‘Flight originated from the imagination’: how artists have captured space travel

As the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum turns 50, an expansive exhibition celebrates how art has coincided with space Wearing a shiny silver spacesuit, Alan Shepard clutches his helmet and looks like an archetypal blue-eyed American hero. The 1961 portrait by Bruce Stevenson paid tribute to the first US astronaut in space. It also planted a seed. James Webb, the then administrator of Nasa, saw the painting and was inspired to start the space agency’s own art programme, believing th...

By David Smith in Washington