In March 1952, Colliers Magazine began a series of articles by a team of 23 contributors, headed by the German-American rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. The team of experts, scientists and space-advocates used the magazine to vividly illustrate their dramatic vision of the near future, and how humans could exploit the seemingly endless possibilities found in space.

Over the course of the series, various subjects such as spacecraft, spacesuits, planetary science, orbital trajectories and even the finer details of Lunar and Martian exploration were presented.

The attraction of the series was not just the exuberant and optimistic articles, or the confident declarations of imminent feasibility, all written in clear, technically believable layman's terms. It was also the superb illustrations.

The highly respected space artist Chesley Bonestell, heading a small team of illustrators, provided the visual spectacle of how space was to be conquered.

History was to eventually run a different course, with Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union (now Russia) becoming the first human to voyage into space in 1961. In 1969 Neil Armstrong of the United States became the first human to set foot on the Moon. Since then, manned space exploration has concentrated on Earth-orbital activities, and no-one has yet set foot on the planet Mars.

In the Colliers articles, from the perspective of the early 1950s, the vision of the future was considerably different...

This film is based on an alternative timeline to the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo era of reality - it is based on the premise that all that had been proposed in the early 1950's in Colliers actually came to pass - and sooner than they expected.

Through the expert use of special visual effects and computer-generated imagery (CGI), the world of wonder and imagination expressed though Collier's has become real. The film Man Conquers Space looks like a documentary made today, and is peppered with archival footage from the dawn of the space age during WWII, through to today, narrated by the people who were there - the engineers, the astronauts, the scientists, the visionaries, the politicians.

 

 

Space Station Cutaway