Painting 7A depicts the two Air Force “aerospace research pilots” (the U.S. Air Force didn’t call them “astronauts” to avoid comparison with NASA’s highly public spaceflights) take a bus ride to the launch pad.
The painting is upbeat as the attractive young men appear confident and relaxed. Jacobe showed them wearing Hamilton Standard MH-5 space suits, which dates the painting to no earlier than late 1967, but used the blue versions intended for tests and training instead of the flight versions, first delivered in June 1968, that would have had the traditional white outer layer. Their suits appear flaccid despite being pressurized and ventilated by the hoses connected to them. One pilot's suit is missing a hose. The pilots are shown wearing headsets inside their helmets but their microphones appear not to match.
The booster and spacecraft stack is shown next to the Umbilical Tower, but there is no White Room enclosing the Gemini-B crew capsule and no swing arm across which the pilots could walk to reach their spacecraft.
This and subsequent paintings depicting the blue suit indicate that their artistic direction came in early 1968 and was not subsequently revised. Prior to 1967, the pilots were expected to wear the white-colored David Clark Co. suits familiar from the just-ended NASA Gemini program. (This is discussed further in connection with Painting 43, under MOL Activation.)
This is the first of the paintings to have a number-letter identifier. There is a 7B in the series, but it is not obvious why the two paintings should share the number "7". This is also the first of the paintings to have Jacobe's signature on it, suggesting that, unlike some others in the collection, he considered it completed.
The painting does not have an acetate sheet associate with it. The onion skin sheet (shown below) is annotated with a rectangle around just the pilots' heads, suggesting it was to be used for a close-up in an animated film describing a typical MOL mission.
The cover sheet had a plain white piece of typing paper taped to it (above)) with possible captions indicating this painting might have been intended for an in-house motivational poster. One of the suggestions, "Three good reasons," apparently counted the two men plus the rocket.
There was also a reference to another graphics provider, perhaps Ball Carson, presumably also a Douglas employee, but Mike Machat was unable to identify him.
- Space suit information: Thomas, K., Hamilton Standard Space Suit Experience Supplement, SVHSER-19654, United Technologies, March 1999, pp. 29-30.