Science

Sailplanes on Mars

Following up our story yesterday Exploring Mars By SailplaneDuncan Lunan has the following to say:

Sydney Jordan’s ‘Lance Mclane’ strip for the Daily Record  (1976-1988)  was set 100 years in the future and included a base on Mars from which explorers went out in sailplanes just like this. 

Sydney Jordan ‘Home Is the Sailor’, Daily Record 1982
Sydney Jordan ‘Sails in the Red Sunset’ Daily Record 1985
Sydney Jordan ‘Sails in the Red Sunset’
Sydney Jordan ‘Sails in the Red Sunset’

For the ‘Vikings and Mars’ exhibition in Largs in 1985, Gordon Ross  (of the Industrial Design Unit at Glasgow School of Art)  designed an automated Mars inflatable aircraft called the ‘Dick-Dick’, and he and I collaborated on a story featuring it called ‘Sails in the Red Sunset’ which ran in the strip from May to October that year, and was reprinted with notes on the aircraft in Vol. 10 No. 2 of Jeff Hawke’s Cosmos, November 2014. 

Gordon Ross sketched for Dick-Dick and Mars fighter aircraft, 1985
Gordon Ross, Dick-Dick diagram for Analog 1992
Gordon Ross Dick-Dick propulsion 1991

It’s nice to know we were all on right lines!

Sydney Jordan 1998 Face on Mars Christmas card

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