Remembering Dandridge Cole

I’ve been thinking all weekend about Dandridge Cole, the aerospace engineer and futurist whose death at age 44 deprived interstellar studies of one of its most insightful advocates. Cole died in 1965, just five years before a deadline he himself set (in 1953!) for a manned landing on the Moon. But then, the former paratrooper from Ohio thought a lot about the future and the need for a kind of ‘future studies’ that would look at current technological trends and project going forward just as conventional historical studies reconstruct what happened to us in centuries past.

The heart attack that struck Cole down in his office at General Electric’s Space Technology Center in Valley Forge, PA deprived us of much, but we do have the substantial legacy of a number of articles and monographs, along with three books, among which Islands in Space: The Challenge of the Planetoids, written with Donald Cox (Chilton Books, 1964) may stand out as the most influential. Andreas Hein, who is heading up the Project Hyperion worldship study for Icarus Interstellar, harks back to the inspiration of Cole in The Hollow Asteroid Starship: Dissemination of an Idea, published on the Icarus blog late last week.
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