adm
spaceship of the future (1961)
this illustration is from the april 21, 1961 issue of Life magazine. the issue mostly deals with yuri gagarin's successful mission to space and what it meant for america. to pick up everyone's spirits, life ran a bunch of illustrations to show what our spacecraft might look like if we ever got around to building any.
the caption (not visible) reads:
An Aerospace Cop to Help Police The Beat
"As vehicles of all kinds are spewed into space, the problem of policing the traffic will arise. Some of the objects will be harmless derelicts whose only crime is that they are blocking the road. Others, like thecluster of casings show drifting past earth (upper right) may turn out to be military platforms orbited by an enemy to release bombs on command. The U.S. must be prepared to look them all over from maneuverable interceptors, like this one, equipped with sensing devices to detect dangerous weapons and armed with rockets to destroy the offenders."
sounds exciting. it's interesting that nearly 50 years later, there is plenty of space debris, but we still don't even have more than two spacecraft in orbit at any one time, including the space station.
the other interesting thing to me is that in the context of the events of the day, there certainly seems to be a veiled threat against the soviets here, like "you might've gotten there first, but we are going to militarize space with these cool interceptors...so don't get any big ideas."
i scanned this image to add it to the new "In the Year 2000" group. life magazine was still large format back then, so the picture is larger than my scanner. sorry.
spaceship of the future (1961)
this illustration is from the april 21, 1961 issue of Life magazine. the issue mostly deals with yuri gagarin's successful mission to space and what it meant for america. to pick up everyone's spirits, life ran a bunch of illustrations to show what our spacecraft might look like if we ever got around to building any.
the caption (not visible) reads:
An Aerospace Cop to Help Police The Beat
"As vehicles of all kinds are spewed into space, the problem of policing the traffic will arise. Some of the objects will be harmless derelicts whose only crime is that they are blocking the road. Others, like thecluster of casings show drifting past earth (upper right) may turn out to be military platforms orbited by an enemy to release bombs on command. The U.S. must be prepared to look them all over from maneuverable interceptors, like this one, equipped with sensing devices to detect dangerous weapons and armed with rockets to destroy the offenders."
sounds exciting. it's interesting that nearly 50 years later, there is plenty of space debris, but we still don't even have more than two spacecraft in orbit at any one time, including the space station.
the other interesting thing to me is that in the context of the events of the day, there certainly seems to be a veiled threat against the soviets here, like "you might've gotten there first, but we are going to militarize space with these cool interceptors...so don't get any big ideas."
i scanned this image to add it to the new "In the Year 2000" group. life magazine was still large format back then, so the picture is larger than my scanner. sorry.