To depict life in space is to commit to paper one’s hopes and aspirations for humanity’s future. Though Guidice was given diagrams and isometric drawings to work from, he said that “there’s hundreds and hundreds of decisions to be made along the way, and each one is kind of controlled by my vision, my inspiration, and the experience I’ve had as an illustrator.”

Guidice’s career as an editorial and commercial illustrator for clients like Hewlett Packard equipped him with the visual storytelling skills needed to sell the prospect of life in space. He was also influenced by his contemporaries who had already left their marks on our collective understanding of what the future could look like, such as Robert McCall, who illustrated Isaac Asimov’s Our World in Space, and Syd Mead, whose design work would later earn him the role as the concept artist for the film Blade Runner.

While the diagrams Guidice referenced might have envisioned how humans could survive in outer space, his paintings depict a future where humans could thrive. Lush English gardens and glassy ponds fill the floating platforms of cylindrical space colonies. Spherical habitats are flanked by reflective surfaces that mimic sunlight. A cross-section of swirling structures reveal rich layers of agricultural farmland. This was NASA’s modernist fantasy of the future.