SHELF LIFE: Early Launches

 For the next browse amongst the library shelves, I thought i'd take a brief look at three early space books that I have come across, dating from the early days of the space race. Unlike most of my collection, these ones do not herald from the glory days of my childhood, but were picked up much later on.

'All About Satellites and Spaceships' is what looks like a school text book, with heavyweight stock pages and simple line drawn illustrations. On the whole, not very exciting. It has about five pages of monochrome photographs, but as it hails from 1958, there isn't a lot to show. One interesting plate shows the Meteor Junior rocket, which seems to be influenced by Werner Von Brauns early designs, with a nice swept wing configuration.

'Seven into Space' - an ex library book in itself, covers America's struggle to get the Mercury programme underway in the face of the Soviet space agencies vast leap forward. Again, as it is a late fifties book, the photographs are all ground based and show Cooper, Glenn and Shepherd et al preparing for their journeys ahead. Some fine shots of launch gantry and training regimes, but alas, no actual launch or mission photography.

The book does has a nice section at the back in a chapter called 'After Mercury' which speculates considerably on exotic propellants and futuristic spacecraft, such as the Convair Manned Lunar Reconnaisance Vehicle, taking advantage of the Strombecker model released the same year! 

https://fantastic-plastic.com/convair-manned-lunar-reconnaissance-vehicle-by-strombecker.html

 Arthur C. Clarke, renown for his science fiction stories, started out writing text books such as the 'Exploration of Space', a comprehensive and quite prescient view of space flight to the Moon and beyond. A youthful looking Clarke peers from the dustjacket and inside are several excellent illustrations of proposed lunar landing craft, based on Clarke's own designs.

The publishers also took advantage of contemporary media and use a still from George Pal's 1950 film 'Destination Moon', to illustrate space suits. Destination Moon was in itself based on Robert Heinlein's 'Rocketship Gallieo'