I was blown away by this cover art for Arthur C. Clarke's Prelude to Space from the 1950's.
Just look at that ship! Its basically a set of super wings!
Don't know the artist but that huge jet-tipped hyper wing totally reminds me of the wings of our fave Century 21 space plane, the Zero-X!
Check it out!
Below is Imai's plastic wing from their vintage OX Mars Explorer set.
Its a dead-ringer! What do you think?
Clarke's amazing lunar plane is called Prometheus and predates the Apollo programme by over a decade.
Prometheus is made up of two sections, Beta and Alpha, and flies to the moon and back in a certain way involving separation.
The novel, Clarke's first, written in 1947 and published 1951, concerns Dirk, a journalist for Interplanetary , who is sent to England and Australia because ...
'The world's first lunar spacecraft is about to launch. The ship, Prometheus, is built from two separate components -- one designed to travel from Earth's atmosphere to the Moon and back, and the other to carry the first component through Earth's atmosphere and into orbit.'
Wiki describes the Prometheus' separation manoeuvre thus:
'Beta is a nuclear-powered flying wing which carries Alpha into orbit .... Alpha separates from Beta'
[above is an extract from a fuller description here]
This could almost be a description of the Zero-X uncoupling from its wing units in space, which we can clearly see in the movie Thunderbirds Are Go
[courtesy of You Tube]!
Later editions of the book gave Prometheus a chromed finish
but I still prefer the early cover art with the mega wing!
What about you?
John Bunch is credited with the Prelude to Space cover on some websites found with Google searches.
ReplyDeleteThanks NCC. Yes, I've had a look. I like John's style.
DeleteI think the NEL chromed version of the artwork is by Chris Moore
ReplyDeleteThanks for that. NEL were a famous paperback brand back in the day.
DeleteThe Prometheus is an approach similar to that adopted by Virgin's abortive Cosmic Girl. The main wing (presumably Alpha) is an air breathing booster, which takes the rocket upper stage to the edge of space, where Beta reaches escape velocity by means of a standard rocket engine. Alpha may be a combination of standard jet engines and ramjet, which would only kick in after it reached the upper atmosphere. Alpha would then return for a runway landing like good old OX Lifting Body.
ReplyDeleteBill
That's pretty much it Brains!
Delete