How Jacque Fresco envisioned 2006

A Trip to the Moon

If vacationers of the next 50 years or so jam up Miami Interplanetary Spaceport trying to get passage on a rocket to the moon, they may have to think in small measure a slight, goateed newcomer to the city. He is Jacque Fresco, a consulting psychologist who has spent many of his 40 years delving into the problems of the weird world of the future. Fresco arrived in Miami from Los Angeles bearing photographs of rocket models for use in several science-fiction movies. Three of his models are pictured on this page in his version of a trip to the moon in the year 2006. For interspace travel, the psychologist-inventor leans to the popular conceptions of a rocket ship. And he has drawn up a saucer-like space station using power generated by the sun, which Fresco believes is as possible as the man-made satellite scheduled to be launched next year in Florida. The space station he visualizes would be a sort of atmospheric filling station, holding large drums of fuel, probably ‘atomic fuel’. Spaceships would be drawn to the station by magnetism, he says. In the airtight stations, life would be only a little more complicated than on earth. He does see a gravity problem, but thinks electrostatic-shoes are dissolution. Food problems would be relatively simple if the world comes to bio cell tissue cultivation of meat and vegetables within 50 years.

In the earthbound world of 2006, he foresees flying arrowheads, elevators that move horizontally as well as vertically and cars that need no drivers. Fresco sees no reason not to expect an entire new electronic world within the next 50 years. “After all, we never expected to see atomic energy in our time” he suggests. He pictures an America of tomorrow connected by cross-country canals which will solve irrigation, flood control and transportation problems. His city of the future features National centers with buildings radiating out from the circular main structure. He envisions elevators that run underground from building to building, then up and down to various levels. Automobiles he sees as teardrop shapes topped with transparent plastic which automatically turns dark in the glare of sunlight. A photo-electric effect, similar to the negative process, makes possible the color change. Fresco’s cars would have proximity control, making collisions impossible, but the allowing the door to slide open and the seat to swing out to meet the driver when he approaches. A bottom worn by the motorist send out a signal which sets the door mechanics interaction, Fresco explains. Claiming already to have perfected an invention four wing de-icing, fresco expects the same principle to eliminate the need for windshield wipers. His theory is a probe which reaches out to measure the electrical charge in raindrop our snowflake and automatically sets the wing or windshield to take the…would be kept…never strike the object thus protected. Fresco pictures a turbo-jet helicopter which incorporates the plane body with the propeller blades for more speed. While the whole copter rotates, the pilot sits stationary in a central control chamber on wheels.

Fresco moved to Miami with his wife and three-year-old son about seven months ago, to escape Los Angeles smog. For the past seven years he had operated his scientific research laboratories in Los Angeles. It was there that he built his models of the world of tomorrow. He also worked as a movie technical adviser during the time. A Los Angeles concern now is perfecting his invention of stereoptician photographs, which do not require glasses, he says. Claiming a doctor’s degree in psychology from Sierra State University of Los Angeles, Fresco was a corporal with the Air Force design development division at Wright Field for 18 months, during World War II. He became interested in electronics while conducting psychological and physiological studies of vision and the working of the human mind, he says.