The Young Scientist Book of Space Flight (1976)

The Young Scientist Book of Space Flight is a much loved book from my childhood and might go some way towards explaining why I find all of this sort of stuff interesting.  Published by Usborne in 1976, it was a mixture of space fact and speculation and contained any number of experiments and projects designed to entertain a generation deprived of anything more than 3 TV channels or home computers and the internet.  And yet interestingly I felt I was living in the future far more back then than I do now, which is probably thoughts for a different more political blog than this one.

Any how, what follows are some of the more entertaining illustrations which are still surprisingly sharp considering how much I wore them out with my eyes. 

 

I first mentioned this book a few weeks back in my post about Plymouth (1991) and how the customised space helmets in the TV pilot reminded me of images from a kids book, well this is it below.

And now the money shot, or at least half a money shot if such a thing can exist. At the end of the book is a two page spread where everything we've learned comes together in a panoramic view of the future.  Here's just the fist page, which contains most of the action.  I lost hours starring through this window.  Marvel at the future font, the certainty of the words, the jet pack, the moon buggy and the heraldic icons adorning those spacemen, living and working on the moon

That's so good its almost pornographic and that's why you only get to see half of it.


Steve