Ron Miller (American, b. 1947). A Scene on Pluto, 2024. Acrylic on board. 15 x 20 inches (38.1 x 50.8 cm). Signed lower ...

Description

Ron Miller (American, b. 1947)
A Scene on Pluto, 2024
Acrylic on board
15 x 20 inches (38.1 x 50.8 cm)
Signed lower right: Ron Miller
Signed, dated, and titled on the reverse: A Scene from Pluto / Ron Miller 2024

Ron Miller has had a storied and multi-decade career as one of America's premiere space artists. This work stands in a unique position within that career, including one of his own earlier contributions to both the art and history of space exploration-- a 1991 U.S. postage stamp of Pluto at lower right above Ron Miller's signature.

As described by Miller himself:
In 1990 I was asked by Howard E. Paine, then art director for National Geographic and art director for the US Postal Service, to design a set of ten stamps honoring the exploration of the solar system: one stamp for each planet plus the moon. Each planet was accompanied by a spacecraft that had explored it. Except Pluto. Its stamp was labeled "Not Yet Explored."

The stamps were released in 1991 as the "Space Exploration Commemorative" set at a special ceremony at JPL. Robert Staehle, an engineer at JPL saw the Pluto stamp and thought Why not? "I viewed it kind of humorously as a challenge," Staehle said. Staehle, together with another engineer, Stacy Weinstein, who had already been working on a possible Pluto probe, evolved an idea for a fast and cheap mission to Pluto. Weinstein says that Stern "had his stamps, and I had my stamps and we were looking at poor little Pluto, not yet explored, and we said, gosh we've got to do something about that!" First dubbed "Pluto Fast Flyby" and then later the "Pluto Kuiper Express" this eventually evolved into the New Horizons project, spearheaded by Alan Stern, New Horizons' principal investigator. "Without the ceremony and without the taunt on the stamp, the conversation that Stacy and I had probably wouldn't have happened," Staehle said. "Yes, we probably would have talked about a mission to Pluto, but we wouldn't have arrived there..."

The USPS itself wrote that "The stamp for Pluto had an artist's impression of what the planet might look like with the words "NOT YET EXPLORED" beneath the picture. Those three words became a rallying cry for scientists eager to complete the exploration of the solar system with a mission to Pluto."

The stamp "became symbolic," Stern said, "a kind of rallying cry after we were selected as NASA's team," said Alan Stern. The stamp was used in proposals and presentations arguing for a Pluto mission. It was part of the public outreach campaign once New Horizons was underway. "When we got to the launch pad, I made sure one of [the stamps] got put on the spacecraft and flown across the solar system, right in Pluto's face."

My wife and I were invited to witness the launch on January 19, 2006. Nine years later, New Horizons arrived at Pluto on July 14, 2015. On that day, Alan Stern and his crew held up a poster-sized print of the stamp with the words "Not Yet" crossed out.

Pluto, naturally enough, has become one of my favorite subjects to paint. Especially since I can benefit from the knowledge about the planet and its landscape returned to earth by New Horizons. It was to this end that I created this special painting, to kind of close the circle: the stamp that helped launch the exploration of Pluto attached to a painting that benefited from what I learned about the little planet from New Horizons.


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