20.6.11

DAY SEVEN: FUTURES PAST

From 'the unwanted blog' -
In early 1949, Mr. Ritchie published a newspaper article discussing the need for space stations. The article was an abridged version of one he’d originally written in 1946. Who was Mr. Ritchie? I honestly don’t know. But I do know that for several years during the war, Mr. Ritchie was a designer and draftsman at Wright Field (where also worked Alex Tremulis, a designer who came up with a concept for a two-stage rocket-boosted VTOHL interceptor during the war), and after the war had what appears to have been a heck of a career in aerospace. Ritchie’s space station (poorly reproduced in the 1949 newspaper article), at first glance, looks both conventional and oddly familiar: