The Outer Periphery: A Visual Catalog of Amateur Spacecraft Designs from the US Patent Office

by Andy Sturdevant

A collection of over a dozen patent illustrations for functioning spacecraft, designed by amateurs, hobbyists, sci-fi enthusiasts, engineers, and cranks. Ranging from “somewhat plausible” to “completely off the wall,” these drawings beautifully capture the delirious optimism of the space age. In the years between Sputnik and Challenger, sitting in your garage drafting a design for, say, a rotating spacecraft that produced an electric dipole on four rotating spherical conducting domes perturbing a uniform spherical electric field seemed not just like an interesting hobby, but an obligation to the future of humankind.

35 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2023

About the author

Andy Sturdevant writes and makes art in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gem of a book—well designed and succinctly edited—The Outer Periphery contains of dozens of designs for spacecraft from 1960 to 2024. The patent applications come largely from engineers, some working in the aerospace industry and including plans from a former astronaut who walked on the moon. The patent applications come from the U.S., Russia, Japan, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Hong Kong, and all were either granted patents or received approval for patent rights upon receipt of additional paperwork. (In the case of a couple of plans presented here, the final paperwork was never filed. Instead, the applications seemed to be put out there for the public good, in case anybody wishes to further pursue the crafts’ development.)

Often included are thumb-nail bios of the applicants and some of the abstracts from the applications, none of which are more abstruse than that submitted for the Space Based Magnetic Vortex Accelerator and Methods of Use, “having one or more sections of magnetic material configured as a conduit with a flightpath therethrough for the spacecraft, a magnetic coil field generator electrically connected to said one or more sections of magnetic material configured to generate a space based magnetic field via said one or more sections of magnetic material, a power plant electrically connected to said magnetic coil field generator, said power plant generator, one or more magnetic field receivers affixed to the spacecraft, said one or more magnetic field receivers configured to magnetically engage said space based magnetic field.” But that one is an outlier.

Andy Sturdevant, who compiled these illustrations for patent applications, takes delight in their ways of depicting the ideas explained, from noting trends in lettering and numbering on patents, which tend to fall into two categories: those for the design of a spacecraft shape and those for spacecraft function (i.e., how the mechanism will work). The Outer Periphery also has a chapter on design John Quincy St. Clair, responsible for six patent applications collected here, including one for a Full Body Teleportation System.

Clearly a work of work of joy and care, The Outer Periphery is great for artists, designers, illustrators, and, well, engineers fascinated by untried ideas.

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