SOCKS

An online magazine of Art, Architecture, Media, Culture, Sounds, Territories, Technology)

  • Media
  • Art
  • Architecture
  • Culture
  • Sounds
  • Territories
  • Visual Atlas

Across the Space Frontier, (1952)

July 22, 2012 by Fosco Lucarelli 4 Comments

A 50’s publication on the space age, before ‘real’ space age was even started.

Among the illustrations and cutaways of space stations, rockets and EVA, the book speculates about the possibility of using of a space station as a (Soviet) nuclear missile platform.

The black and white illustration is from Archigram 4, and guess what? They got the spaceships from Across the Space Frontier, (or, more probably from a comic book copy).

From the very rich Smallritual Flickr stream.


Related Posts

  • Space Replay, an Eerie Space Manipulating Device

    Space replay is a project designed by Francesco Tacchini, Julinka Ebhardt and Will Yates-Johnson of…

  • Mas Yendo: Machines for Living in The End of Times

    “What I speculate in my work is that new technologies will play an important part…

  • Arabic Machines: Early Schematics

    Water powered systems, pulleys and gearing mechanisms, images from an arabic manuscript, datable from the…

  • Ready for Ars Electronica

    We are off for a week, to see the Ars Electronica festival at Linz, Austria.…

  • dOCUMENTA 13: News From Nowhere, by Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho, [a Retrospective from the Future]

    News from Nowhere is probably the most ambitious art-project of Kassel's dOCUMENTA 13. Presented in…

Comments

  1. Klaus says

    July 31, 2012 at 5:51 pm

    Well spotted! The Space Station from “Across the Space Frontier” became sort of a default item in science fiction design during the 1950s and 60s (even after that). The image in Chalk’s collage was, indeed, clipped from a comic book published in 1953, just a year after Von Braun’s book. It’s actually the oldest the image in Space Probe!

  2. Berry Greathouse says

    February 13, 2013 at 6:57 am

    At the International Space Station ISS repairs are often needed on the exterior, the problem is it is a lot of work to send out a manned space walk to do this. Astronauts need oxygen and they have the problems of human error. Yet if we use robots, well they do not complain, unless programmed too. Robots in fact could spend months to fix something, astronauts five day space walk missions are about all we can muster right now and if we cannot get it done in time, imagine the cost for another launch. What about Fatigue factors, which take a toll on the organic components of the human body? Costs to send up a space crew to do repairs can be millions if not billions of dollars.,

    Have a look at all of the most current write-up on our blog site
    <http://www.foodsupplementdigest.com/turmeric-side-effects/

  3. Ed Ackman says

    May 6, 2013 at 1:53 am

    While the present seems so obvious when you’re here, much has always been unforeseen by futurists or proven to be totally wide of the mark.
    I read recently that a 1988 forecast of the next 30 years by smartest guys in the room didn’t even mention the mobile phone or any of its 2013 functions.
    So it is amazing that much of this book is right on the money, detailed 17 years before it happened – even if the design of the space station in this learned tome came from the pen of a comic book cartoon animator.

Trackbacks

  1. Картинки из несбывшегося будущего [ретробудущее] says:
    August 28, 2012 at 11:20 pm

    […] Картинки из несбывшегося будущего. Мне его, кстати, совсем не жалко. Оно красивое, но не очень интересное. […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Tumblr

Socks is a non-linear journey through distant territories of human imagination.

About | Visual Atlas | Topics

We are Mariabruna Fabrizi and Fosco Lucarelli from Microcities. Ask us anything

  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Tumblr


SOCKS is a project by Fosco Lucarelli and Mariabruna Fabrizi of MICROCITIES, Architecture Cityscape, Landscape.
Except where otherwise noted, the content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.
Whenever possible we try to attribute content (images, videos, and quotes) to their creators and original sources. Please feel free to write us if you notice misattributions or wish something to be removed.
SOCKS is powered by WordPress.