2001 Cosmic Correspondence Archives

[From Dale Figley (7/24/01):]

We waited all day to get up the nerve to fire it off. It used an Aero-Tech J-415. I don't know much about the big stuff these days. I was up to F's when I quit rockets in the 70's. I had decided to build one that looked like I always thought they should. No straight cardboard tubes for me. The engine was donated by a friend I had met while researching the thing. Like I said, I knew nothing about what they call high power rocketry now. Anyway, it flew fantastic. We figured it went up a couple thousand feet. It only weighs 11 pounds without the parachute and engine. I had it set up with a chute for the nose cone and one for the airframe. I had to walk almost a mile and a half to get the nose back. It had a little damage to one pod when it landed. I repaired that and it sits in our house now as a display. Never to fly again!! The construction is a balsa frame like you would build a model airplane with. Then it is skinned with 1/32 balsa sheeting. After that was sanded smooth, I applied 2 layers of fiber glass then sanded and painted it. It isn't really patterned after any one model. I didn't want to copy. Too easy. The Orbit Jet, the one from When Worlds Collide and, Destination Moon were all looked at when I first drew it up. It took 3 months to build. Wheew, haven't typed this much in a long time, and it's hot in here. Oh, and if I didn't mention it before, it's 6 feet tall. Maybe I'll make a lamp out of it one of these days. :^)

If you think about it, it's a neat way to make a complicated shape. I had the idea way back when I was in my teens. Never had the cash to pull it off then. I had originally thought of just papering it like the old model planes. But they came up with those neat high power engines, so I used the balsa and fiber glass. It worked great. But it was spendy and messy to do. I have another that is 8 feet long that looks a bit like the ones from that newer Flash Gordon movie. I never finished it though. It got as far as the first coat of glass then we picked up a house that needs restoring and it's been sitting in storage ever since. Used Styrofoam for the airframe on that one. It is so heavy it will never leave the ground. We're thinking of using it for a cabinet or something. :^) Until we picked up this house, which is sort of Victorian, I had imagined rockets all over the place.

How about you? You have that neat site, it looks like you've been interested in this kind of thing longer than I have. I found you while looking around for ray guns. Do you collect as well? Have you ever visited Gene Metcalf's site?

[From Roaring Rockets: We here at RR have been ordered by Spousal Unit Command Central to cut back on collecting, so we do not collect Ray Guns, for instance. Or many other things we would like to see around the house when we look in various directions. We do have a few current (late 1980s - mid 1990s) Chinese rayguns; too lovely to turn away from. We hide them in our office away from home!]

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August 2001

[From Michael Rutkaus (8/4/01):]

Hi, thanks for the Captain Video memories!

All I have to contribute is that when I was 8 or 9 yrs old I met both the Captain and the Ranger in uniform (I guess they were there for a publicityshot) at the gate where you got on the airplane ride at Glen Echo (MD) amusement park, right where you step into the airplane on a cable.

I wanted to shake hands with him/them and someone started to intervene, but the Captain stopped them and made sure I got to shake his hand and the Ranger's and I told them I liked the show a lot!

Mike Rutkaus
Winchester VA

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[From Don Petkus (8/12/01):]

I always thought spaceships from the 1930s through 1950s looked cooler than anything that we actually sent into space. When I was a kid in Gary, Indiana, I was really impressed by Ray Harryhausen's stop motion flying saucers in "Earth versus the Flying Saucers" and the single stage "astro-propelled" Venus expedition ship in "20 Million Miles to Earth." Somehow on the screen they look real and strange at the same time to me. (I remember the interior of the Venus rocket looking like the control room of some kind of power plant. The interior furnishings looked strangely heavy for something that was designed to go into space.)

In "The Harryhausen Chronicles" I noticed, in a clip of a home-produced film he did as a teenager, a 1930s style dart-shaped ship, as part of the model set he used on which to animate a beast from Jupiter. It looked like it may have been something you bought in a toy department or sent away for. I still think the Buck Rogers ships (that looked like sections of a railroad trestle) and the Flash Gordon models (that seem to have had firework sparklers in the tail section) were the most fun.

[SpacEditor's note: Yes, indeed, to us the Alex Raymond-designed space ships looked the way a space ship should. The Flash Gordon serial followed Raymond's Sunday comic strip designs fairly closely, except for Dr. Zarkov's ship, which was the one created for the science fiction musical (!) JUST IMAGINE (1930). Toy versions of Raymond's comic strip ships were available in stores in the 1930s and 1940s, along with Buck Rogers ships designed by Dick Calkins... these were the only space ship toys until the space adventure explosion of the early 1950s. We don't know who designed the weird, flatiron-shaped space ships used in the BUCK ROGERS serial. The best feature of the ships shown in either the BUCK ROGERS or the three FLASH GORDON serials, for us, was the strange motorboating engine sound.]

