Publius & Co.

Following the Links

My computer at work was upgraded. Consequently, I'm transferring stuff I kept locally to the new machine (using my Creative Labs Nomad MuVo as a thumb drive--Thanks, sweetie!) and I just transferred my bookmarks.

Time to sort thru them, and get rid of dead and old links...and I stumbled across some stuff that is interesting in general, and probably really interesting to Ted. And I even remember how I found them...

First stop is Deep Cold, by Dan Roam. One day, I went to get my hair cut and I was flipping thru Popular Science, which had a sidebar of interesting links. I don't remember the exact description used, but the URL was easy enough to remember. Deep Cold recreates some little-known abandoned or proposed spacecraft, lost in the US/Soviet Space Race of the 60's. Really neat, and Mr. Roam's animations are fabulous. He has a fantastic feel for cinematography, and I recognized the movie from which he grabbed some dialogue (Marooned, which I really enjoyed as a kid).

Deep Cold led me to Man Conquers Space. If you were a kid in an American school in the 60's, you know we were supposed to have several Space Stations (the wagon-wheeled type) floating above the Earth, colonies on the Moon, and research teams on Mars by now. You also know none of that has come to pass.

(Yet.)

In the 50's Collier's magazine published a series of articles by Dr. Wernher von Braun, which gave us kids in the 60's our crazy ideas about lunar colonies and space stations and all that expensive stuff. Most of us (me, for example) realized not in my lifetime; other's haven't (Ted, and more power to you), but the guys at Man Conquers Space are pretending it did. They're making a documentary of NCA's (National Council of Astronautics) successes of the last ten years (if you go along with them and pretend it's 1969) and discusses the upcoming mission to Jupiter. If I had a couple of spare million dollars, I'd invest it in this movie.

(Special to Ted: You've got to build a Saturn Shuttle).

Of course, I had to find the Collier's magazines that inspired Man Conquers Space. Later, I'll probably go to eBay and buy them; for now, though, enjoy the Gallery of Collier's Cover Space Technology. Absolutely delightful artwork that launched a thousand dreams...and since it's the Johnson Spaceflight Center's official home page, you can look at tons of other stuff, like Dr. von Braun's sketches of proposed Mars exploration vehicles.

OK, lunch is over for me...but during your next lunchtime surfing trip, take a look.

Posted by Victor at Septiembre 26, 2003 12:22 PM