SPACE CADETS

Yet another foray into the world of sweet and cigarette card collecting revealed an older set of cards from Cadet Sweets, who are interesting advertised on the back of the card as being based on the famous Slough Industrial estate which was home to Century 21 in the sixties. These cards are a reproduction set from originals produced in 1957.

 The majority of the set covers the usual fare, with the origins of rocketry and early attempts at powered flight, before moving on to early rockets and missiles. As the set is effectively prior to the first manned space mission, the space exploration theme which follows is exclusively speculative, taking its cues from the work of Werner Von Braun and Arthur c. Clarke. 

Many of the manned program images owe their inspiration from the March 1952 issue of Colliers magazine, which featured an expansive article by Von Braun and Willy Ley, entitled 'We Will conquer Space Soon' and showed the classic Braun designs for space wheel and multi stage rockets.

Interestingly, the actual proposed landing vehicles for the Moon and Mars are more akin to the design showed in Arthur C. Clarke's seminal publication 'The Exploration of Space' from 1951, in which he proposed a simple cylindrical moon lander, as opposed to Von Braun's vast machines composed of a skeletal framework surrounding fuel tanks and crew capsules.

Among the more futuristic example cards are a pair showing a commercial airliner, with a forward swept delta wing configuration. Whilst Thunderbird 2 is probably the most memorable example of the swept wing in science fiction designs and the concept may appear to be very contemporary, the concept was first discussed as far back as 1934 and was considered my the Soviet and nazi military in 1944.

Ju 287 Bomber

The Junkers Ju287 was a jet engined swept wing bomber and the earlier Belyayev DB-LK was a proposed flying wing design for the russian airforce.

Belyayev DB-LK

The Eagle comic was an early exponent of space travel in the fifties and sixties, with the Dan Dare strip, and often featured cutaway features of various aircraft and spaceships, by the artist Lesley Ashwell Wood, who also later published his work in the excellent 'Inside Information' series of childrens books. One of his illustrations for Eagle shows a large cylindrical ship reminiscent of the Cadet vehicles.