Flight of Fancy

 

Sometimes you can see a concept and know instinctively that its never going to fly. So it is with the rather beautiful Goodyear Aerospace Meteor Junior Rocket. Proposed in 1954 by one Darrell C Romick, this striking craft owes more to automotive styling than astronautics.

The rocket was designed with two boosters which would deliver the final third stage into orbit to service the METEOR space station, a vast project designed by Romick as a permanent base in space.

The elegant and super streamlined model did not make it further off the drawing board than a model version, now in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, but it is interesting to note the draft of the final orbital stage looks very like the illustrations from the early Project Sword strip in SOLO comic.