John Zukowsky

This book accompanied an exhibition relating to the role of designers and architects in both science fiction and real-world spaceflight and astronomy. The exhibition started at The Art Institute of Chicago and then moved to the Museum of Flight in Seattle during 2001.

It consists of a series of essays by various academics. Most of these are fairly useful, but in quite a few instances they betray little practical knowledge of their subjects, only theoretical knowledge. One academic, for example, refers to himself as a life-long enthusiast of science fiction and yet manages to refer to "Robert Heinlein's 'Foundation Trilogy' ' ...

What is quite remarkable is the vision of the immediate future in space which never materialised. One of the popular tropes of 'what if?' science fiction is "what if the Apollo programme hadn't been cancelled?'. Well, this book looks forward to a future that never happened because of 9/11. The diversion of funds away from NASA towards the 'War on Terror', and then the financial crisis of 2008, killed off a lot of public and private projects, many of which are illustrated in this book as, of course, it was prepared before the attacks in New York. In particular, the growth of space tourism is much more optimistically anticipated than happened in the real world. And no-one anticipated that the end of the Space Shuttle programme would be followed by stagnation in US developments in spaceflight - the Shuttle's successor is a return to full-stack single-use rockets (Elon Musk's reusable Falcons notwithstanding).

Still, this does not take away from this book, which is sumptuous. Highlight amongst the articles is a piece from Frederick Ordway III - the NASA advisor who worked on Kubrick's '2001' - on that film and the coverage by Collier's magazine of Wernher von Braun's plans in 1951.… (altro)