Painting 18A shows the pilots, having shed their space suits and donned the 1960s version of space couture, come to grips with their small and strictly functional surroundings.They are wearing the "bump helmets" assumed necessary in the days before astronauts had experience inside voluminous spacecraft; early planners were concerned with the possibility of head injuries in free-floating situations.
This is the second of only five paintings in the MOL art collection that has Jacobe's signature.
There is no acetate sheet, and no evidence of tape residue indicating it was lost. There is an onionskin sheet, not annotated. The cover sheet is annotated in the bottom left quadrant with handwritten corrections: "(1) No shoes, (2) Bump hats wrong, (3) earphones missing, (4) should not have belts, (5) pockets missing and (6) boom mike missing." None of these revisions were apparently incorporated, except that it appears thigh pockets might have been penciled directly onto the painting.