Sep 092009
Something I procured from eBay some years ago. In 1950 the Hayden Planetarium in New York began issuing “Interplanterary Tour Reservations,” listing as destinations the Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. A print campaign apparently brought ina vast number of respondants. The scan below is of a Reservation modified for Sweden, with a Swedish respondant (one Ake Hurtig of Malmo, Sweden… one wonders if Ake is still around and if he’s still waiting for his trip to the Moon).
I can’t help but think that in 1950, the Moon, Mars Jupiter and Saturn looked closer than they do in 2009. And this is sad. We seem to have given up on the future.
10 Responses to “Interplanetary Tour Reservation”
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Well Yogi Berra said it all a long time ago. But it is more than sad, it is dangerous.
Yep, our so called “leaders” have given up on it. Fighting imaginary “global warming” is more important.
You saw Obama’s speech to the little children; the great accomplishment of the previous generation was “revolutionizing the way we communicate with each other” with MySpace and Facebook. Well it’s a nice way to keep in track of people you might otherwise lose touch with, but you can’t really equate it with “overcoming a depression and world war, and putting men on the moon” (not to mention all the idiots whose main concern seems to be putting up as many pictures of themselves wasted at bars as humanly possible). And of course, everybody’s worried that a lot of the older generation of aerospace people are going to be retiring in the next 5-10 years, and there won’t be anyone to replace them with.
But yes, humanity does seem to be turning inward and giving up on itself, and it is very frightening, and dangerous, and sad. Who will carry the torch after we are gone?
These “reservations to other planets” were even mentioned in the Heinlein classic “Have Spacesuit, Will Travel”.
IIRC, Pee-Wee’s Daddy, Professor Reisfield, had visited the planetarium as a child and gotten a reservation to the Moon. When such trips became possible, he was contacted to see if he wanted to exercise his reservation. He was unable to go, having (in the interim) become quite the guru at Princeton, so Pee-Wee announced that SHE would take the trip. When her Mommy said, “No”, and her Daddy said “Hell, no!” — she went! 🙂 I think her line was, “I can be an amoral little wretch if I want to be”.
I never knew that the “reservations” mentioned in the story were real…nice to see that RAH wove some reality into that fiction. Thanks for posting this!
> even mentioned in the Heinlein classic “Have Spacesuit, Will Travel”.
Ah, the great era of the sci-fi “juveniles.” I grew up reading twenty-year-old copies of “Tom Swift,” and have since amassed a small collection of “juveniles,” mostly the “Tom Swift” and Heinlein books.
Go into a large modern bookstore, and look at the kids section. The selection of sci-fi “juveniles” is at best slim. But if you want wizards and vampires… hey, you’re in luck.
Now, I like Harry Potter as much as the next reasonable person; it’s damned entertaining and basically well written. But I’m sorry, such fiction does *not* give kids something to aspire to. Becoming an inventor? An astronaut? A scientist? An explorer? These are the sorts of things that kids in theory *can* grow up to become. But these sorts of things are no longer popular. Inward-turning fantasy navel-gazing has replaced looking towards the future.
Bah.
>Ah, the great era of the sci-fi “juveniles.”
RAH’s ‘Starman Jones’, and ‘Space Family Robinson’ for me, and the one, whose title I can’t remember, where they send out interstellar explorer ships,that travel nearly at lightspeed, and they use telepaths to communicate with the ships, and when they return, due to time dilation, the crews have hardly aged, compared to those left behind.
>such fiction does *not* give kids something to aspire to
Know what you mean. A freind of mine has college-age son, whose bloody good with with computers.
What does he use his computer for? AutoCAD?, Blender?
No, downloading anime and playing ‘world of warcraft’!
Already a lost cause……..
The RAH “lightspeed” story is “Time for the Stars”. Great idea — use telepathic twins as “communicators” for star ships, since the “speed of thought” is instantaneous, and avoids that pesky Einsteinian time-dilation effect (although he talked about “slippage” between the twins, where the Earth-side twin had to be heavily sedated, and the star-side twin had to be dangerously stimulated, just to be get their telepathic “voices” to run at roughly the same speed when the ships got to an appreciable percentage of lightspeed)… 🙂
(but just to show how spooky real that all could really be — when I read about the quantum “pairing” that scientists have demonstrated, where effects on one of the particles affects its copy in the same way, regardless of distance…I immediately thought of “Time for the Stars”. RAH must have been channeling the future).
Scott, I have all the Tom Swift Jr adventures in my library, and they are the most treasured tomes of my childhood. You’re right, though…such dreams between endpapers are dying out in favor of CGI-laden 30-minute commercials for the latest toy wonders.
Gimme Asimov, Heinlein, del Rey, Clarke, Longyear, etc. any day of the week… 🙂
There is no way Obama is going to push a major effort in space. He’s devoid of a national vision (except for ObamaCare). Without our national pride on the line, no major space efforts are going to be done. Hopefully China fits the bill in about 10 years. Or better yet… SpaceX, Bigelow, Virgin Galactic, and Blue Origin get the ball moving.
It is depressing to look back 40 years and see all the ideas about getting into space… and then see where we sit now. It’s God damn embarrassing as an American to remember a time when this nation traveled to the Moon on a semi-routine schedule (and had serious plans to explore and develop the Solar System)… and decades later… younger Americans don’t even know what we did and had planned.
>The RAH “lightspeed” story is “Time for the Stars”.
Thanks for that.
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