So how long does it take for a vision of tomorrow to evaporate like last night's dreams? Not long at all. Sometimes something as trivial as a president who's been unable to keep a single one of his campaign promises, and decides to randomly kill a progam so it looks like he's not a completey toothless, inefectual leader.

The bottm line, my friends, is that last month Project Constellation went from being The Future to being something no different than all those Popular Mechanics covers from the 1940s.

Ah, the 1950s. I get the feeling that people were kind of dumb in the '50s, but they were just so damn fetching about it. How else can you explain something like this?

If you're in early middle age like me, you can probably remember NASA and the government making a huge deal over abandoning "Wasteful" rockets like the Saturn V in favor of a more "Economical" system they called "The Space Shuttle." Development started in 1973, and it was expected to go into service in 1978, but as *NO ONE* could manage to do anything right in the '70s, and as Jimmy Carter had some kind of pathological hatred of the space program, it got postponed to 1981.

Back in 1978, I read in Starlog or Future magazine an announcement that the French Space Agency were building their own space shuttle, called "Hermes." Development began the next year, and ran until 1994 or so, when the project was finally abandoned. In that time, it never flew, never even hit a finalized design. It remains fascinating, however.

The purpose of this column is to show us cool crap that people thought the future would be like, which, alas, never happened. "Men Into Space" more than qualifies. While there had been SF shows on TV almost since its inception, and not all of them were bad, it was definitely a low-budget affair aimed at kids. "Men Into Space" was the first such show that attempted to make space interesting and entertaining for adults, and to be mildly educational as well.

Ok, I've been slamming Von Braun pretty hard, calling him an Nazi Party Member and a Major in the SS, and some people have complained to me about dissing the guy who put us on the moon, and that none of that stuff doesn't matter any more than the current Pope having been an unwilling member of the Hitler Youth.

Over the last couple weeks, we've been looking at Von Braun's space shuttle obsession, and Disney's eventual enthusiastic support of such a thing. So, ok, you've got a space shuttle. The obvious problem then becomes one we in the present face: "So you can get to orbit. Big deal. What do you do next?" Well, you go on to the moon, obviously, and here's former Nazi party member and SS Major Werner von Braun himself explaining his plan and how it'll all work, followed by a dramatization of a lunar mission. Part 1: