Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

A young Carl Sagan sketched
this conception of future
space travel in the mid-1940s,
when he was 10 to 13 years
old. Courtesy of Druyan-Sagan
Associates Inc. All rights
reserved/Manuscript Division

Among the 595,000 items in the Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive in the Library of Congress is a childhood drawing titled “The Evolution of Interstellar Flight.”

When Carl Sagan was 10 to 13 years old, sometime between 1944 and 1947, that drawing was created, an artistic vision of adventurers crossing the galaxy.

So notes Sahar Kazmi, a writer-editor in the Office of the Chief Information Officer, detailing this and other Carl Sagan childhood drawings of space travel in the November-December issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

Savvy visions

“In one of the most thrilling notes of foresight from the young Sagan, three astronauts appear at the bottom right corner of the page. Their uniforms feature bubble helmets, thick jumpsuits and backpacks with antennae — familiar sights to modern readers, but unexpectedly savvy visions from a school kid in the 1940s,” Kazmi explains.

“That boyish wonder never left Sagan,” Kazmi adds. “Today, his enchantment with the cosmos lives on in an impressive body of work, ready to inspire a new generation of dreamers.”

Rock and Roll legend Chuck Berry with Carl Sagan at a Voyager 2 Neptune flyby celebration in August 1989. Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” is the only rock song on the interstellar spacecrafts Voyagers 1 and 2.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

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