(Source: British Interplanetary Society)

Speaker: Mat Irvine
Date: 22 February 2012, 7pm.

Location: BIS, 27/29 South Lambeth Road, Vauxhall, London, SW8 1SZ

It’s a somewhat sobering thought to realise that the Apollo Missions – magnificent achievements that they were – were really a dead-end. This is especially emphasised by the fact that the last mission, Apollo 17, was 1972, and that was it; human crews have not been back since. Personally I have to put the blame fair and square on President Kennedy as it was he who said in that speech of 1961, “We will put a Man on the Moon by the end of the decade…” At that point the Americans were still putting a lone man into low Earth orbit, and the ideas of Lunar travel were, if not in the far future, certainly in the medium – there were other priorities. But their President had given the American aerospace companies an ultimatum, so ways had to be found to achieve this goal ‘within the decade’. Consequently plans that were reasonably well established had to be put on long-term hold, if not abandoned all together, and Project Apollo was born.

But what if President Kennedy had not made that speech in 1961? Instead the ideas that were being proposed on the way “Space – As It Should Be” – had gone ahead? This talk looks at many of the plans that such scientists and engineers, such as Wernher von Braun and Willie Ley, plus visionary artists like Chesley Bonestell and Rolf Klep were proposing. If these had happened, “Space – As It Would Have Turned Out”, would almost certainly have been completely different.

This talk is based around one of Mat’s particular interests – the early spacecraft designs that were being proposed post-WWII. This also links in with his speciality in models of spacecraft, as many of these early von Braun and similar designs were made as model kits, as early as the mid-1950s.