Before I consign my 1971 student notebook back to the attic, I couldn’t resist showing you this. I don’t remember drawing it but it seems to be nothing more than a doodle that got elaborated when I should have been working on my thesis. The space suits are from 2001: A Space Odyssey and from the Frank Hampson era of Dan Dare. The astro-physicist bears a slight resemblance to Hermann Bondi.
Had I drawn the Gamma Cygni Outpost as a more elongated asteroid, I could have claimed to have predicted the interstellar object Oumuamua, which passed through our solar system in 2017. I don’t know where the name Salodrin came from. I’m sure it’s not from any science-fiction story that I’d been reading.
Sadly, this is as far as the mission got, so the ‘beyond’ in the title is misleading. So often when I look back at the ideas that I worked on just for fun, I think, why didn’t I take this further?