Kids dreamt of being astronauts, sailing the solar winds to Mars (or at least the moon [or at at least a few miles up for a few weeks while trying to repair a busted telescope or bring Fritos and vodka to the bored-ass crew of the International Space Station]). Now, thanks to funding-cuts, a relatively cruddy economy, and a general lack of interest in cool shit like rockets, NASA has become a well-funded think-tank that might get by sending probes to Uranus and devising new ways to grow cannabis in zero-G.
To be fair, kids today might still be able to train as astronauts, but they'll be flight attendants aboard Virgin Spacelines flights shuffling sararimen between Tokyo and LA; or miners sucking palladium from asteroids for Halliburton. But hey, maybe NASA will maintain relevancy by being the FAA of space.
Below is a scanned ad from a 1986 issue of OMNI promoting the Young Astronaut Council, which was founded in 1984 as a sort of booster organization for math, science, and all things cosmological. The council seems to be defunct, as its website is no longer responding. The last working snapshot was taken on September 8, 2009, but all others since point to a blank page.
If only they'd known better, this ad would have featured an IBM PC...with rockets.
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