Retro-Future: To The Stars!

This is the start of a new series, collection of the most inspiring & hard-to-find retro-futuristic graphics. We will try to stay away from the well-known American pulp & book cover illustrations and instead will focus on the artwork from rather unlikely sources: Soviet & Eastern Bloc "popular tech & science" magazines, German, Italian, British fantastic illustrations and promotional literature - all from the Golden Age of Retro-Future (from 1930s to 1970s)











Part 1. Space never looked better... and perhaps never will

Retro-futuristic art, in a way, is a double-fantasy: imaginary future wrapped in imaginary past. Which makes this style doubly interesting, if not doubly obsolete... In this part we will showcase rarely seen art, done in 1930s to 1970s, mostly from "Teknika Molodezhi" (TM), Yuny Tekhnik, DetGiz (Russia) and German retro-future sites

One Day in Space

NASA publishes spectacular images of the recent mission

In our previous post you saw the shuttle's pre-flight activities and launch preparation. Today, with new NASA imagery in (not copyrighted), plus a few photos from a Russian source, you can get a closer look at science and maintenance work in orbit, including several fascinating spacewalks.

STS-117 Atlantis mission's rendezvous with Expedition 15 of the International Space Station.









STS-117 noticed a gap in the thermal blanket, which would be repaired during a spacewalk
















Mission's first spacewalk (connecting station's newly installed truss)




Construction of the International Space Station continues - activating new truss segments.




New solar array configuration. Future missions will add more arrays to each side and several science modules.

Project "Orion": Powered by an Atomic Bomb Machine Gun

The Ultimate 1950s Space Technology, which almost made it to Saturn

Obviously, "almost" is a key word here, but apparently NASA still has "small secret contingency plan division" which is dedicated to preserving "Orion" nuclear propulsion technology - and reviving it in case of a killer asteroid threat.
So what exactly is this "Project Orion" - the most radical propulsion technology for kick-ass space missions? No, it's not the NASA's future space capsule ("Apollo-on-steroids", some may say) - but a proposed colossal nuclear-bomb-powered rocket from 1958

Nuclear Propulsion: Getting More Miles Per Gallon
... or rather, giving you maximum payload per launch.
The ultimate BIG technology, conceived in the 1950s to go to Saturn, Jupiter, and beyond... was powered by a row upon row of controlled, directed nuclear blasts...











Maybe somebody is already building it, in the remote Canadian Rockies

With a mass of 1000-2000 metric tons and 1000 nuclear bombs for propulsion the medium version alone would have been a terrifying monster. The "super" Orion design at 8 million tons could easily be the size of a small city. Here is a size comparison of some of the proposed versions












To the stars - one nuke at a time!

Various mission profiles for "Orion" were considered, including an ambitious interstellar version (asteroid defense and mining were among other ideas). This called for a 40-million-ton spacecraft to be powered by the sequential release of ten million bombs, each designed to explode roughly 60 m to the vehicle's rear.

Shuttle Pre-Flight Activities

Pre-Flight Activities, Rarely Seen by the General Public

Technology moves on, and these photos may soon follow the way of our other post: "Rare Photos of the Russian Buran Space Program". Can we say, it was good while it lasted?

However, these pictures deserve a wide viewing audience: the amount of thought and engineering that goes into every launch is immense; each successful take-off represents the Mankind's finest effort, and is a wonder to behold.

External tank arrives by barge from Louisiana


Removing external tank







Preparing to lift the tank to vertical







Orbiter: External tank with Solid Rocket Boosters (SRB)


Engines are attached to the shuttle in the Orbiter Processing Facility


Shuttle has been moved to VAB and will be attached to external tank








Payload carrier
leaves Canister Rotation Facility




Lifting payload into position for insertion into "Discovery" when it arrives at the pad





Shuttle "Discovery" leaves VAB











"Discovery" arrives at Pad








Ready for Launch











We Have Lift Off !

Time Machine: CERN's Large Hadron Collider

Look closely.
This is what the world's first Time Machine may look like

Never heard of "traversable wormholes?"

Well, soon you might start hearing about them, as the world's most powerful particle accelerator becomes functional this spring - unleashing forces, capable of distorting not only space (just like gravity distorts space around Earth), but also TIME


CERN's Large Hadron Collider is set to become the very first time machine in history.

According to the research published by Irina Arefieva and Igor Volovich, "in general relativity, a time-like curve in space-time will run from past to future. But in some space-times the curves can intersect themselves, giving a closed-like curve, which is interpreted as a time machine - which suggests the possibility of time travel"

Two proton beams travel in opposite directions and collide at four points along the way - replicating the Big Bang conditions of "cosmic plasma", a mysterious almost liquid state, which occurred before quarks had cooled off enough to allow atoms to form together. The Large Hadron Collider will force quarks to break free of their bonds, the matter substance to unravel - to recreate the original "cosmic plasma", and to reconstruct Big Bang conditions. (hopefully on a much smaller scale)

Here are some quick facts:
- 20-year work-in-progress
- A team of 7,000 physicists from more than 80 nations
- 27 kilometers in circumference, 175 meters underground
- facilitating head-on collision of protons, traveling very near the speed-of-light
- each tunnel is big enough to run a train through it.
- temperatures generated: more than 1000,000 times hotter than the sun's core
- superconducting magnets are cooled to a temperature colder than in deep space

The most complicated thing that humans have ever built

To better appreciate the enormous scale of this beast, consider that it runs 17 miles across the border of two countries, has detectors in four locations the size of buildings, housed in huge caverns - and if you happen to be inside the tunnel while this thing is in operation, you would have a highly radioactive - and fatal - experience.

