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As the 1970's wore on and interest in the space programme waned and financial support for space travel was gradually withdrawn, it became apparent that the space shuttle concept that would eventually be produced was something much more sedate and straightforward - and to me resembling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

Token Gesture

Scouring the listings for vintage space memorabilia on eBay, recently turned up a very fine piece of ephemera - an old book token. In itself, it’s a nice piece, but the front is adorned with a neat lenticular card. Lenticulars or ‘Vari-Vue’ as they are sometimes known, are laminated photographs with tiny lenses graven into the plastic to give a 3d effect, depending on the angle of view. The process is explained quite simply on the back of this card too.

The lenticular image shows an astronaut standing on a crest of a hill, overlooking his Lunar Module and acolleague setting up experiments on the surface. Both appear to be plastic models. In the rear is a distant image of green Earth. The 3d effect is especially clear.

Inside the card is a nice 70’s illustration of a moon suit, with explanatory notes. On the other side is the token itself, with a value of ten shillings, which dates it nicely to the pre-decimal era.

The two other lenticulars I have found are postcard size, one with a LEM descending on a luxuriantly green moon surface - and you can see the strings! 

The other came in a heavy duty wooden frame, which protected it remarkably well and shows a large rocket and a team of astronauts exploring the surface.

 

I did wonder if the model used on the green moon postcard might be the small Revell Apollo LEM kit. As shown above, but the detailing is slightly heavier.

Just as I was finishing this post, I found another Toppan release postcard, entitled PK-57 Lunar Landing. 

Be a Rocketman

I came across this gorgeous booklet on an archival site recently, which appears to be a promotional brochure inviting college graduates to work with NASA. It uses first nations imagery as the background to its theme, with various motifs and symbols culled from tribal artworks from across the nation. Its an interesting choice of design, given the almost exclusively white male dominated industry, which was called to light recently with the publication of Margot Lee Shetterly's book 'Hidden Figures', which showcased the work of three afro-american women, who were pivotal in the early success of the American space race.

The booklet is estimated to have been released around 1962 and encourages college students to join the aerospace industry in an engineering or technology career. As is very much the case with material from the period, it depicts a very male dominated industry, with lots of clean shaven, serious looking technicians peering studiously at complex devices.

Looking past the period aesthetics, there are some gorgeous illustrations and imagery, including material straight from the drawing boards at NASA, as the early sixties were a period of massive optimism and excitement, with sights set not just on the Moon, but to reach Mars and the outer planets. As such, the illustrations include early concepts for electrical ion driven engined spaceships and the massive heavy lift vehicle NOVA.

The tantalising glimpses of exotic craft proposed to journey into space and create habitable environments for humans in orbit are far in excess of the actuality of the state of the embryonic space programme at the time, which at the point of publication, was just finding its feet with early Gemini missions and the lunar impact probe Ranger.

The science fiction look of some of the illustrations is definitely intended to project an impression of a fast moving, innovative industry and would probably have convinced many young men to join the administration. Given the marginalisation of first nation peoples, as well as segregation issues in the states at the time, it seems unlikely that the design choice of tribal imagery would have found any traction with its actual audiences?