READERS of a certain age may remember Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s sci-fi puppet shows—“Supercar”, “Fireball XL5”, “Stingray”, “Thunderbirds” and “Captain Scarlet”—filmed, as the Andersons put it, in “Supermarionation”. Those who remember “Captain Scarlet” in particular may find one of the pictures here eerily familiar. English Electric’s Fighter Jet Take-Off Platform, a flying airfield, is not quite the Cloudbase from which the immortal captain operated. But it was intended, like its fictional counterpart, to launch and receive planes while itself airborne. It would have taken off and landed vertically in, say, a jungle clearing otherwise inaccessible to the aircraft piggybacking on it.

English Electric was one of the firms merged into what eventually became BAE Systems, and BAE has recently been through its archives and publicised some of the projects dreamed up in the glory days of the 1960s, when designers’ imaginations were allowed to run riot with little consideration of practicality or budget. MUSTARD (the Multi-Unit Space Transport And Recovery Device), for example, was designed by the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC). It could pass for something out of “Fireball XL5” or “Supercar”—though it also resembles Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo which will, Virgin hopes, soon be taking paying passengers to the edge of space. It would have been a three-stage space-plane, though only one stage would have made it into orbit. The other two were reusable boosters.

An Anderson version of the “Jumping Jeep”, also by BAC, might easily have emerged from the pod carried by Thunderbird Two on one of its missions for International Rescue. Continuing the vertical-take-off theme, the Jeep would have had 12 fans whose downdraft would have helped it over obstacles such as ditches. And Hawker Siddeley’s Intercity Vertical-Lift Aircraft, intended as a passenger plane that could land in urban airports not much bigger than pocket handkerchiefs, looks like the sort of thing that would have whisked Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward, International Rescue’s London agent, from her penthouse in Mayfair to New York for a day’s shopping.

Sadly, none of these fantasies made it into metal. They remain as fictional as the Andersons’ puppet shows. Too expensive. Or too noisy. Or simply too silly. (Why build a vertical-take-off airfield when you can build a vertical-take-off fighter, as Hawker Siddeley showed with its world-beating Harrier?) But that is the strange thing about the future. Nothing ages faster than yesterday’s dreams of tomorrow.