The Stars My Destination

Every good space mission needs spaceships and every spaceman needs a base to fly them from. Historically, we havent managed to make a permanent base on the Moon, but we have had a spacestation or two. When I was younger, I always imagined that space stations would be 2001-like Space Wheels just as Von Braun proposed in his imaginings at NASA, but as usual my expectations fell a little short when all we got at the time was Skylab - a retrofitted piece of space junk who's only exciting moment came when it fell back to Earth trailing green sparks.

Every space book i'd read suggested that space stations would be vast wheels or complex cylindrical arrangements being visited by shuttles and tugs. The current International Space Station looks like a vertiginous mass of upscaled Meccano - forever poised to suddenly come apart in a shower of bolts and mass produced pieces.

Among my favourite designs were always the Space Station from the Kellogs Space Age premiums, a design borrowed from McDonnel Douglas or Northrop  a solid looking construction that would have fitted neatly into the SWORD or Spacex fleets.

 Robert McCall always managed to fire my imagination with his stations and designs, all his paintings were always busy hives of activity with astronauts jetting about and rockets and space vehicles soaring through the heavens.

A hot contender for a SWORD space station for me is the model displayed at General Motors Futurama II expo in the sixties, a multi-tiered construction with a very Andersonesque feel to it. I could well imagine a toy version of this, complete with flashing lights and opening hatches, waiting to refuel the Booster Rocket before it blasts off to Mars Base.

As far as i'm aware, there isn't any mention of a space station in SWORD fiction either. Perhaps a space-borne toy was considered to have limited playability, its hard to 'swoosh' a space station around a room the way you can with a rocket!