Nearly half a century ago, Collier's magazine brought a team of scientists and space artists together for a series of now-famous illustrated articles that had an enormous influence on the generation that would help build the International Space Station.

In 1951, Collier's was one of the giants of periodical publishing, numbering its weekly readership in the millions. Rightly suspecting that the U.S. audience was eager to hear about space and space travel, managing editor Gordon Manning bet that a San Antonio conference on "Physics and Medicine of the Upper Atmosphere" would draw the crowned heads of astronautics and rocketry, and sent a writer to attend.

At the conference, held at the U.S. Air Force School of Aviation Medicine, the artist gravitated to Wernher von Braun, who was both one of the foremost rocket experts in the world and a long-time advocate of space travel.

Although Bonestell's friends voiced some political concerns, von Braun's experience and dedication to the cause of exploration impressed the painter enormously, leading him to point the German scientist out to the Collier's editors as "the man to send our rocket to the moon."

The two men were the center of a second conference held at the magazine's New York offices a week later. Joining them were many of the great names of mid-century space science and illustration: Willy Ley, who had collaborated with both von Braun and Bonestell on occasion; astronomer Fred Whipple; international law expert Oscar Schachter; artists Fred Freeman and Rolf Klep; and physicist Joseph Kaplan.

Beginning with the March 22, 1952, issue, this team produced "The Collier's Space Program," six lavishly-illustrated articles over two years' time that brought all aspects of space travel down to earth and, in so doing, inaugurated the first and greatest of the U.S. manias for rocketry and spacecraft. Every element of von Braun's integrated space program -- from the first piloted rockets to a mission to Mars -- was laid out in painstaking detail in issues that would later become collector's items.

Some of the elements of the "Collier's Space Program," like the creation of crewed rockets, a reusable space shuttle and the first landings on the moon, have already been achieved. With a few trial runs behind us, we soon will be a step closer to a permanent crewed space station -- the next stage in the magazine's imaginary conquest of other planets -- once the International Space Station goes on line.

At a planned size of 356 x 290 feet [118 x 97 meters], the ISS will favorably compare to von Braun's 250-foot [83-meter]-diameter ring-shaped station, which the Collier's team designed to hold 80 people.

However, unlike the ISS, the Collier's station would have been built exclusively by U.S. funds. Given estimates that such a structure could be built by 1967, the total bill would have come in at around $4 billion in 1952 dollars.

Also unlike the international station, von Braun's rotating spoked wheel would generate the illusion of about a third of Earth gravity, bridging the gap between earth and moon not only spatially but in terms of the apparent weight of objects and crew.

The Collier's station would then have served as a launching point for more extensive missions to the moon, followed after "a century or more," as the otherwise optimistic von Braun wrote, by a trip to Mars.