Memoirs of an armchair astronaut (retired)

Details Memoirs of an armchair astronaut (retired) Memoirs of an armchair astronaut (retired)

Nov 1993

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1993jbis...46..411c&link_type=abstract

British Interplanetary Society, Journal (ISSN 0007-094X), vol. 46, no. 11, p. 411-414

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Histories, Uk Space Program, Space Exploration, United Kingdom

Scientific paper

According to my biographer Neil McAleer, who now knows far more about me than I have any wish to, I joined the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) in the summer of 1934, when it was one year old and I was approaching seventeen. Much of the next two years was spent bombarding the Society's patient secretary, Leslie Johnson, with technical queries which he did his best to answer, and which I am sure would make embarrassing reading today. During this period I also made contact with another active BIS member, the science-fiction writer Eric Frank Russell, to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude for early encouragement. I wish I still possessed his amusing and often bawdy letters, written in the most beautiful script I have ever encountered. In 1936, escaping from the uncharted wilds of rural Somerset to the genteel environs of Whitehall (literally - my office was next door to Downing Street) I made contact with the London members of the BIS, as well as the local s.f. fans. There was a 90% overlap between the two groups, and until the outbreak of war rocketry and science fiction dominated my life, with H.M. Civil Service a very poor third. A quarter of a century later, I looked back on those days in an essay which appeared in Holiday Magazine (May, 1963) and which has since been reprinted in Voices from the Sky (1965), Astounding Days (1989) and By Space Possessed (1993). Any attempt to update it would now be both impossible and absurd: it preserves the spirit of the early Space Age like a fly in amber. Here, exactly as originally published, are 'Memoirs of an Armchair Astronaut (Retired)'.

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