I've previously talked about how we're in a decade of fortieth space anniversaries. Well, today is a fiftieth anniversary of a very significant space-related cultural event.

Fifty years ago today, the first of a series of popular space articles was published in Collier's Magazine. This was a collaboration with several space engineers (including Werner von Braun and Willey Ley) and space artists, including the incomparable Chesley Bonestell.

It presented a future in space that helped prepare the American public for the upcoming space age. It included von Braun's vision of expansion into the solar system, nurtured even while he was designing the V-2 rockets for Hitler's Third Reich. The series described crewed reusable shuttles, large wheeled space stations (as later depicted in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey), lunar shuttles and bases, and manned flights to Mars. It later resulted in a Disney animated series that was shown on Sunday nights.

Unfortunately, for many reasons, the future didn't turn exactly as von Braun, Ley, Bonestell and others envisioned. NASA was formed in response to a public panicked by Sputnik, and then diverted from a slow, rational development of the high frontier to the Cold-War imperative of beating the Russians to the Moon (and per Lyndon Johnson's desires, helping industrialize the South) with the Apollo program. Once this pattern had been set in place, the space bureaucracy acquired an institutional inertia that has prevented us from making much further progress, at least in proportion to the funds expended on it.

There's another article on the topic from Space.com a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, it's used as the background of a depressing puff piece for NASA and the International Space Station:

Some of the elements of the "Collier's Space Program," like the creation of crewed rockets, a reusable space shuttle and the first landings on the moon, have already been achieved. With a few trial runs behind us, we soon will be a step closer to a permanent crewed space station -- the next stage in the magazine's imaginary conquest of other planets -- once the International Space Station goes on line.

Yeah, right. No one on that team envisioned going to the Moon and then abandoning it. Or a reusable Shuttle that would fly only half a dozen times a year at a cost of over half a billion per flight. And there is nothing in the design (or location) of ISS that will allow it to make much of a contribution toward going to other planets.

At a planned size of 356 x 290 feet [118 x 97 meters], the ISS will favorably compare to von Braun's 250-foot [83-meter]- diameter ring-shaped station, which the Collier's team designed to hold 80 people.

Favorably compare?!

By what criteria? Apparently this guy thinks that size means something. Because it's a few tens of feet larger (because the solar panels stick out that far) than the planned wheeled station, he thinks that it's a better station, even though the wheel held 80 people, and ISS holds three (and perhaps a dozen if it ever gets fully built).

However, unlike the ISS, the Collier's station would have been built exclusively by U.S. funds. Given estimates that such a structure could be built by 1967, the total bill would have come in at around $4 billion in 1952 dollars.

And even accounting for inflation over the past fifty years, it would have been a bargain, compared to ISS, particularly when one considers that it had artificial gravity, and held an order of magnitude more people.

Australian David Sanders has produced a documentary of what life would have been like over the past half century had that vision been actually carried forward. From his website:

This film is based on an alternative timeline to the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo era of reality - it is based on the premise that all that had been proposed in the early 1950's in Colliers actually came to pass - and sooner than they expected.

Through the expert use of special visual effects and computer-generated imagery (CGI), the world of wonder and imagination expressed though Collier's has become real. The film Man Conquers Space looks like a documentary from the 1960's, complete with varying grades of film quality, scratches and lab marks, and a tinny soundtrack - just the way it would appear today if it had indeed been made over 30 years ago on the limited budget afforded to documentary makers of that era.

David has the vision, even if Washington has lost it. Check it out.

[Update at 1:30PM PST]

Dr. Al Jackson has a web page commemorating this series, with his own personal recollections.

Here is my remembrance of this event.

http://home.flash.net/~aajiv/bd/uss1.html

Opps , did not notice I had been referenced!

I have some interesting information about the origin of The Mars Project.
Since one the contributers , Dr. Joachim Mühlner,
leaves near JSC , where I work, I have been able
to interview him. Amazing man! He worked on the
V2 at Peenemünde , ICBMs, the Apollo Program and
the Shuttle! What a span!
He is 89 and been retired for many years, but finished with Lockheed here in Houston.