Thirty-inch spheres, packed with intricate sensing instruments, will be launched to circle the globe within the most densely populated latitudes and at an altitude of about 250 miles.

THE INFORMATION they gather about conditions at the extreme outer limits of our atmosphere will be fed back to the earth in a steady stream of radio signals.

How hot is it 250 miles up? How hot is the cosmic radiation? What is the effect of the earth's magnetic field? Is meteor dust a threat to plans for interstellar travel?

These and a host of other perplexing questions will be answered by these tiny artificial "moons" circling the earth.

On these answers will depend to a great extent the design of space ships for Jacque Fresco's proposed trip

to the moon in 2006 A.D.

conception of a rocket ship.

Almost identical models may be found in the laboratories at the University of Michigan.

There they are being used to solve problems of packing the most instrumentation, designed to answer the most questions, within the strict limitations of space, form and weight imposed by the necessity of getting the satellites aloft to their assigned orbits.

But some of these space vehicles will be more like the popular idea of a flying saucer, Fresco believes. He has designed one (above) which would serve as an interplanetary filling station.

It would be stocked with huge drums of fuel — probably atomic. There space travelers can pull up to the "pumps" on the outer rim of the saucer and take on enough go-juice to take them several millions of miles along their way. 

LIFE IN these outer space fueling stations will be quite like life on earth itself, Fresco thinks. But then he has some ideas on what life on earth will be like by then.

The interstellar "gas pump" attendants will be able to overcome the problem of an existence without gravity by the simple expedient of wearing electrostatic shoes.

Food will be no problem, Fresco says, because they will grow it themselves on a built-in space farm. 

As soon as a few problems of photosynthesis are licked this will become the accepted means of food production.

HERE ON earth we will be riding elevators that go sidewise as well as up and down, whisking us from building to building and up or down to the desired floor.

Our automobiles will be plastic teardrops with photosensitive tops that turn black when struck by the sun's rays and clear when the rays are absent at night or during cloudy weather.

There won't be any collisions by then because all cars will be equipped with proximity controls, a simple elaboration of the proximity fuses used in present-day aerial missiles.

Each motorist will wear a tiny button — electronic, of course — that is tuned to his own car's personal wave length. As he approaches, the car doors will slide open for him.

All that is required is a further adaptation of the principle used in the modern electronic garage door opener.

MOST OF THE wonders of 2006 will be further refinements of the commonplace of 1956, Fresco believes. But one of the gadgets he is working on seems somewhat unworldly.

He plans to eliminate the windshield wiper. A probe would extend forward to measure the electrical charge in an oncoming raindrop or snowflake.

This information would be relayed to a device that would, in turn, give the windshield a similar charge.

Since like electrical charges repel like, the snow or rain would be electrostatically repelled. The windshield would remain dry and clear.

A similar principle reduces the fly ash, smoke and chemicals from the smokestacks of our Detroit industries.

HOLLYWOOD thought enough of Fresco's futuristic ideas to hire his Scientific Research Laboratories to make models for movies of space flight.

The models he provided the movie studios are those pictured here.

We are on the threshold of a true electronic age as well as the age of interplanetary flight, says Fresco.

Its possibilities are limited only by our own so-far earth-bound imaginations.

What's so wonderful, for example, about a trip to the moon to a generation that has already seen the development of television, radar, "robot brains" — and Jacque Fresco?