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ESSAY
Previously presented on the RED ALERT! website
Published on the Spectrum Headquarters website with the gracious permission of Mike Adamson |
WHERE WAS GLENN FIELD?
Following the launch of the first issue, I was contacted by England's
Nigel Preece (who bought the very first copy!), with some fascinating
information about real-life "Glenn Fields." Nigel said: "I noticed in the
editorial for the book that you were debating where to place Glenfield.
Well, get this, my Father... was stationed in a small village in
Leicestershire during the 2nd world war which doubled as a storage area
for army vehicles. It was, and still is today, called Glen Field.
"It will make for a superb launch site in about 2028 for the Zero-X, and
may even make a good site for the HQ of the S.S.E.C., as well as be close
enough for Penny to get there in time to go to the press conference and
attend the launch. The north sea is not too far away, so there will be a
suitable jetty for FAB1 to shoot off and into the sea to shoot down the
Hood's copter!
"However, if you prefer, I have it on good authority that there is a
Glenfield in North Dakota, not to mention one in your own part of the
world, just a few miles south west of Bankstown, New South Wales, or the
Glenfield just north of Auckland in NZ. If anything the NZ one is the best
because of the proximity of the water."
I had no idea! I checked some maps (thanks for the files, Nigel!) and
indeed located the Australian and New Zealand Glenfields.
The latter is a suburb of North Shore City, Auckland, and there is a small
airfield just west of the city, on another peninsula. But going by the
scale of the map and the kind of runway Zero-X would require, "Glenn
Field" would stretch from somewhere in Waitemata Harbour right across the
peninsula into Rangitoto Channel...! The Australian Glen- field lies 14km
south-west of Bankstown, a suburb of Sydney, and is just outside the city
in hill country. The Zero-X runway would stretch halfway from Sydney
Airport to Bankstown Aerodrome!
The North Dakota location is out because of proximity to the sea and the
apparently lush environment of the film (green trees by the roads, green
hills and countryside backing the spaceport). England? It's tempting, but
all those America accents give the game away. Besides, the UK couldn't
muster the funding or interest to put up a capsule, never mind the kind of
investment even an international part-share in Zero-X would cost...
Alan Fennell named a location in the Zero-X comic strip,
and not surprisingly he placed it in Florida, as the natural descendant of
the modern day space program. The sunshine and lushness match up, the
accents are appropriate, and though there are no ranges of hills such as
we see backing the launch on the "rolling sky," nor coastal hills and
cliffs such as the chase with The Hood was staged against, it's a fair
bet.
Looking for flare, Jack Heston placed Glenn Field in Texas, another
traditional home of the US space program, which similarly matched the warm
weather, proximity to the sea, and generally interesting terrain.
Spaceports are usually close to the sea so ships can launch over
essentially unpopulated parts of the world, a safety measure. Most
spaceports are on the east coast of continents, and ships launch to the
east so as to take advantage of the inherent rotational kick of the
turning planet. The closer the equator, the bigger the available free
acceleration.
On the naming of the spaceport, Gerry was probably naming it in tribute to
John Glenn, the first American in space, but there is an extra tribute
that could be involved, if we wanted to see it this way; Glenn Curtis was
the founder of one of America's oldest aviation companies, around 1910,
and products from the firm he created are still around today, long after
the absorption of the company in the great cycles of corporate take-over
that have so remodelled the face of aerospace. Who knows, "New World
Aircraft" could be a descendant of all the present-day combines. And in
the fictionalised closing credits of Thunderbirds Are Go!,
"Jim Glenn, President of New World Aircraft and designer of Zero-X" is
cited, so there's another angle!
READ OTHER TEXTS FROM MIKE ADAMSON
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