In 1969, Rauschenberg was invited by NASA to witness the launch of the historic Apollo 11 mission and to commemorate it. Rauschenberg was given unrestricted access to NASA’s facilities - he roamed the buildings, met with astronauts, and was granted access to official NASA photographs and documents. After the Apollo launch, Rauschenberg began working on a series of 34 lithographs titled "Stoned Moon," and "Brake" is one of the lithographs from that series. Depicted in the bottom right corner of "Brake" are astronauts Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee from the Apollo 1 mission, a tragedy that predated the Apollo 11 mission. Rauschenberg originally wasn’t a fan of lithography and said that artists in the 1960s shouldn’t be "writing on rocks," but lithography eventually won him over when he realized all of its possibilities. Many of the stones used for the "Stoned Moon" series broke, thereby creating a fissure in several of the lithographs, but Rauschenberg embraced the damage, saying that "ideas can be cracks in the stone." "Brake" is one of the pieces created from a cracked stone, and the line is visible in this lithograph.