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[From John Davis (8/13/01):]

[SpacEditor's note: John is supplying information about a trailer-mounted silvery rocket tilted at a sharp upward angle, which the SpacEditor glimpsed at a distance in a parking lot during a shopping center opening about 1990.]

I just stumbled across the Space Patrol website and saw your letter about the Ralston Rocket. What you probably saw at the carnival that day was an Astroliner, a trailer-mounted carnival rocket ride built by Wisdom Manufacturing in Merino, Colorado. It moved up and down and rolled left and right on hydraulics, while a film inside was rear-projected on a screen in the front, giving the impression of forward motion. For five years, I was the one who made the films for the Astroliner. I have pictures and brochures of it, although I haven't yet scanned them. Write me if you'd like to see them, and I'll send them via E-mail. When I first saw the Astroliner, I too thought of the Ralston, which I saw in Denver about 1955. It was like a dream come true to be involved with this ride. Unfortunately, there are few if any left in this country; most of them wound up going to Europe or Japan. I would guess at least a hundred of them were built. They had two models; one held thirty five passengers, the other held fifty.

Hope you find this of interest.

Cadet John Davis

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November 2001

[From Fred Dawson (11/19/01):]

Hi Everyone,

When I was about 7, in 1952, my family got our first TV and Captain Video was one of my early favorites. I remember it quite well, right now recalling Tucker the Space Bum, Commissioner Cary, and because I had three older brothers who watched it with me, quite a few of the bloopers and cheesy special effects.

Tucker was one of my favorite characters, in part because he was the antidote for the Rangers' straight-arrow personalities. Unlike the other regulars, he usually appeared unshaven in wrinkled khakis and an old yachting cap and he wasn't above trying to make money out of whatever situation they were in. Right in front of them, he once snapped pictures of an enemy installation (with a very cheap camera) and then tried to blackmail the bad guy with the resulting 8x10 glossies. And in his first appearance in "The Starship of Yesterday," he even spied for the villains but changed sides when he learned they were going to leave him to die with the good guys.

Commissioner Cary was unusually colorless for a space commander, an older balding man with horn-rimmed glasses as I recall. He usually wore a business suit even when exploring distant planets.

One goof I fondly remember came in an episode where the Captain battled a bad guy on an airless planet and his helmet came off. While the Captain quickly put it back on, the helmet's visor was flopping up and down during the rest of the episode.

A less obvious example of poor science came in another episode on another airless planet (asteroid?). Here the bad guys captured the Captain, the Ranger and the Commisioner and tied them to some trees in their spacesuits. With his oxygen running low, the Captain used the lens of his rocket ring to burn through his ropes. Need I say what's wrong with this sequence.

There were also two planets inhabited by dinosaur-like monsters, mostly one sock puppet who would roar from behind some rocks or at the base of a cliff. On one planet, this beast could be killed with the characters' sidearms--on the other, it required the Galaxy's guns.

I found your chronology quite helpful in recalling memories. I'll try to get back to you with some more.

Blasting Off For Now,

Fred Dawson aka Phred

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[From Karl (9/29/01):]

Thanks for the info, I've enclosed two drawings of what I still remember of the Captain Video show when I lived in Brooklyn in the mid 50's, wathcing on ch 5. One space ship I recall had a kind of webbing of tubes with a control area on top, I remember this as my friends and I tried to build a model of it but couldn't find a proper material to build the bottom part. As for Tobor the robot... well he was my favorite as I remember he was a dark-like grey or black. I also remember the mountain base opening and the spaceship Galaxy blasting off.

Tom Corbett was also one of my favorite shows; I met Frankie Thomas and the other space cadets at a department store in N.Y.C. which as a Christmas display had an inside monorail which encircled the whole floor. There was also a large rocket prop, set up near the toy section, it was in the center of a large cleared area --- it might have been made to break down into sections as I remember my mother remarking the floor was not so sturdy. My dad's quick reply was, "hey if you flew through space, you wouldn't be sturdy either!" I guess he was trying to keep the illusion alive for me. That rocket had a strange design but I remember the mannikin pilot had tubes or wires connected either to his back or to the chair he sat in.

In front of this rocket prop were the three Space Cadets greeting all the kids and their parents as they went through this rocket. I also recall that my dad bought me a silver space helmet with one way viewer in front. I also got a space cadet outfit--- the shirt and pants of the uniform were grey with a dark blue V in front, with the yellow dots on it, and at the bottom of the v was the space cadet emblem--- I wore this uniform to school, PS 88 and the teacher forced me to go home and change, boy, was that a letdown! I'll keep in touch, hope the sketch jogs some memories

Karl

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December 2001

[From Richard Scott (12/28/01):]

I have just found your site and am enthralled! I have yet to read it all, but what I've seen brings back so much. I find your comments, and the depth of your work, truly wonderful! Thank you for putting this together!

Richard Scott (age 57).

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