This is it: The Golden Age of Concept Spacecraft.

The 1950s marked the official start of the "Space Age."  At White Sands, New Mexico, in Huntsville, Alabama, and at Cape Canaveral, Florida, American rocket scientists -- many of them ex-Germans -- worked sleeplessly to design and perfect launch vehicles that would boost artificial satellites -- and eventually human beings -- into the cosmos.  To drum up public support for this dangerous and expensive undertaking, rocketry experts, including Dr. Werner von Braun, Willey Ley and Krafft Ehricke were enlisted to share their visions of space travel that, God- and Congress-willing, lay just around the proverbial corner. 

Such first-generation plastic model manufacturers as Revell, Monogram, Aurora, Lindberg and Strombecker were more than happy to contribute to this public information campaign by kitting the widest variety of conceptual spacecraft models ever to make their way to hobby store shelves.  No period before or since has yielded such a vast array of imaginative "could be" spacecraft kits as this one.

Concept Spacecraft

1900-1930

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s