After a Moon city is established the 'Moonies' will "want the prestige of holding a major world event." Their idea is the Olympic Games of 2020, complete with a stadium covered by a huge plexiglass dome where "the visitors from Earth will have a fine view of their home world."
Stay tuned for a great illustration of the "Lunar high jump" coming next week.
See also:
Sea City 2000 (1979)
Future Cities: Homes and Living into the 21st Century (1979)
Ristos (1979)
The Future World of Transportation
Heh, they seem to be phoning a lot of this in... "it looks exactly like 1970 spacecraft, but it's totally different, trust us..." "you can't see it, but there's a giant statue there of Alan Shepard, really..."
ReplyDeleteThe SSTO shuttlwe is based on Phil Bono's ROMBUS: http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/rombus.htm. No surprise there as TOBotF was written by Kenneth Gatland, who co-authored "Frontiers of Space" with Bono and was another book that influenced me profoundly.
ReplyDeleteI was so struck by this spread that I named the Einstein-level genius who unified general relativity and the electronuclear forces in the 1990s Patrick Umtali. He came from Montserrat and it eventually struck me that it was unlikely that someone from a West indian island would have an African surname, but maybe he'd changed it. Sadly, 1997 came and went with no Theory of Everything. We're still waiting. Oddly, Umtali's work wasn't string-based, although this was years before I really knew what string were much less before he current mood of disillusionment with them arose.
Having Shepherd's statue behind Yuri is hokey, but a fun idea. But how did I ever take seriously the idea of a Lunar Olympics in *2020*?
It's great how they come up with these ideas, and then forget that the torch wouldn't last very long like that. Where's the oxygen? How do they keep it burning?
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