I love the sense of scale in the illustration above cover for Tom Swift and His Outpost in Space from 1955 which I found thanks to the Flickr site of digital archivist Paula Wirth. The illustrator who did the cover is (it may be Graham Kaye who also did quite a bit of work for the Saturday Evening Post. I also come across this gem of a description of the book from the dust jacket:
"A space station 22,300 miles above the earth is Tom Swift Jr.'s latest project! Tom's plans for his gigantic hub-and-spoke outpost of the universe calls for twelve laboratories. Solar batteries will be produced in one laboratory, another will be a celestial observatory, and another a radio broadcasting and TV station relaying programs over one third of the earth. But the project is beset from the start by a fiendish enemy, and also that weird phantom of outer space, Zero Gravity."