Space: The final frontier?

The words ‘space: the final frontier' are spoken by the fictional Captain Kirk at the start of each episode of the original Star Trek series. The first programme went out in 1966 but within three years the series had been cancelled because of poor ratings. The decision was a hasty one as within a few years the repeats were pulling in global audiences of many millions.

Thirty years on and Star Trek – the story of the Starship Enterprise, its successors and predecessors, has become one of the world's largest franchises in the history of entertainment. Star Trek's popularity reflects our age-old fascination with space. We have been gazing up at the heavens since time immemorial and for thousands of years been recording our thoughts on what might be up there.

Much speculation has been fantastic but there are two instances where such conjecture has directly influenced the course of true spaceflight. In 1865 Jules Verne published De la Terre à la Lune. This novel, perhaps more than any other, inspired Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth to write their seminal spaceflight theories of the early twentieth century – without these works we might not have had Sputnik 1 in 1957 or the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon in 1969.

Verne made many errors in his story of humans travelling to the Moon; for example, people could never have survived the violent acceleration of being fired from a giant gun in a ‘manned' shell. What is remarkable, however, is how much he got right: his lunar explorers were launched from the east coast of Florida – so too were the Apollo astronauts. At the end of their mission Verne's intrepid crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean – so too did those of the Apollo missions.

© Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library

Today we would describe Verne's book as science fiction, which by influencing thinkers such as Tsiolkovsky and Oberth illustrates how creative an informed imagination can be. Wernher von Braun of the National Air and Space Administration (NASA) was very aware of this. As a young man he too had been affected strongly by the stories of Verne, H. G. Wells and others. They steered him to the start of his lifelong obsession with spaceflight and rocketry.

© Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library

In the early 1950s von Braun was in charge of the United States' army ballistic missile technical programme and, while the technological means for reaching space was within his reach, the political will to fund its development was not. He set about priming the nation and the politicians to the idea of spaceflight. In 1952 he teamed up with leading space artist, Chesley Bonestell, to produce a series of articles in Collier's Magazine on how humans could travel, use and live in space.

These articles caught the attention of Walt Disney who wanted to promote his new Disneyland theme park in California. He employed von Braun and his associates as consultants for three television films on space: Man in Space, Man and the Moon and Mars and Beyond. In those early days of television the effect of such programmes was huge and the American nation, including its politicians, was subtly but effectively weaned on the promise of spaceflight. In 1955 President Eisenhower had committed America to launching a satellite as part of the coming International Geophysical Year. This was only four months after 42 million people had watched Man in Space.