Larry's Vault: Space the Final Frontier (Kinda, Sorta)

We've decommissioned our fleet of Space Shuttles and now have to hitch rides on Russian Federation Soyuz ships to get off the planet. The Untied States seems to be effectively out of the space exploration business.

No moon bases. No mission to mars. 

Well, when I was a kid all of the above was possible and clearly on schedule to occur by around 1985 (at the very least by 2001).

Growing up, I watched Alan Shepard and John Glenn leave the planet Earth on grainy black & white TV. When I was about 9 years old, I wrote Nasa a letter  and got a mound of government reports on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs as a reply.

I had books on space exploration such as the How and Why Wonder Book of Rockets and Missiles.  

These books were always filled with top notch illustrations of the astronaut construction workers, space stations, space ports, moon bases and Martian colonies that I could expect to see as an adult.

We kinda, sorta got the future I was promised. We do have a space station—we're just missing the “space taxi” to get there.

In any case, by way of the past I bring you the future (or something like that).

Here's some great retro-futurist art.

Artwork by Robert Patterson, Jack Coggins,  Chesley Bonestell, John Polgreen, George Solonewitsch, Fred Freeman and Rolf Kelp.