HA! Found ’em. Well, there’s the better part of a day’s theoretical productivity flushed down the obsession s-hole. I’d *swear* I’d shared these before, but I can’t find evidence of that. Either I imagined it or I did so elsewhere. It *may* have been in support of “Man Conquers Space,” many long years ago, an exercise as dead and buried as the dreams of manned missions to Neptune by 2000. Anyway…
Pages from a Convair report on Post-Nova launch vehicles, 1963. This was for a contract to NASA-Marshall, and explains what the future of space launches looked like from this golden age, before Viet Nam and especially the “Great Society” program spending brought NASA budget and its dreams of an actual future post-Apollo crashing down.
This particular report does not have the authors listed… but other related reports do. This has Krafft Ehricke all over it. It’s the sort of space optimism that he excelled at, and that a better world would have gotten.
Three models are examined… Conservative, Intermediate and Ambitious. Even the Conservative model has manned missions to Jupiter before 2000 (the thinking behind “2001” was not so far off… for the time), while the Ambitious model has long term Jovian bases by 1996 (followed by annual supply flights), manned missions to Titan bases by 1999 or so and manned flybys of Uranus and Neptune by the early/mid 1990s. A permanently manned Mars base by 1987 or so.
Instead we got… hmmm. What’d we get? Facebook? Twitter? Weirdos and vanity and decay?
Along the same lines, two charts shown by Ehricke a few years later, showing what the future of spaceflight held:
The likes of Ehricke had a much higher opinion of Mankind than history has borne out.
If this sort of thing has been interesting, why not subscribe to the or the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. ? Or just hit the tip jar?
Do it.
DO IT.
