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Docking Bay 52 Athena When a dream is based on solid knowledge, it can become very predictive of the future.
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The Athena was originally presented in the August 15, 1953 issue of the Saturday Evening Post’s cover story: The Day the Rocket Blew Up. Although its wing looks large to modern viewers, this spaceship predicted many features of the space shuttle three decades in advance of the shuttle’s actual development.
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In this amazing short story the author predicted our space shuttle fleet would be very few number which would be rotated in order to build and supply an orbiting space station. The Athena and her sister shuttles were designed as re-usable two stage to orbit vehicles with a space glider return to land on a standard runway. The Athena was definitely a dead accurate prediction of the real Space Shuttle.
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The story was written by G. Harry Stine, under the pen name of Lee Correy. At the time, he was a practicing engineer, working at launching rockets at America’s first launch site, White Sands New Mexico. Because a rocket engineer designed the Athena, it had more than a ring of authenticity about it.
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This is why it just ‘looked right’ in the singular painting of it standing on the launch pad. It was very convincing in part due to the fact that Stine had built a model of the Athena and shared it with the artist. This helped him create this photo-realistic painting.
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While the story that it supported was not long, it was heroic in its message. It reminded us of the risks involved in working with any super powerful machines. The more powerful the machine, the more responsible we need to be.
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The Athena herself is a good representative of this breed of future space shuttles. Sleek powerful competent and effective it is one of the best spaceship designs of the 50s.
Links to Additional information available in the Trade Zone.
A Precision Design Drawing of this Spaceship -----------------------------------------
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Complete background information is available in the Spaceship Handbook
Click on Image to LEARN MORE or BUY NOW.
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This Spaceship is also featured in “Ad Astra per Aspera”
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