The Universe – Asteroid Attack

Today on Far Future Horizons we present another episode of the highly acclaimed documentary series The Universe ~ Asteroid Attack.

The Usborne Book of the Future

One book that I fondly remember from my youth is 'The Usborne Book of the Future', first published in 1979 by Usborne Books, and written by Kenneth Gatland and David Jefferis. The book is a very illustrative and colourful trip in time to the year 2000 and beyond. Portrayed in its pages is the exciting and wonderful world of robots, cities of the future, space colonies and interstellar travel. This is the future as seen from the stand point of almost thirty years ago, a future that many of us still dream of today and remains yet to be realized.





My most favorite illustrations in the book are the ones depicting Space Arks and Asteroid Colonies as envisioned by Dandridge Cole back in the early 1960s. 

Islands in Space: The Challenge of the Planetoids, the Pioneering Work of Dandridge M. Cole

Cut Away View of an Asteroid Hollowed Out and Transformed into a Space Colony

©RoyScarfo

This essay was originally posted on the Discovery Enterprise blog site on August 8, 2007 and blog site of the National Space Society on August 13, 2009. 

This essay was cited in the article "Remembering Dandridge Cole" by Paul Gilster on May 14^th , 2012 in Centauri Dreams.

NASA is again considering the feasibility of manned missions to the asteroids. However, this idea is not without precedent. Scientists began seriously considering asteroids as targets of exploration in the 1960s. The leading proponent of such missions was American aerospace engineer and futurist - Dandridge MacFarland Cole.

October 30th, 2005 marked the 40th anniversary of his untimely passing. Dandridge Cole was only 44 years old when he suffered a fatal heart attack. The anniversary of his death seems to have largely escaped the notice and attention of the space community at large. This brief article seeks to redress that awful oversight.