As B Smith said, in the 1960s there were snap-together rockets in Kellogg’s breakfast cereal boxes, including reasonably detailed models of the actual Apollo spacecraft, some of the more speculative NASA designs — even, as this close-up photo shows, vehicles from Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.

The real imagined future of US and Soviet space exploration blurred with the imaginary imagined future of Gerry Anderson to create, in my mind at least, a gloriously unfolding set of possibilities.

My favourite breakfast cereal toy of all was the Kellogg’s Molab, pictured above — although I’m pretty sure mine was blue. Apparently it’s loosely based on NASA concepts for a manned MObile LABoratory for cruising the Lunar surface, much like this book cover illustration. General Motors even built a mock-up. However once the Moon Landings had happened, the follow-up programmes to Apollo were killed off.

I kept losing my Molab’s wheels. Probably because I didn’t glue in the axle pins. But that didn’t matter. I re-imagined it as a spacecraft. The wheel mounts became fold-down exit ramps for rapid troop deployment.

But my favourite space-related TV series from that era was Fireball XL5. May I recommend the opening and closing titles? Or perhaps this version by Bob Downe.

[Photo: Kellogg's Molab cereal packet premium image thanks to Wotan of the Moonbase Central blog. If you grew up during the Space Age, you'll lose yourself there for hours.]

The 1960s were the Space Age. And since I was a bright male child of that decade, my thoughts were dominated by the events, images and themes of space exploration.

It doesn’t look much now, but this photo was the very pinnacle of all that. Or perhaps the apogee. Neil Armstrong stepping onto the surface of the Moon. One small step etc, taken from the original TV footage.

I was mesmerised — even though half the time my nine-year-old self couldn’t figure out what was going on. I’d been following the story as it unfolded in the newspapers, reading every word and memorising every diagram. It was front page news every day. But the TV images were just crap.

Of course the reason they were crap was the circuitous journey they took from the Apollo mission’s slow-scan TV cameras. The signal was compressed from arsehole to breakfast time and bounced from the Moon to the Parkes Radiothermal Telescope in rural New South Wales, then somehow to NASA Mission Control in Houston where the audio was mixed in, then back to Australia to the TV stations, and finally out through the normal broadcast chain.

It’s a miracle they arrived at all, as the film The Dish portrayed — along with its historical inaccuracies.

But historians and popular culture tell us that the world stopped to watch these blurry images, and we all remember where we were. And it’s true.

Scheduled to happen in prime TV viewing hours in the US, that first step was broadcast early afternoon Australian time. We got a day off school to watch it. Myponga Primary School only had one television, wheeled on its trolley from classroom to classroom as required. That wasn’t going to work for the whole school.

So my family watched the moonwalk at the home our of friends the Lorenzetti family. They had a better TV, ‘cos they were richer than us. I remember sitting on the carpeted floor in front of a TV in a wooden cabinet. I remember being frustrated because it was all supposed to be so important to watch, and I wanted it to be exciting, but it started off as a high-contrast blur and everything happened so slowly.

The Apollo 11 mission was, as I say, the apogee of the Space Age. But space — or should I say Space, capitalised — dominated my childhood in so many other ways.

I kinda knew I has a “strong interest” in space, but the recent comment by schoolmate Michael Mignanelli really hit me.

One thing that amazed [us] was the fascination you had for space ships. On the bus and at school, you were always drawing space ships, they were drawn very neat and also to scale, for some one your age at the time, it was amazing. We were convinced that later in life you would probably finish up in America working on some space mission.

He’s right. I was fascinated. Perhaps even obsessed? What do you make of all this?

• I could identify by sight all of the manned space vehicles, US and Soviet. I could talk you through their mission profiles. I could explain escape towers and transfer orbits and ablative heat shielding. And much more. By the time I was eight years old. Well, not the mathematics of the transfer orbits.
• I named the farm’s cats after spacecraft. My favourite cats were named after Soviet space vehicles because they simply looked so much cooler. I seem to recall that I got to name the cats because my mother hates the critters and my father couldn’t give a shit.
• An old film projection booth on wheels became my imaginary spacecraft, as explained previously.
• An antique steam locomotive in the Victor Harbor playground was also re-imagined as a spacecraft, much to the annoyance of the other kids playing there. Until I realised that the “control room” was in the middle rather than at the front, so it obviously worked better as a submarine. Those other kids were all just stupid and unimaginative. And I told them so.

Back when I was a kid, Space was exciting. Today it’s just a routine place you stash satellites and, as I’ve written before, somehow NASA has made it boring.

This morning I watched the Space Shuttle Endeavor [sic] rocket into orbit on NASA TV. Exciting. But now I see this new photograph (above) of a planet found orbiting Fomalhaut, and realise we’re still only taking the tiniest of baby-steps into the universe.

