WONDERS OF STEEL (showtimes 11:00 am & 1:30 pm) brings steel making to life through music and animation in a masterpiece, Rhapsody of Steel (1959). Produced by John Sutherland, the film features Gary Merrill as the narrator and three-time Academy Award-winner Dimitri Tiomkin conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony in his own composition. An exhibit case holds the original press release, promotional images and other artifacts documenting the United States Steel Corporation's release of this 23-minute film.
Philip N. Shockey wrote a piece for the March-May, 1959 issue of Space Journal titled, "The Ultimate Necessity of Space Travel." Shockey makes the case for a trip to the moon and eventually further into space as a necessity brought about by the eventual destruction of Earth a few billion years from now.When one considers that our planet is doomed, at least as far as life is concerned, it is impossible to put meaningful value on the titanic forward struggle of life on Earth through billions of years. This struggle, whether conscious or not, appears agonizingly futile if the gigantic mass contribution can not be perpetuated.
The Honorable Edmund G. Brown
Governor, State of California
I have been asked by those responsible for placing this "space" capsule to write down my guesses about the state of man's space efforts one hundred years from this date when, hopefully, this capsule will be opened.
Most of my life has been spent as a politician. Politicians generally know very little about rockets, satellites and the other trappings of outer space.
It is their task to be concerned about inner space, the still undiscovered space of the mind and the spirit, and about whether the institutions of men on this planet create for the men they are supposed to serve the atmosphere, the psychological spaciousness, in which they can grow to fulfill their human potential.
This is the "space" about which I am concerned in 1963 as I write this statement. Even here, on ground that is much more familiar to me than is outer space, I have few predictions, but many hopes, about life on earth one hundred years from now.
My chief hope is that by the time men will have truly grasped the overriding necessity of freedom as a condition of man's continued existence: freedom from the necessity to hate as well as freedom from oppression of the mind, the spirit and the body.
I hope too that, having grasped this imperative, man, one hundred years from 1963, will have transformed his institutions into guarantors of that freedom.
Astronauts will need protection from dangerous radiation, temperature extremes, lack of oxygen, unusual conditions of gravity and other space barriers. Special suits to do that job are now being developed.
Air conditioning is a must. Westinghouse is now creating an individual "package" which maintains steady temperature and has a blower to circulate air. Other companies are devising roomy space coveralls with built-in ray protection and oxygen systems. One protective measure that might be included: Metallic pads on the suits - so that disabled "drifters," separated from their mother ship, can be brought back to safety with a large magnet.
An effect was much more than simply a spillover from the silvery streamlining of the space program. It was an increasing preoccupation with the future and technology that helped change not only the country’s look in the 1950s and ’60s, but also, in some ways, its very conception of itself, as if seen anew from space.
The architect Buckminster Fuller, one of the space age’s most ardent proselytizers, put it much more coherently in his book “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth”: “We are all astronauts.”
The classic 1956 book The Complete Book of Space Travel contains some amazing imagery. The book was targeted at young boys and had that unique blend of sincerity, wonder and confidence we so often see in 1950s futurism. As early as 1956 the question was not if we'd explore the moon and other planets in our solar system, but when we would make this a reality. Chapter 22 is even titled, "If We Are Visited First."
"Pressure suits will improve, say the space doctors, but not enough to permit their wearers to work freely in a vacuum for long periods of time. Dr. Fritz Haber of the School of Space Medicine believes that the whole space-suit idea will have to be abandoned. If space men want to float around outside their space ship (as they did in the movie, Destination Moon), they will have to stay inside rigid cylinders and do their work by remote-control devices operated from inside."
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