Some time ago I came across a discarded issue of Scientific American from 1962. Looking at that one issue, I find ads full of optimism for tremendous strides in space exploration which were obviously around the corner:
An advertisement from Perkin-Elmer, who built the periscope used on the first American space flight, with a picture from that flight. Opposite that is:
The Garrett Corporation, which was studying or designing thermal and atmospheric systems for manned space flight. The picture shows a little orbiting lab with scientists working in shirtsleeves. You’d almost think that Boeing was going to have this in test before their next passenger jet model came out.
Speaking of Boeing, that’s next. Their ad mentions the Dyna-Soar space glider, for which they were the system contractor. It was going to fly into space and land like a—space shuttle, was that?
Let’s move along to Boeing’s then-competitor, Douglas. Among other things, they were working on: [ul]
[li]The Saturn rocket (at least we did get that one)[/li][li]Lunar cargo handlers[/li][li]Orbiting space observatory that looks like Deep Space Station K7 from "The Trouble with Tribbles[/li][li]Supply and Escape vehicle, resembling the DynaSoar[/li][li]Nuclear powered space ship[/li][li]Lunar VTOL craft[/li][/ul].
You see what I’m getting at. Obviously, in 1962, there was tremendous optimism about what was going to be possible in space. Yet, in 2005 hardly any of this has yet been achieved. As a layman, I’m curious as to what went wrong. Should not the engineers and scientists been able to recognize even then that the ideas being considered were too expensive or impractical to be feasible? And what were the problems, exactly? I can’t believe that these folks would have underestimated the amount of fuel that would have been required. But were there other unforeseen difficulties in structural engineering, or in life support systems, or in the human physical capacity to endure flights in these vehicles?