices they are sending our way to sniff and probe at us?”

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