For years sensible adults have been amused by the talk of small fry about space ships, interplanetary travel, and the weirdly-garbed science-fiction characters of extra-terrestrial domains. Now it appears that the children were right, and the minds of their elders were hopelessly earthbound. The prospect of travel in free space–beyond the limits of Earth's atmosphere and gravitational pull–has virtually been assured by the latest scientific and technical developments. The men who will probably participate in it's pioneer adventures are already alive.
from The Mystery of Other Worlds Revealed, 1952
In their own words, in their own pictures, from a time when the sky was the limit before the dream of spaceflight transitioned into hardware and cold steel. That is what the blog is all about - to present the first glimmering of the dawn of the Space Age, with an enthusiastic optimism that seems harder to find today. Don't you want to get back to a time when people were free to dream that anything might be possible?
The Mystery of Other Worlds - the name comes from a title of one of two pulp-type magazines (the other was The Complete Book of Outer Space) my Dad gave to me as a young boy. Every page was filled with black and white photos of rockets, aliens, and alien worlds. There were images taken from The Day The Earth Stood Still and War of the Worlds, two of my favorite movies. I was intoxicated with all that vintage rocket science, and kept them at hand year after year. Those publications became my Flight Manual for an adventure that has continued ever since. Though I long since have worn the original covers off and the dog-eared pages are yellow with age, they still have a sense of wonder to give to the reader.
