The Real Nuclear Ferries

Looking at the Brooke Bond cards really took me back to the good old days of the space race when space ephemera was everywhere. The cover and the last few cards of the tea card set featured modular, re-usable vehicles for travelling to the Moon and beyond. Commonly based on a cylindrical frame, even the moon base design followed the trend, the system was intended to be an interchangeable series of units which could be configured for different mission requirements. The Lunar Shuttle vehicle is very reminiscent of the SWORD Moonbase itself too.

The cover image on the album shows the main ship being assembled in orbit prior to launching on a manned Mars mission. What's most notable and distinctive about these and other similar images is the inclusion of the nuclear engine. This proposal was known as the NERVA project - (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application)  an appellation which also followed the custom for using the names of roman gods and deities. NERVA was a product of the Los Alamos labs and a jointly funded product which was actually highly successful until the funding was dropped and the project cancelled in 1973 over environmental and cost issues.

The idea of the Mars mission also appeared as part of a pull out poster in Countdown comic during June 1971 - contemporary with the Brooke Bond cards - which showed a specualtive space programme up to 1988! The poster shows the Lunar Shuttle and the Nuclear Shuttle as well as the Space Tug, Skylab (remember that ?) and what would eventually become the Voyager and other deep space probes.

Even at this tender age I was a complete obsessive geek and a bit of a magpie and when I went into a hardware store with my dad, I was delighted to spot a combination padlock that looked exactly like one of the modules on the poster! In fact, I havent changed at all and am considering looking on ebay for another one now!

However, the central concept of the Nuclear Shuttle has been around for some time prior to the seventies as the NASA archives contain many images from the late fifties and early sixties of the projected use of this modular system, using a shuttle launched series of parts. The main ship would be assembled in orbit using tugs and a nuclear based cargo shuttle would move cargo back and to from a lunar base. The final push to Mars would use three NERVA engines mounted together for maximum acceleration and thrust.