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As the 1970's wore on and interest in the space programme waned and financial support for space travel was gradually withdrawn, it became apparent that the space shuttle concept that would eventually be produced was something much more sedate and straightforward - and to me resembling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