EXTRA VEHICULAR ACTIVITY

At the height of the space race era, in the period following the first moon landing, space books were available in abundance for children eager to learn the latest developments in this exciting field. Besides annuals, encyclopaedias, text books and comics, there were always other items to keep a young mind busy. Activity books of various kinds were often small, fairly cheap items intended to while away an afternoon or an evening with colouring, drawing or; thanks to the Letraset Company - applying transfers.

 Letraset were one of the premier names in dry transfer lettering and decals, primarily used in the design industry, but they also produced a huge range of transfers for the children's market in a large series of different products. The massively comprehensive site 'Action Transfers' details the history and scope of these products and shows examples of almost all the products produced.

I was a huge fan of Action Transfers and given their relative low price, would regularly collect the many space themed products that appeared. Some of the sets were a simple card background and a sheet of transfers, whilst others, such as the Patterson Blick Outer Space book, were small booklets, with a base for the transfers and a few pages of additional information about each theme.

Always well illustrated and very informative, the small booklets covered recent space activities, a brief history of space travel and my favourite part - a look towards future exploration.

The transfers for each set were usually a collection of rockets, satellites and astronauts in various poses and configurations, that could be applied in whatever location the owner desired. Some of the illustrations were based on historical photographs or drawings and others were copied from existing imagery that had appeared elsewhere.

A cheaper alternative to the transfer range were self adhesive sticker books, which included a sheet or two of peel off stickers and a background on which to apply them. This booklet has large areas of the background already designated for the user to apply the stickers.

This example was found on ebay with the stickers already in place, some of which have been applied in haste and are a little out of place, revealing the green spaces beneath the stickers, which match the shape of the adhesive section.

The Action Stickers book is probably one of the best example of plagiarism or recycling of existing imagery, as it clearly includes several almost direct lifts from well known artwork by Robert McCall and Ed Valigursky, including the Nuclear Ferry and a pair of large delta winged space vehicles.

One of the lesser illustrations shows part of a Mars mission proposal and the small rocketship used in the project.

The Dennis Knight booklet is clearly inspired by the imagery on the contemporary issue Brooke Bond Tea card set, 'Race Into Space' - with the spaceship being assembled in orbit from the back, appearing inside the booklet and the cover image bearing a more than passing resemblance.

The recycling and re-use of existing imagery and designs extended beyond the production of books and was especially noticeable in the Hong Kong toy industry, where regulation was less rigorously enforced and many conceptual designs for spaceships appeared in toy form. A very prominent example being Robert McCall's illustration of the Nuclear Ferry concept vehicle, which found its way into the Tri-ang Spacex and Project SWORD toy lines,

McCall's art was further used as the basis of the box art for the SWORD toy and many decades later, when the artist was shown the item and the box artwork, he was both surprised and delighted that his work had been made into a toy. 

Personally, I have always found it very satisfying and rewarding to discover both a physical manifestation of an illustration in one of my favourite books, or the origin of a particular model or toy in a vintage publication.

Shuttle Diplomacy

From an early age, I have always been fascinated by space travel. First by rockets and the moon landing experience and then, as the space race seemed on the verge of major expansion, by re-useable space vehicles. Toys and models, books and comic strips proliferated with all kinds of spacecraft designs and anything seemed possible.

 The Triang Spacex toy series and the Gerry Anderson's inspired Project SWORD toys, all had their share of fabulous spaceships and I waited in anticipation for these dreams to become reality.

Every space book, collectors card set or comic strip I read had its own interpretation of these next generation vehicles and the designs were varied and fantastic, but all shared a common aesthetic - a dynamic, sleek shape, capable of both space and atmospheric flight.

The various Gerry Anderson puppet and live action shows such as Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and UFO seemed to suggest that the future of spaceflight would be grand, unusual and dramatic, with huge modular craft, with multiple sections and detachable airframes zooming into space to perform daring missions, before landing majestically at sprawling spaceports.

Some of my favourite designs were the 'piggy-back' style of craft, with a booster vehicle lifting a separate orbiter into space.

The sleek triangular craft shown in the futuristic sections of the space travel books I regularly devoured looked just like the toys I was playing with and like the craft I was watching on TV.

As the sixties rolled into the seventies, developments were being reported of the real world designs being tested for the space shuttle programme, as it came to be known and comics such as TV21 and Countdown, regularly showed conceptual art or photographs of test aircraft, being developed by NASA to fulfill the purpose.

The design proposals by the major engineering companies of the time were lavish and exotic, with multiple hulled vehicles, or variable geometry fuselages and wings.

Everything looked exciting and sat neatly in my personal vision of futuristic spaceflight, but despite all the fabulous concepts being shown, the reality seemed to be a little different.

As time went on, the idea of a multi stage, separately piloted series of craft, seemed to be falling out of favour to be replaced with a more straightforward spaceplane using additional boosters.

As the 1970's wore on and interest in the space programme waned and financial support for space travel was gradually withdrawn, it became apparent that the space shuttle concept that would eventually be produced was something much more sedate and straightforward - and to me resembling little more than a large airliner.

Eventually, the design was finalised and the Space Shuttle Columbia made its first flight in 1981, to less acclaim and spectacle than the Apollo missions, decades earlier, even though it marked a huge leap forward in space technology.

Over the next few years, the success of the shuttle made local space travel almost commonplace and pedestrian, and even though the Russian attempts at developing a space shuttle had showed promise with the early MAK lifting body test vehicle, which was spotted being recovered from the sea; what ultimately emerged as the development progressed was an almost identical clone of the US craft, in the form of the Buran Shuttle. 

Although the soviets managed to prepare two functional shuttles and a massive supporting base at Baikonour, the project never came to fruition and the shuttle made a single uncrewed orbital flight in 1988. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the ensuing disruption meant that the two orbiters were left to fall into disrepair and the project was abandoned.

The US Space Shuttle programme was ultimately suspended and retired in 2011, following the completion of the orbiting International Space Station and  two tragic very high profile disasters. Developments in re-useable space craft by independent innovators meant that the technology was rapidly becoming obsolete and a new vision for the future was gradually unfolding. Despite the apparent optimism of the field and major developments in re-useable spacecraft, the heady days of swooping spaceplanes and majestic delta winged craft landing on extensive runways may now however be restricted to the tv shows and book covers of yesterday.