The sun shafts down on a group of cocktail drinkers, as a woman in a white dress laughs at something her camel-coated companion has said and a bartender stands at ease, wearing a faint smile. Behind the revelers, a rolling landscape of red roofs recedes uncannily toward a glowing ring of sky. Above, freed from gravity’s clutch, a man on a bicycle rigged with orange sails glides across the crescent horizon.

Stumble across the paintings of Rick Guidice and Don Davis in some dark corner of the Internet one evening, and you might think they are pages from an old pulp magazine. They were in fact commissioned by NASA forty years ago to accompany scientific reports, fleshing out what seemed, at the time, a plausible future of colonies in Earth’s orbit.

Rick Guidice was a freelance illustrator who often worked on advertisements. "We all aspired to get General Motors as a client and do these wonderful ads and publish them in the top magazines every week," he recalled recently, reached at his studio in Los Gatos, California. He painted machinery, cars, buildings—in his down time, he painted a Formula 1 race in Monaco.

Don Davis’s experience was in more otherworldly scenes. In 1968, a high schooler entranced by space, he was referred to a job program at the US Geological Survey’s Branch of Astrogeological Studies. "They were involved with background work for the Apollo program, helping map the moon and decide where the landing should take place," he says. He showed up with an oil painting of the Moon and was hired on the spot as a scientific illustrator.

The two would be part of a dream that blossomed in the fertile imaginations of the post-Apollo era—and, for all intents and purposes, died within a decade. But for a brief moment, that dream looked like it would propel humanity spaceward.

In the mid-1970s, NASA began to give grants to a Princeton physics professor named Gerard O’Neill. O’Neill was convinced that building colonies that orbited the Earth was the best way to harvest the mineral riches of asteroids and provide a home for the burgeoning millions of Earth. The colonies would trail behind the moon, a location where they would not need to expend any fuel to stay aloft. On them would be vast manufactories of solar arrays that, released into space, would beam power back to Earth in the form of microwaves, justifying the colonies' expense. For a few years, O'Neill's ideas spread like wildfire through a certain set of forward-thinkers in science and the media.

In 1975, O’Neill spearheaded a ten-week-long study at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, working with engineers, social scientists, and other researchers, as well as architects, to see whether such structures were feasible. Their final report describes several possible colony types, such as the Bernal Sphere, in which the landscape is smeared across the interior of an enormous globe, and which generates its own gravity using centrifugal force. A cylindrical colony, in which a twenty-mile long tube was lined with human habitations, also made the cut, as did toroid colonies, shaped like immense hula hoops. With the extension of current engineering, the study participants concluded, it was possible that such things could be built and sustained as early as 1990.

Someone at NASA got in touch with Davis and Guidice, who had each worked on other illustrations for the agency in the past, about illustrating the report. Soon they were receiving sketches, technical specs, and explanations from O’Neill.

An idyllic retreat

The rolling hills behind the cocktail drinkers and sky-cyclist in Guidice’s painting of a Bernal Sphere are in many of the interior paintings. Sometimes they are laced with cypresses, delicately rendered in acrylic paints; other times thin fir trees rise in ranks toward a horizon line that recedes around a toroid’s bend. In one of Davis’s, a family wades in a stream high above a bay traversed by a slender suspension bridge. Through a miles-long window fitted with a mirror to reflect in daylight, distant agriculture pods spin in a halo around the colony’s cylinder.

O’Neill helped inspire this idyllic scenery. "He wanted to replicate an English countryside," Guidice says. "He wanted it to be very rural farmland." Davis recalls a similar conversation: "You go to Sausalito, on the San Francisco Bay, and you see the boats down below, and the green hills around you and the water and the city stretching out ahead of you—that was the impression he shared with me." All three knew that colonies would almost certainly look more like shopping malls than countryside, at least at first. But to inspire viewers, they would need a romantic depiction.

The romance was not just in the paintings. The 1975 report, available on NASA’s website, peppered technical descriptions with episodes from an imagined visit to the colony. The style is familiar to anyone who’s read the utopian literature of the mid-twentieth century—Ecotopia and Walden Two, especially. In one aside, a colony leader explains to the visitor, over a lunch of chicken, peas, rice, and apple pie produced from on-colony agriculture, how the society functions:

The colony experiences the egalitarianism of a frontier reinforced by the esprit of a group of people working together with a sense of mission on a common task. His face glowed with enthusiasm as he declared that this spirit, more than heroic adventures or romanticized challenge, is what makes the colony a rewarding place to live...

He excuses himself, saying he has a meeting of the "elders" to attend.