Humans have been dreaming of long-term spaceflight for decades decades. While there's always been a curiosity in traveling to the stars, the Space Race of the 1960's kickstarted a desire to make concrete steps towards a future in space. An educational video from the period, dug up by by archival footage YouTube channel WDTVLIVE42, shows the first attempts to rein in sci-fi and up the science.

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While Uncle Bill probably doesn't get everything right, the basic principles he lists are sound. Interestingly enough, his vision for the future is not terribly dissimilar from Elon Musk's. When laying out his vision for space travel last year (recently published in an academic journal), Musk discusses an idea very similar to the way stations highlighted in the instructional video. Ideally, Musk wants a rocket that "would take tankers of rocket fuel into space, where the spaceships that would take people to Mars would be waiting in orbit."

While it's simplified a bitMusk doesn't seem to imagine much of a station in orbitthe principal is the same. By making a pitstop after clearing orbit, rockets will be able to get the strength to carry on into the great unknown. It's as much a dream today as it was when the instructional video was released, but Musk wants to make it happen with a decade. Maybe these dreams really will come true.

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How a Film From the 1960s Imagined Space Stations and Moon Bases - Popular Mechanics