Member Portfolio

Rick Sternbach

Membership level: FELLOW

About the Artist

Rick Sternbach has been a space and science fiction artist since the early 1970s, often combining both interests in a project. His clients include NASA, Sky & Telescope, Data Products, Random House, Smithsonian, Analog, Astronomy, The Planetary Society, and Time-Life Books. He is a founding member and Fellow of the International Association of Astronomical Artists (IAAA), which was formed in 1983. He has written and illustrated articles on orbital transfer vehicles and interstellar flight for Science Digest. Beginning in the late 1970s Rick added film and television illustration and special effects to his repertoire, with productions like Star Trek: The Motion Picture, The Last Starfighter, Future Flight, and Cosmos, for which he and other members of the astronomical art team received an Emmy award, the first for visual effects. Rick also twice received the coveted Hugo award for best professional science fiction artist, in 1977 and 1978. In 2006, after fifteen years with the Star Trek franchise, Rick produced physical terrains and globes of Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Saturn’s moon Iapetus for the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, for their Gunther Depths of Space exhibit. Digital renderings of the Cosmos 1 solar sail were done for the Planetary Society, along with composited images of a sixteen square foot scale model of their revised Lightsail 1. He has also built a scale model of a proposed asteroid retrieval spacecraft for the Keck Institute for Space Studies. Most recently, Rick was included as a member of the special committee overseeing the restoration of the original U.S.S. Enterprise eleven foot filming miniature by the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

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