We Need You to Colonize Mars, NASA’s Retro Recruitment Posters Implore

Mars is hardly a welcoming place. Tens of millions of miles from Earth, lacking in atmosphere, and blanketed in chemicals that are mildly toxic to the human endocrine system, it’s hardly the kind of place you’d go to on a lark, even if we had the technology to easily get there and back again. Nevertheless, Mars exploration has a fair share of boosters, including aquatic car entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has announced that he intends to send a spacecraft to the Red Planet by 2018.

With both private companies and government entities mulling over interplanetary missions and eventual settlments, the real trouble may be convincing anyone to go along. But NASA’s recent release of a trove of recruitment posters might do the trick of changing people’s minds. The retro-styled posters, which anyone can download in high-resolution for free, show off a variety of possible careers that colonists might take up, from technicians to surveyors, teachers to farmers.

NASA explains that it commissioned the images for a Kennedy Center exhibition in 2009. Thanks to their chic midcentury styling, however, they’re as charming and relevant now as they were then—and they’ll likely remain that way whenever we actually do make it out of Earth’s orbit.

While these posters clearly aren’t meant to really convince anyone to become, say, a Martian potato farmer, they’re a charming reminder that NASA and other organizations are still doing important work. Indeed, the retro aesthetic of the images may serve primarily to remind us of NASA’s own golden age. That’s likely why the agency has taken a similar approach in the past with other posters that depict the future of space travel through the iconography of the 20^th century Space Age.

In any case, not everyone needs convincing. In a recent trailer for his forthcoming documentary Lo and Behold, actor and director Werner Herzog interrupts Elon Musk to offer himself as a candidate for interplanetary travel. “I would come along. I wouldn’t have a problem,” he tells the nonplussed CEO.

We’ll be right there with you, Werner. As long as you narrate the trip.