Americans have never been so optimistic as we were during the space race. The idea that we were a few short years away from the next step in human evolution—people seriously believed that we would be colonizing other planets in a decade or two—was, for a few years, a kind of science-fictional religion that everybody bought into. Megan Prelinger's lush new photo book, Another Science Fiction, demonstrates the excitement of the era by looking at the advertisements that the aerospace industry created to sell products to engineers.

Advertisements are, practically by definition, lies. Most exist to perform two separate functions at the same time: to make you feel worthless and to provide the solution to your new self-loathing. But the target audience of these ads was presumably more canny than the average consumer: They were the men (yes, mostly men) designing the vehicles that were sending us to the stars. Another Science Fiction doesn't feature a whole lot of cowboy-style spacemen who are trying to tame alien races; instead it portrays a scientifically reasonable future of space travel that is still ages beyond the future we live in today.

Prelinger, a San Francisco woman who cofounded a private research library with a collection devoted to science fiction and the space race, is the perfect curator for this book of artifacts, providing context and analysis throughout. One chapter looks at the more abstract ads, which depict our space program as an extension of our own bodies: a rocket is superimposed with a silhouette of a grasping hand, satellites are enormous piercing green eyes staring back at Earth. Footprints are popular, from realistic-looking space-boot treads to wingtip prints in moon dust to the whole universe laid out in one naked footprint. Other chapters show cutaway diagrams of space farms, or mining colonies, or entire underground cities on the moon.

Some of the ads (paid for by companies with superhero names like Ex-Cell-O) are selling a new type of plastic, others promote one tiny circular engine part, but the specific products are basically afterthoughts: They're selling the future to future-minded men, and there's a kind of breathless energy, a juggernaut of possibility, powering each advertisement. It's easy to imagine the art of these ads—most of them are paintings, and some of the more abstract works wouldn't look out of place in a museum today—inspiring the scientific minds that were guiding us to the future. We sold ourselves to the stars thanks to an amazing synergy between the best of engineering and advertising.

Megan Prelinger reads Mon June 14, University Book Store, 7 pm, free.