I’m a child of the Space Age. When I was born, no-one had been outside the earth’s atmosphere. I was too young to be aware of the flights of Yuri Gararin or Alan Shepherd. But when Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong walked upon the Moon we got the day off school to watch the grainy video imagery — our rural school didn’t have enough TVs for everyone to see.

Today I watched quietly as Endeavor became a tiny blue dot in the empty black sky — oh so quickly! And yet… And yet in the full-sized Hubble Space Telescope imagery the newly-photographed planet Fomalhaut b is also just a faint dot.

25 light-years away.

Endeavour would take more than 900,000 years to get there at its low Earth orbit speed of 8 kilometres a second.

Tiny. Baby. Steps.

Have I been too harsh on NASA? Last week the Cassini spacecraft zoomed past Saturn’s moon Enceladus and took these magnificent pictures. Hat-tip to the Bad Astronomy Blog.

Clarke is best-known, of course, for his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on the 1966 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even today it’s visually stunning, a grand expression of 1960s technological confidence. Even today, the ending still makes no sense whatsoever, with or without LSD.

Everyone remembers that the computer HAL 9000 went mad and killed the crew. The real lesson is that HAL went mad because his masters had told him to lie, to cover up the mission’s true purpose. This Cold War-era fable about how paranoia corrupts the mind remains completely relevant in this age of The Continual War on Terror.

What Clarke should really be remembered for, however — and what could have made him a multi-billionaire — is suggesting the use of geostationary satellites for international telecommunications.

Clarke’s 1945 paper “Extra-Terrestrial Relays — Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?” sketched out the idea so thoroughly that it counts as “prior art” and no-one’s been able to gain patents ever since.

Apart from 33 novels, 13 short-story collections, TV programs and countless non-fiction works, Clarke was a regular letter-writer to New Scientist magazine. Sometimes he wrote about the ethics and politics of science and technology, but more often than not it was to point out that some newly-patented idea had already been described in one of his novels decades before. Not to boast, just to chuckle.

Sir Arthur is dead. The Space Age is dead.

At least the First Space Age is dead. The 1960s imperative “to boldly go” as imagined by visionaries like Clarke has congealed into a bloated, bureaucratic NASA which has, in the US at least, drained all the excitement from spaceflight.

Long live Space Age 2.0, funded not by governments asserting their fitness to rule the world, but by entrepreneurs like Sir Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic. Space will never be the same.

[A slightly different version of this story was published in Crikey today.]

Three quick movies for you to watch on a lazy Sunday… things which I’ve been sent over the last week.

1. The 15-minute promotional film A Ballad for the Fair (pictured) tours the 1964 New York World’s Fair, with an emphasis on communications technology since it was produced by Bell System. Marvel at the video-phone! Warning: there is folk music. Hat-tip to Paleo-Future.
2. A creepy community service announcement about violence against women starring Australia’s celebrity criminal Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read. Chopper even has his own website. Hat-tip to Rhys McDonald via Five Thumbs Down. Check the latter for an amusing AFL players’ social guide.
3. The US shoots down a spy satellite. Thanks, Richard. I won’t bother discussing the military-strategy and international-politics angles of that one, there’s plenty elsewhere.

Key points:

• Nominations close 25 February. There’s a nomination form, and you’ll have to include an explanation of “why you want to participate as a delegate in the Australia 2020 Summit in 100 words or less.” A bit like a TV Week competition.
• You can nominate for up to three subject areas.
• If you don’t get selected, you can still make a submission. Submissions close 9 April.

And that’s about it, apart from a photo of Chairman Rudd. Not even an RSS feed.

Nobody gets a place in history for coming second. In October 2007 we celebrated 50 Years of The Space Age, commemorating the launch of Sputnik 1. I wrote about it, here and for Crikey (different pieces). I masturbated.

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of America’s first successful satellite launch — and I only just realised it now.

The Bad Astronomy Blog has some of the story, and of course Wikipedia reveals all.

Apparently the US could’ve gotten something into orbit before the Commies, but they wanted to use an American rocket. The Juno 1 launch vehicle, based on German technology, was originally unsuited politically. Alas, the all-American Vanguard wasn’t up for it.

If you can point to one thing that made me the geek I am today, it’s this series of books.

Each one was just 48 pages long, and the illustrations were usually paintings — pretty corny by today’s standards. But they really did create a sense of wonder for the Science and Technology which was unfolding in The Space Age. The first one was issued in 1960 and they ran well into the 1970s.

Looking through the lists put together by collectors intabits and Joe Roberts, I reckon I had at least 23 of the titles.