Just one superconducting solenoid (CMS) contains in it more iron than the Eiffel Tower. The cost of building LHC is so high, that America had to put a stop to its own Superconducting Super Collider in 1993 (even though 14 miles of tunnel had already been dug in Texas), so today CERN's structure is the lone contender for the title "the most complicated thing that humans have ever built".

The idea is to focus all this incredible energy into the smallest space possible. As they say, "the more energy goes in, the more massive the particles that come out". How massive? How about a miniature black hole?





If not time-travel, other exciting thing produced by LHC may be:
The end of the world as we know it

Apologies for a sensationalist headline, but how would you like a miniature Big Bang generated in your community, with scientists going around in little black vans with blaring loudspeakers: "Everything is under control, remain calm, look for a miniature blackhole in your kitchen sink"?

All jokes aside, scientists do expect excitement, but of the containable kind. The well-known reasons behind building LHC are finding the "God Particle" (Higgs Boson?) and coming up with the "Grand Unified Theory" of all forces of the Universe. For the estimation of dangers associated with LHC, read this paper abstract.

All other weird notions that LHC may produce uncontrollable Medium-sized Bang, or a bad-mannered black hole, are put to rest by CERN scientists: they assure us that "even if black holes will be produced, they will be too small and too short-lived to generate a strong gravitational force." In other words, Geneva is not going to get sucked into anything cosmologically weird.

Good.

Discover Magazine puts it: "The collisions at LHC could spray out strange new kinds of matter, unfurl hidden dimensions of space, even generate tiny glowing reenactments of the birth of the universe." And now, as we have seen - it may even facilitate time travel.

"We don’t even know what to expect," says French physicist Yves Schutz. "We’re now in a domain of energy that nobody has ever explored."

"Cosmic Motors" Concept Art

If you wondered who is on the cutting edge of futuristic vehicle design, here is your answer

Daniel Simon, God bless his skills and imagination, is the coolest concept vehicle designer this side of Saturn's rings. The future itself can't help but shrivel and scuttle into a corner when this mighty artist enters the room. Yes! the Future itself feels intimidated, knowing that it will have to come up with something as radical and smooth as Daniel's visions in a few hundred years.


Get the book "Cosmic Motors" while it's still available, and find a quiet corner to drool over it

We admit, this feature is a bit overdue, but not for a lack of trying! It's just that Daniel Simon is a super-busy guy these days and is pretty hard to catch. Between designing the objects of future fetish and the newest luxury car models, he jet sets from Berlin to California three times on any given day. One hour he is having lunch with the top Star Wars artist, the next - he is surfing with a bunch of dudes (and supermodels) in the sunny Land of the Free.

In the meantime, his futuristic vehicles book "Cosmic Motors" continues to sell like a bunch of Ganymedian pancakes, or hot pies during Russian perestroika - and he is on fire with designs for the next book. So check out this catalog of galactic machinery, before it disappears from the stores.

AUTOMOTIVE CONCEPTS
Seductive vehicle design for movies, entertainment and car industry

Yeah, I really like your site and think it's really cool, so, lets do it, tell me what you need! Best and until soon..." That soon turned out to be a full year, and finally we are able to exclusively feature his designs, and damn the torpedoes! (the pin-up style of some of his sexy drivers and machinery put our mind into a chrome-sleek-vintage-retro-pulp-WorldWarTwo-patriotic mode)


At some point we sent deeply philosophical, life-altering questions to Simon, to which he replied by sending us his book (which rocked the socks off our editorial team) and saying that he'd work on the answers while on the plane. However, the answers got siphoned off the airplane into a big blue yonder and are slowly drifting to the ground somewhere over China. In the meantime, here are some interesting facts from introduction to his book.


"In 2001 he obtained his degree in vehicle design at the University of Applied Science in Pforzheim, Germany. After completion he went to Barcelona and designed concept cars for Bugatti and Lamborghini, followed by 5 years in the VW Group's Advanced Design... He has since returned to Berlin and founded the Daniel Simon Studio where he is designing virtual vehicles for his brand Cosmic Motors, published in his first book "Cosmic Motors". In parallel he continues to be a car designer, and offers his services to premium car makers."


An "epic vehicle" is one way to describe the exploration Ice Train that routinely meets two dozen Cthulhu on any given trip (who line up for credit for a chance of ownership, on their unspeakable terms). It's big, it's gorgeous, and it knows it


Stewardesses of these sexy vehicles are pretty sexy, too. Almost as groovy as the original "Joy of Flying" examples of the 1960s




Detailed to the point of obsession, sleek and sensual enough to be considered evil - these machines haunt your dreams and DRIVE your desires, prompting you to look on your current car with a sort of deep sadness...







OK, this is the future concept only but we are on the good way to achieve that. This is what we have so far, I would say, beautiful...