I think I have to buy this book....

Better Than Apollo: The Space Program We Almost Had

SAN FRANCISCO — In the late 1950s, American space companies jumped into a headlong race to build an aerospace industry that could launch missiles across the world and rockets above it.

In her new book Another Science Fiction, archivist Megan Prelinger delves into the hyperbolic, whimsical world of the advertisements these early aerospace companies created to sell themselves.

Far from the dry, technical ads you might imagine, companies like Northrup, Ex-Cell-O, and National tried to lure the most talented young engineers into their cubicles by drawing on the mystique of science fiction. Ball-bearing, engine-part, and guidance-system companies didn’t sell themselves, but rather the grand vision of space exploration as the next step in mankind’s destiny.

The book is lovingly crafted and exhaustively researched. Unlike so many “big idea” tomes that skip over the details to deliver the PowerPoint version of reality, Another Science Fiction glories in the details, providing a complex portrait of the nation’s spacefaring ambitions. Prelinger’s analysis reaches outside the narrow confines of space boosterism to reveal the neural connections in the American psyche between the final frontier, the Soviet menace, and good, old industrial engineering.

We caught up with Prelinger at the wonderfully strange library she runs with her husband, Rick, to ogle old space stuff and discuss countercultural space utopias, alternatives to Apollo, and her hopes for a human spaceflight renaissance.

Sometimes I think I'd be happiest if I had been born 25 years earlier, and had worked for NASA in the '60s....

I would have loved to have worked at NASA in the 60s, other than the fact that women didn't, everyone smoked, and I'm guessing not too many of those NASA guys looked like Loren Dean in Apollo 13 (he was yummy there!!).

I forgot another weird thing I discovered while being up all night- The movie Blue Lagoon was based on a book. The Blue Lagoon with Brooke Shields! A public domain book (now).

[link]

It is really weird. I read some and the plot is very, very similar.

The movie Blue Lagoon was based on a book.

Oh, yeah. I read the book before I saw the movie. My mom wouldn't let me see the movie as she deemed in too mature for me, but she didn't pay much attention to the books I checked out of the library. I didn't see the movie until years later.

I would have loved to have worked at NASA in the 60s, other than the fact that women didn't, everyone smoked, and I'm guessing not too many of those NASA guys looked like Loren Dean in Apollo 13 (he was yummy there!!).

My mom worked at an MIT lab doing work for NASA in the late sixties and early seventies.

For some reason, when I was in middle school/junior high, they would play The Blue Lagoon on regular tv (we did't have cable) at 4:00 in the morning all the time. I was an insomiac back then, and I swear I watched it a million times. As I grew up, I thought I was imagining it, because what station in their right mind would play that horrible movie so many times, but it turns out my friend M and her brother remember the same thing. They would have really been in trouble, as their father would not let the watch 'The Facts of Life' because he thought it was too mature.

The other strange today thing is that their are anti-abortion protesters at our hospital. But they are protesting outside the Eye Institute entrance. It is clearly marked Eye Institute.

they are protesting outside the Eye Institute entrance

Maybe they don't understand how babies get made.

But where do they GET the eyes????

My afternoon stretch of classes is about to start. I really don't wanna work anymore today.