Almost 70 years have passed since the first animals were sent into space and a lot has changed in that time. The space shuttle was the world’s first reusable space vehicle capable of gliding back to the Earth after each mission. The five orbiters have flown more than 130 times, traveling over half a billion miles, carrying over 350 people into space. It fundamentally changed how we understand the universe. The Space Shuttle was retired on 8 July 2011 after 30 years of travel when Atlantis returned to Earth for the last time, marking the end of an incredible era.
Most people will know what the Space Shuttle is and will have their own opinions on whether it was a success or not. This publication aims to inform and educate about the Space Shuttle and what it helped achieve. Whilst covering the negative incidents of the Space Shuttle, the publication intends to be a positive piece, focusing mainly on what the Shuttle helped achieve and how it benefitted science and mankind.
The size of the publication is the total length (37.1m) and wingspan (23.7m) of a Space Shuttle orbiter at a scale of 1:100cm. This allows for a large publication at 371x237mm reflecting the large nature of the subject matter. The chosen typeface is Futura. This has been selected as it was the first typeface ‘in space’, used on the Lunar Plagues left on the moon during the Apollo missions. Although it was not the space shuttle that completed these missions, the font still has relevance to the wider subject matter.
A mixed colour palette reflects different elements of space. The dark grey and black represent the darkness of space. The brighter colours are taken from an image of a nebula (seen at the start of the publication) which was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. As stated by NASA, the colours seen in Hubble photographs have been added during the editing process where they use colour to “highlight interesting features of the celestial object being studied.” Colour is also used in this way throughout the publication.
Result - pass.
