After the hardware started flying in the late 40’s, it was as if a dam had been breached. The spaceship had been born! There was no shortage of ideas to try and with Cold War paranoia funding development, there was no shortage of money with which to try them. Still, even with the apparent ease with which designs seemed to be falling off of the drawing boards onto the launch pads, there were many, many more that never made it. How many designs actually made it to flight status? 10%? 1%? No one knows.

The funding gods are fickle. A program that was of utmost national urgency one day could find itself redundant or superfluous the next based on events thousands of miles away in some foreign capital. Some projects were undertaken at enormous cost with goals no more substantial than to salve wounded pride or bolster a nation’s technological ego (the Soviet Buran shuttle comes to mind).

In this section we’ll visit some projects that were well into their development at the time of cancellation. In some cases, actual hardware had been built and was awaiting the magic "go" command that never came.

One thing you may notice is that the entries in this section are much less personal. The theoreticians worked alone or with small staffs, books have authors and movies have director/producers. This makes it easy to hang a name on an idea. Real space hardware, on the other hand, is created by armies of technical people. Creative teams come up with the fundamental ideas which are then turned over to specialists whose job it is to break it up into manageable pieces. Each piece is broken up finer and finer until you have thousands of engineers and technicians each working on some individual widget. The hardware then works its way back up the chain through departments whose job it is to assemble the parts into a whole, even though they have no clue as to what’s in the parts. This approach always involves not only the prime contractor whose name is on the vehicle, but hundreds (sometimes thousands) of subcontractors, specialty firms and parts vendors.

A word of caution as you read through this section’s entries. Many of these designs were driven by the Cold War which meant that their job was to protect Our Side at the expense of Their Side. These are not soaring expressions of the human spirit, but rather show the dark side of our Faustian bargain with technology.

Finishing off the section, though, is a great hope for the future. For the first fifty years of the Space Age rockets were all fundamentally derivatives of the V2. The sizes changed, the fuels changed, the payloads changed, but the basic design was the same, i.e. propellants fed by turbopumps into enclosed combustion chambers which developed thrust by sending the combustion gasses out a contracting/expanding nozzle. As we move into the new millennium this is all changing: Rocket engines with the combustion taking place outside the nozzle, rockets which pump propellants using centrifugal force by spinning the entire engine; space launchers which hitch a ride the first few miles on an airplane. And the most fundamental change of all is that it is being funded by private industry. The efficiency of these programs should reduce the cost of reaching space by orders of magnitude and at that point the true Space Age will begin. Of course, once these vehicles start flying, they will technically be ineligible for this book. A hazy crystal ball and some revisionist history is a small price to pay for this kind of progress.

Stick around. The best is yet to come!