English Electric's Fighter Jet Take-Off Platform, a flying airfield, is not quite the Cloud-base from which the immortal captain operated.

Those who remember "Captain Scarlet" in particular may find one of the pictures here eerily familiar.

Readers of a certain age may remember Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's sci-fi puppet shows -- "Supercar", "Fireball XL5", "Stingray", "Thunderbirds" and "Captain Scarlet" -- filmed, as the Andersons put it, in " SuperMarionation ".

MUSTARD (the Multi-Unit Space Transport And Recovery Device), was designed by the British Aircraft Corporation -- BAC). It could pass for something out of "Fireball XL5" or "Supercar" though it also resembles Virgin Galactic's Spaceship Two which will, Virgin hopes, soon be taking paying passengers to the edge of space.

But it was intended, like its fictional counterpart, to launch and receive planes while itself airborne.

It would have taken off and landed vertically in say, a jungle clearing otherwise inaccessible to the aircraft piggybacking on it.

An Anderson version of the "Jumping Jeep", also by BAC, it would have had 12 fans whose downdraft would have helped it over obstacles such as ditches.

It would have been a three-stage space-plane, though only one stage would have made it into orbit. The other two were reusable boosters.

And Hawker Siddeley's Intercity Vertical- Lift Aircraft, intended as a passenger plane that could land in urban airports not much bigger than pocket handkerchiefs.

Too expensive. Or too noisy. Or simply too silly. (Why build a vertical-take-off airfield when you can build a vertical-take-off fighter, as Hawker Siddeley showed with its world-beating Harrier?)

Sadly, none of these fantasies made it into metal. They remain as fictional as the Andersons' puppet shows.

But that is the strange thing about the future. Nothing ages faster than yesterday's dreams of tomorrow. Thank you.