Jeff Knapp, reference and
instruction librarian,
Penn State Altoona
Just Browsing: Our Future in Space (from the Past . . .)
by Jeffrey KnappThe year was 1972, and America’s exploration of the moon, at least for the time being, was drawing to a close. I watched. And I watched. I stared at the mighty Saturn V rocket as it stood motionless on the launch pad, ready to launch Apollo 17 on the final manned mission to the moon. The countdown was held up for some technical reason and it was getting late. Then, the unthinkable happened: bedtime.
I was five.
Despite my protests, my parents shuffled me off to bed, promising to get me up when they were about to launch (They didn’t). Apollo 17 launched at around midnight, and I missed it. The disappointment wore off quickly, though, and throughout my childhood, I was always excited by anything having to do with the space program. Unfortunately, the 1970s were pretty lean on space excitement. NASA had to fight off a huge hangover after winning the race to the moon, and until the space shuttle was ready to fly, they had to make do with things like Skylab (yawn), Apollo-Soyuz (zzzz), and the Viking landers on Mars.
But something that always fascinates me are old images of what the future will look like. The sites I’m showcasing in this edition of Just Browsing will give you a glimpse into how people saw the future of space exploration back in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
On Flickr, an online photo management and sharing site, someone has uploaded a great collection of 3” x 4” glass slides that he found at a garage sale. These slides are believed to be from NASA from the late 1950s to early 60s, and show artist’s conceptions of moon exploration before even the Mercury program. Check them out here.
The NASA site itself has a collection of art from the 1970s depicting huge space colonies housing about 10,000 people (here). Unlike the previous site, which were artists’ conceptions of the near future, this site displays images of a much more distant future that certainly hasn’t occurred yet. They are still awe-inspiring to imagine—especially when you consider the difficulties we’ve encountered recently in building the relatively tiny International Space Station. I remember seeing images like these on the pages of Omni magazine and on Carl Sagan’s Cosmos back in the 1970s.
And finally, no discussion of online information sources for space exploration and space history would be complete without mention of Encyclopedia Astronautica. This site might seem a bit cluttered when you first look at it, it is jammed-packed with information and images.
What I love most about it, considering how much I like past images of the future, are the proposed space vehicles that never got made, especially the Soviet ones. The Soviet Union quietly bowed out of the Moon Race after Apollo 11’s historic landing in 1969, but only since the Soviet collapse has information been available on how the Soviets had tried to reach the moon. This site has complete chronologies of the race to the moon and space launches in general. If you are a fan of space exploration and have not seen Encyclopedia Astronautica before, you simply must!
Happy Browsing!