My favourites were The How & Why Wonder Book of Planets and Interplanetary Travel (insanely optimistic, in hindsight), Rockets and Missiles, Atomic Energy (no nuclear waste here, just atomic trains!) and The How & Why Wonder Book of Robots and Electronic Brains — man, there’s a whole essay in that last title alone, eh?

I bet my mother still has them stashed away in a cupboard somewhere.

OK, it’s not really a spaceliner, ‘cos it won’t be making any leisurely cruises to Mars or even the Moon. It just goes up and then comes down again. But it looks so goddam sexy.

Virgin Galactic has presented the world with this sexy design for SpaceShipTwo, which will start taking paying passengers on a sub-orbital trip in 2010, eight people at a time.

Sir Richard Branson reckons it’s important that the project is a genuine commercial success.

If we do [this], I believe we’ll unlock a wall of private sector money into both space launch systems and space technology.

This could rival the scale of investment in the mobile phone and internet technologies after they were unlocked from their military origins and thrown open to the private sector.

Virgin Galactic reckons the carrier vehicle — White Knight Two — is very nearly finished and will start flight tests later this year. SpaceShipTwo is about 60% complete.

They’ll look rather spiffy parked outside the Foster+Partners spaceport they showed us in October.

Spaceport America, the world’s first commercial spaceport, is being built in New Mexico for Virgin Galactic. Who else would you choose to design it other than Foster+Partners — follow the link for more piccies. Thanks to Wired for the pointer.

Given all the announcements of a spaceport in Australia, a shame it’s not somewhere like Cairns. Or Uluru.

Bonus space link: Arthur C Clarke on the 50th anniversary of Sputnik.

On 4 October 1957, it was a beach ball with a beeper inside. A month later, 3 November, it was a differently-shaped Russian metal thing with a dog inside.

“Jay-zus,” thought America, collectively. “Those goddam Commies have gotten into space! And they’ve got The Bomb.” They called it “the Sputnik Crisis” and the US created ARPA (which eventually developed the Internet) and New Math (which created a huge market in hula hoops for primary schools).

The first human in space was in 1961. And only eight years later people were walking on the moon.

But now, in 2007, it’s been 35 years since anyone’s been to the moon. Indeed, it’s been 35 years since anyone’s been more than 480km from Earth.

I could write an essay on the death of the Space Age — but amateur astronomer Stuart Atkinson has already done it. His impassioned plea for space makes the point that it’ll be the commercial mavericks who create our future in space, not the slow-moving international “cooperation” which created the lame ISS — and certainly not boring old farts like NASA.

What the hell were we thinking? No, seriously, what the hell were we thinking? We had a beach-head in space; we’d stepped off the Earth and started to become a multi-planet species, a species capable of surviving an asteroid impact, or a nuclear war, or population crises. We’d just started to Think Big, to dare to dream, to look beyond our own close horizon to the world beyond, and we turned away from it all. We ran back from the Moon with our tail between our legs, whimpering, cowering from the darkness, frightened by its immensity.

Watching shuddery footage of Neil Armstrong descending Eagle’s ladder, and of Dave Scott standing wide-eyed with wonder on the edge of Hadley Rille, the historians of the future, sitting around their holographic displays in the grand museums and universities of the worlds circling 51 Pegasi and other exotic star systems will shake their heads in disbelief and pity and contempt at what we did after Apollo. They’ll think us timid at best, cowards at worst, for how we fled from the future. They’ll debate endlessly the reasons why, instead of keeping going, instead of settling the Moon, reaching out for Mars and spreading across the solar system as is our destiny we came home, shut the door, turned off all the lights and went to bed, pulling the covers over our heads so we wouldn’t have to see the Moon and planets and stars shining seductively through the window.

God, if we’d just kept going… don’t you ever wonder what it would be like now? What kind of world we would be living in?

…

It makes me want to scream at the sky “I’m sorry! We were stupid! Forgive us!” and hope my words reach the citizens of the future.

It’s worth reading the whole thing.

I agree with Stuart’s point. Indeed, I’ve written before about the glory of Mars and why the US space program is shite. But where is that sense of adventure?

• June 1989: The Cape York Space Agency announces that launches from its Temple Bay facility will commence in 1992.
• Sept 1997: International Resources Corp announces it’ll break ground on its spaceport near Weipa in October.
• June 2001: Science Minister Nick Minchin announces a $52M government contribution to a spaceport on Christmas Island to target the Asian satellite launch market. The first launch is expected in 2003.

And those three are just a taste! When will this spaceport actually happen?

50 years old tomorrow, the Space Age began with the launch of Sputnik 1. Australia’s current role in space is a set of commemorative postage stamps. Wow.

No, this isn’t something from Thunderbirds, but a new radio studio complex in Krakow, Poland. Thanks Richard.