A BLAST FROM THE PAST

Growing up, I paid frequent visits to the local library, as well as a much smaller one in school and regularly combed the shelves for any interesting space books. The majority were dry, text heavy volumes, but now and again, I would come across a book which knew its intended audience and catered for it with interesting articles intended for a younger audience and a range of exciting images to catch the eye. Martin L Keen published 'Rockets, Missiles and Spacecraft' under the Odhams imprint, who were responsible for a lot of younger readers books in the sixties. 

The cover shows a painting by renowned artist Robert McCall, who was employed to visualise may NASA projects.

It fell in the period just prior to the Apollo Moon Landing era, when excitement and anticipation were high and featured some early prototype designs for the apollo program. At the time, I assumed they would be the designs of the vehicles which would land on the moon and very much like the space shuttle program some decades later, I was very disappointed with the actual craft!

The book shows a photograph of something which is clearly a model from one of the proposals submitted to NASA by the several engineering companies who applied for the contract, possibly Bell Aerospace.

Other interesting illustrations include the Dyna Soar glider, atop a modified Titan rocket launcher, with large stabilising fins and some excellent artwork relating to the Gemini programme. Besides good photo coverage, Keen also includes some illustrative work, with drawings and illustrations of various rockets and missiles. These vary in style and quality, but one in particular always made me quite curious. this was a drawing of an air to surface missile called the Army 'Rascal' and the drawing seemed to represent a childs toy aircraft, rather than a missile. the accompanying drawings are fairly accurate and recognisable, but the Rascal bears no relation to the actual missile, as seen below.

The Rascal was a large supersonic missile launched from a modified B52 Bomber. It was in use until 1958, when it was decomissioned.

At the time of publication, accurate information on the Apollo project was clearly being kept under wraps, as the Saturn launch vehicle for the mission is shown at a very early conceptual stage. It is also accompanied by the projected heavy lift vehicle Nova, which was intended to be many time larger and be used to transport cargo to the moon.

My favourite sections of all space books is always the future developments, or 'beyond the moon' chapters, which look ahead to possible interplanetary missions, or exotic fuel craft. This book is no exception and has designs for ion powered, nuclear fuelled craft. 

One thing which always intrigued me about this particular section was the inclusion of a series of probes designed to explore Mars, with a view to discovering life. A trio of similar designs are shown, each shaped like a rocket nose cone. The first one is Project Gulliver - named after Jonathan Swifts famous explorer, who in the book 'Gullivers Travels' famously predicted the presence of two moons orbiting Mars and came surprisingly close to guessing their orbital trajectory. The Gulliver probe was intended to land on the planets surface and shoot out tethered projectiles on to the surface, with cables coated in a sticky film. these would then be retracted, drawing in soil and dust samples for analysis.

Two similar probes, he Multivator and Wolf Trap, used similar devices to test for the presence of life. Unfortunately, none of the designs were ever approved and the Viking probes were eventually dispatched to Mars, but failed to identify any organic compounds.

All in all a great book and one of the rare occasions when i have bought two copies, as the first one I had was a little shelf worn, but the quality justified finding a second good copy for the shelf. having the older copy enabled me to scan the pages, too - rather than relying on photographing  a spread.