Jayessell is mistaken. Images 10 & 11 are from the Lang movie, but the cover and first image are not. Compare the fins, which have a distinctive boxy structure on the movie rocket.

“Are we sure this is Bonestell?”

Yes, we are. Image 14 clearly states that the color images are his work in collaboration with Ley, which also makes their connection with the Fritz Lang movie exceedingly unlikely.

Pedantry aside though, thanks for the gorgeous scans of a truly historic article.

Image 12 contradicts the text. There we see an eclipse of the Sun by the Earth in which the Earth is shown as appearing smaller than the Sun. Yet in reality a viewer on the Moon would see the Earth as being much larger than the Sun. An eclipse would be very different - the inner corona would not be visible as above, but the outer corona would be. Now I wouldn’t expect someone in 1945 to realize that the coronas would appear different, but I’d expect them to know that the Earth would appear larger than the Sun from the Moon. The article even states that the Earth looks larger from the Moon than the Moon does from Earth - since the Sun and Moon are of similar apparent size from Earth, one could extrapolate.

The drawing on page 9 may or may not be incorrect depending on the artist’s intentions. It features a globe at the horizon, which might be his interpretation of what the Earth would look like from the Moon (and given that nobody had actually been in space yet and the artist would be working in a knowledge vacuum, it’s plausible). Yet the lack of features makes me wonder if it’s supposed to be the Sun, and if so why is the light coming from behind the viewer?

There are also some discrepancies, although far more understandable, with respect to the view of Earth from space. Clouds simply don’t look like that - the drawings in images 5 and 13 show random puffy clouds, some in long, parallel lines, with no signs of high or low pressure systems, fronts, or cumulonimbus clouds. It’s possible that meteorologists didn’t realize at that time exactly what weather systems looked like from above, though.

Robert Heinlein (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A_Heinlein ) was among those influenced by Ley’s writings. In his novel Have Space Suit, Will Travel you’ll find what Ley was talking about at the part where your transcript is cut off. In this passage of the story, Heinlein explains how a space suit must have its own air supply:

The bottles are big and clumsy, weighing around sixty pounds apiece, and each holds only about five mass pounds of air even at that enormous pressure; instead of a month’s supply you will have only a few hours — my suit was rated at eight hours for the bottles it used to have. But you will be okay for those hours — if everything works right. You can stretch time, for you don’t die from overheating very fast and can stand too much carbon dioxide even longer — but let your oxygen run out and you die in about seven minutes. Which gets us back where we started — it takes oxygen to stay alive.
To make darn sure that you’re getting enough (your nose can’t tell) you clip a little photoelectric cell to your ear and let it see the color of your blood; the redness of the blood measures the oxygen it carries. Hook this to a galvanometer. If its needle gets into the danger zone, start saying your prayers.

Not bad considering.
(Vaccuum tubes, LOX/Alcohol, 3stages, reusable, orbit and return)
(Transistors, LOX/H2, 6 stages, disposable, orbit/land and return)

The illustrations look Bonstellian.

http://www.astronautix.com/astros/bonstell.htm

The steam helicopter on page 72 looks remarkably like what I saw on the Discovery channel.

The lift rotor was spun by small ramjets at the tips, with no need of a tail rotor.
In the video I saw the body of the craft was barely larger than a go-cart.
(I think that could be adapted to a car!)

When were the V-2s de-secretized?
I suppose the Allies came across several of them in the first months after D-Day.

(The best thing about the V-2 is it sucked up resources and manpower that might otherwise have gone to more efficient conventional weapons.)

My dad was in WWII (Somewhere I have a photo of him sitting on a German Jet!)
and one of his “Stars and Stripes” newsmagazines described the V-1 and maybe the V-2.

(Charlie, I doubt I can find it.)

How well did the BIS moonship compare to the Saturn V?
(Darn close or off by a factor of 2000?)