The Spacemobile, a 1965 poster for a NASA space science lecture

The Spacemobile is an English-language poster in the U.S. Information Agency's overseas series, dated 26 February 1965. A painted astronaut holds up lunar soil beside a landing craft, and the sheet names the New Zealand Department of Education and NASA as sponsors of a space science lecture (NAID 6949271).

What it shows

A painted astronaut in a spacesuit stands on a moonscape and holds up a sample of lunar soil next to a landing craft, in the archive's description. The word on the craft is cut off by the edge of the illustration; FRAME reads the visible part as "STATES." The rest of the sheet is a short announcement and a list of sponsors.

THE SPACEMOBILE

A Space Science Lecture Demonstration

Sponsored by New Zealand Department of Education and United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration

[on the landing craft:] [partly hidden]STATES

S-562 (8)

Issuer, sponsors and audience

The poster sits in Record Group 306 at the National Archives, in the U.S. Information Agency series of posters distributed in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. The catalog title says it went to multiple posts. The sheet itself names two sponsors, one American and one foreign: NASA and New Zealand's Department of Education. The record codes the audience as a foreign public and the purpose as commemoration.

Unlike many sheets in this series, which FRAME codes as blurred in source, this one is coded identified: "the speaker is who they say they are." The sponsors are printed on the face. The record gives no dates, venues or attendance, and this page adds none.

How to read it

The archive's one technique tag is transfer, and its reading is that the glamour of space exploration is attached to the lecture program. The picture promises a man on the Moon. The text offers a lecture. That gap is the whole sales pitch, and it is a mild one. A science demonstration, jointly sponsored with a host government's education ministry and labeled as such, is among the least coercive things a state information service can do abroad.

Compare the photo-posters in the same series that report on real missions, such as Moon Close-Ups from U.S. Ranger and Voyage to Mars. The wider set is on the U.S. Information Agency posters hub, with a gallery of sheets.