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But Kubrick wasn't the only one
operating under a heavy dose of optimism. Look at this 1969
proposal for a lunar outpost put forward months before the Apollo 11
landing:
Frontiersmen of the Space Age
Engineers and technicians
colonize the Moon. Drawing on the most advanced thinking of experts,
artist Davis Meltzer portrays a lunar outpost that might be possible
in a generation. A survey team drills core samples and maps the
surface as an attendant monitors the oxygen supply. Aluminum
habitation modules lie almost buried for protection against
micrometeorites and temperatures that fluctuate 500° F between noon
and night. In a laboratory module, foreground, biologists observe
animals and experiment with raising vegetables in fertilized water.
A multi-level main module encloses dressing rooms for entering and
leaving, medical dispensary, dormitory, kitchen, and dining and
recreation areas. Pressurized tunnels lead to a smelter, where lunar
rock quarried on the surface is processed for the water chemically
locked within it. The water not only fills the station’s swimming
pool, but also yields oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for fuel for
a flying vehicle, far left. A fence-like radio telescope probes deep
space, and an optical scope in a small observatory studies the
heavens, undimmed by the Earth’s atmosphere. Beside a hanger pit, a
commuter rocket poises for return to the blue planet Earth.
Never mind that the cost and
engineering challenges of building an installation like this on the
lunar surface by a gang of men in spacesuits would have made Isambard
Kingdom Brunel blanch; man hadn't even set foot on the Moon and they
were already talking about building something like this "in a
generation"!
Show that sort of confidence
today and they'd suspect you were off your medication again. |
