March 09, 2010
Reaching for the Stars When Space Was a Thrill
Dennis Overbye in The New York Times:
It was “Mad Men” meets “Flash Gordon.”
The years from 1957 to 1962 were a golden age of science fiction, as well as paranoia and exhilaration on a cosmic scale. The future was still the future back then, some of us could dream of farms on the moon and heroically finned rockets blasting off from alien landscapes. Others worried about Russian moon bases. Scientists debated whether robots or humans should explore space. Satellites and transistors were jazzy emblems of postwar technology, and we were about to unravel the secrets of the universe and tame the atom (if it did not kill us first).
Some of the most extravagant of these visions of the future came not from cheap paperbacks, but from corporations buffing their high-tech credentials and recruiting engineering talent in the heady days when zooming budgets for defense and NASA had created a gold rush in outer space. In the pages of magazines like Aviation Week, Missiles and Rockets and even Fortune, companies, some famous and some now obscure, were engaged in a sort of leapfrog of dreams. And so, for example, Republic Aviation of Farmingdale, N.Y. — “Designers and Builders of the Incomparable Thundercraft” — could be found bragging in Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine in 1959 about the lunar gardening experiments it was doing for a future Air Force base on the moon.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 04:42 AM | Permalink
Comments
Yes, I am concerned about things like no more SSTs flying between NY, London and Paris; an anemic space program with aging shuttles maybe going out of service - all technology based mid 20th century. we are slipping.
I think it all started going downhill with the dim-witted Reagan.
Anyways, I would send probes to Europa and Enceladus. Both prime candidates for extra-terrestrial life.
In fact, you heard it here first that I believe that we have already imaged extra-terrestrial life.
Look at this photograph of long frozen micro-organisms emerging from a glacier:
http://www.astrobiology.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=23215
and then look at a picture of europa here:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap090308.html
those are pictures of the same thing, the same kind of micro organism.
Even the same color!
Posted by: odysseus14 | Mar 9, 2010 4:07:27 PM
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