While the superpowers were busy spending billions on a Space Race that would ultimately lead to a series of blurry television pictures, there was another, far more real, Space Age unfolding. In my head.

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.

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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.

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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.

Bugger. The Space Age ended today. Sir Arthur C Clarke, the grand master of science fiction, is dead at age 90. According to the BBC he died in Sri Lanka, his adopted home since 1956, from a cardio-respiratory attack.

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.]

The Space Shuttle really is a pile of crap, isn’t it. A book I had back in the 1970s enthused that there’d be a flight every week. The Shuttle would be regular trucking service to orbit. Reality: The first Shuttle flight for 2007 was only the other day, and I hardly need to mention the disasters. Still, offer me a ticket and I’ll fly tomorrow. Though part of me suspects the sturdy Soyuz would be safer.

Thanks for joining us. In the centre of the screen, wearing the white spacesuit — sorry, white Extra-Vehicular Mobility Unit — is Heidi Piper. This is her first Extra-Vehicular Activity in her brand new Extra-Vehicular Mobility Unit. Heidi’s current task is “remove aft solar array blanket box restraints”.

Judging by the loud clanging noises, followed by something falling off, Heidi’s task involves bashing something until it falls off.

No-one else seems bothered. I assume it’s OK to bash your space station until bits fall off.

You can’t quite see him, but up on the left is Joe Tanner. This is his sixth Extra-Vehicular Activity — oh, “spacewalk”, dammit! — so he gets to “mate the T5 to the J5″ on the P4 truss segment.

That’s is, Joe plugs in a data cable.

Joe plugs in several data cables, actually, along with six power cables. They’re all part of connecting the poetically-named “upper utility tray”. And each time it goes a little like this.

Joe: I am about to mate the T5 to the J5.

NASA Voice 1: Roger that, the T5 to the J5.

[Time passes.]

Joe: OK, I am mating the T5 to the J5.

NASA Voice 1: Copy that.

[Time passes.]

Joe: OK, I have mated the T5 to the J5.

NASA Voice 1: Roger, T5 to J5.

Joe: T5 to J5, copy that. T5 to J5.

NASA Voice 2: We copy that, Atlantis. T5 to J5.

Jewish Grandmother: Copy that, T5 to J5.

Choir and Archangels: Copy that, T5 to J5.

And then, in the background, you can just hear a faint sound. Thirty identical NASA-issue ball-point pens initial thirty identical NASA-issue checklists headed “International Space Station P4 Truss Assembly Upper Utility Tray, Part 16B: T5 to J5 Mating Procedure”. A slight grunt, and everybody turns the page.

Joe Tanner, as I say, plugs in several data cables on this EVA, along with six power cables. It’s pretty rivetting stuff.

Meanwhile, Heidi has moved on. Having deftly completed “remove aft solar array blanket box restraints”, she’s faced with her equally daunting second task: “remove forward solar array blanket box restraints”. The announcer reassures us that this is an identical procedure to her first task. And he’s right! More loud banging!

Joe moves on to the next cable, and that’s Part A done. Next, Part B. Yes, more cables to be plugged in.

Is this really what happened to “Space: The Final Frontier”? Some kind of auditor-led DIY Ikea On Mogadon?

Back in the days of Apollo 11, we all got a day off school to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon (Luna). “One small step for mumble mumble,” he said — accounts differ as to the exact wording. And then a silvery blur moved down towards the right-hand side of the screen. We took this to indicate that a man called Armstrong had walked upon the Moon.

Hell, we didn’t care about the poor quality! It’d been in the papers all week. We’d followed every moment in breathless anticipation. It’s the goddam Moon, for Christ’s sake! The Moon! We come in peace for all mankind!

But here in 2006, Heidi and Joe are an hour and a half ahead of schedule.

Huh? Ahead of schedule? You mean you’d planned for this to be slower? I should have been thrilled at Heidi “repositioning her portable foot restraint so that she has good access to her next task”, because this is the breathtaking pace of space exploration?

Screw this, I’m going to watch The Bill.