Wednesday, July 22, 2009

60's Space On The Brain

(Click on images to enlarge.)
I'm still wondering what a "drogue" chute is.

Continuing with the look back at the period in American history when visiting the moon was still an unrealised goal... above, a space-themed cartoon from the pages of The Saturday Evening Post, Jan 29, 1966. UPDATE: thanks to a comment about the "drogue" chute, I looked it up, and the cartoonist had his terms right! Here's the Wiki entry on it.

Below: Space was all the rage in the 60's, as this far-out, spacey ad from the same Post issue for a new refrigerator shows. Mod for the "now" generation, baby!

4 comments:

  1. In nautical parlance, a drogue is a type of heavy duty anchor made roughly like a parachute to slow speeding vesssels. Not sure if similar items were used in the space program but at least this cartoonist thought so.

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  2. The Frigidaire ad is amazing!!!

    Have you seen the Gorgeous early 1960s Motorola ads by Charles Schridde? They are truly beautiful.

    Whenever I see old Saturday Evening Post magazines from that period I flip through them to see if they have these ads.

    Here's some links:

    http://paleo-future.blogspot.com/2007/03/motorola-television-revisited-1961-1963.html

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  3. ... a drogue parachute is an initial release which begins the deceleration process and stabilizes the craft followed by another much larger chute for the actual slow descent. Sort of have to do things in steps when trying to decelerate from a thousand mph.

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  4. James,
    thanks for your insight on that! And thanks also for commenting.

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