I keep coming across John Wilkins' A Discourse Concerning a New Planet as (maybe) the oldest text seriously discussing extraterrestrial colonization, but it's a little hard to find a history of actual drawings / sketches etc of plans, serious or wacky / imaginative.<p>In any case thought someone on HN might be able to point me in the right direction. Any help is appreciated! :^)<p>Not looking for anything specific beyond age, could be space stations, lunar / martian colonies or anything in-between.
I'd suggest looking to the history of science fiction, which ... goes back further than you might expect:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_fiction" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_fiction</a><p>For a modern view based on a relistic sense of rocketry, science, and technology, I'd probably start with the early 20th century. There were several popular works written by the 1930s, and I'd expect some from earlier.<p>Wikipedia's Space Colonization article suggests the work of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, which I was also going to suggest, beginning around 1900.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_colonization" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_colonization</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky</a><p>I'm not aware of specific illustrations accompanying these, but any such would all but certainly follow those dates.<p>The same article also suggests:<p><i>In the 1920s John Desmond Bernal, Hermann Oberth, Guido von Pirquet and Herman Noordung further developed the idea. Wernher von Braun contributed his ideas in a 1952 Colliers article. In the 1950s and 1960s, Dandridge M. Cole[18] published his ideas.</i><p>The Werner "who cares where they come donw") von Braun article was part of a series "Man Will Conquer Space Soon!'<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Will_Conquer_Space_Soon" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Will_Conquer_Space_Soon</a>!<p>The series was reprinted in 2016:<p><a href="http://www.aiaahouston.org/newsletter/" rel="nofollow">http://www.aiaahouston.org/newsletter/</a><p>The age of American "pulp" science fiction magazines dates to 1926 with Hugo Gernsback's <i>Amazing Stories</i>. This and other early SciFi magazines are archived at the Internet Archive, and the covers are illustrated:<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/amazingstoriesmagazine" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/amazingstoriesmagazine</a>
This is a start but only goes back to 1954 and is limited to a few russian pop culture images.<p><a href="https://www.rbth.com/history/332103-soviet-space-colonization-sci-fil" rel="nofollow">https://www.rbth.com/history/332103-soviet-space-colonizatio...</a>