12 thoughts on “Space Travel”

  1. Space tourism was a popular prediction several decades ago. Unfortunately, modern adventure seekers are still confined to the boundaries of our terrestrial planet

    I guess Milo doesn’t read the newspapers much.

  2. That lunar colony painting is amusing since it appears the lander (if that’s what it is) has no fuel tanks.

  3. That lunar colony painting is amusing since it appears the lander (if that’s what it is) has no fuel tanks.

    I would presume that the tanks have been recycled as habitat space.

  4. I like the Big Green Ship descending on (ascending from?) the city.

    No, I have no suggestions as to how it does that. Internally housed anti-grav boosters, I guess.

  5. I would presume that the tanks have been recycled as habitat space.

    From the cut-away, it looks like the tanks were completely removed and perhaps also the engines. Since the Apollo LM used hypergolic propellants (toxic, corrosive, and all around nasty chemicals), it seems likely this vehicle would also. I’d be hesitant about removing hypergolic propellant tanks (likely containing residual liquid) and I certainly wouldn’t want to live inside tanks after they’d been emptied.

  6. From the Comments after the pictures:
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    Jelmer says:
    October 25, 2010 at 3:53 am

    If you flip the Space Garbagemen image, you can see a guy inside the red area wearing a baseball cap or something, so I’d say they are manned.
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    But is his ball cap on backward, is the bill intentionally ‘weathered’ and torn up? Is the hat two sizes too big, with a ‘flat bill’? Just how accurate was the artists idea of the future? (wink, wink)
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    AND
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    Just to keep everyone else safe, I’m warning you here and now, DO NOT go searching for “Boytopia”, like I did. I wanted to see if anything about that idea is scanned and online.

    There’s a “Boytopia’ out there alright. But I think the Boys Cub of America has allowed their rights to that term expire. I don’t even think the Boys Club of America was shooting for their centers for space training were supposed to be,
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    “…a paradise for everyone who loves sizzling hardcore …”.
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    There is the possibility that to MAKE a distinction, the hardcore folks pronounce the term differently. It could be pronounced ‘boy-TOP-a-ya’, now?

    (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, I don’t wanna know what ya’ mean)

  7. That last picture of the guy in the altitude chamber really brought back some strong memories. It is from a book that had to have been my absolute favorite as a kid, and I’ve been looking for a copy ever since.

  8. googaw: they’re relevant in that they embody mistakes of futurology that one would be well advised not to repeat.

  9. Paul D: true, but the important mistakes are in the economic assumptions and in the many details of what must go on “behind the scenes”, both in technical and business terms, to make anything resembling these fantasies possible. The technical mistakes visible in the pictures are trivia, like discovering a logical flaw in a medieval argument about the nature of angels.

  10. the 1956 concept struck a chord with me. First off, the space plane looks just like the Berkut–a company owned by a dear friend of ours, Richard Riley, who passed away a few years ago. Second, the space station reminds me of the design I helped with for Hughes’ ill-fated space station proposal. It was a dual spinner, used Shuttle tanks as spokes, and was ringed with a flexible solar panel. My job was to analyze the structure, with its nonlynnear geometric stiffening.

  11. From the cut-away, it looks like the tanks were completely removed and perhaps also the engines. Since the Apollo LM used hypergolic propellants (toxic, corrosive, and all around nasty chemicals), it seems likely this vehicle would also.

    This looks nothing like the Apollo LM. It looks more like the post-Apollo concepts for landing the S-IVB stage on the Moon (not much like it, but closer).

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