(via Sculpture on the moon: Paul van Hoeydonck’s Fallen Astronaut.)
Making art that satisfied both van Hoeydonck’s futurist aesthetic and Scott’s somber philosophical goals proved a delicate process. “I am not an easy man to work with; I like to work alone,” van Hoeydonck confesses. Building on the concept of his Astros, he wanted to evoke the epic journey of the space explorers. (“To our children they are normal; to our grandchildren they will be myth,” he told a UPI reporter at the time.) Scott and his Apollo crewmates were thinking instead about a personal memorial: “We came up with the idea of recognizing the guys who’d died in the pursuit of space,” Scott tells us by phone from his Los Angeles home. “We also wanted to recognize our Soviet colleagues as well”—a remarkable sentiment at the height of the space race.