Space exploration has always been the province of dreamers: The human imagination readily soars where human ingenuity struggles to follow. A Voyage to the Moon—a satirical account of a space voyage, often cited as the first science fiction story—was written by the real Cyrano de Bergerac in 1649, just 40 years after Galileo’s first telescopic observations of the moon. Cyrano was dead and buried for a good three centuries before the first manned rockets started to fly.
In 1961, when President Kennedy declared that the United States would send a man to the moon by the decade’s end, those words, too, had a dreamlike quality. They resonated with optimism and ambition in much the same way as the most famous dream speech of all, delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. two years later. By the end of the decade, both visions had yielded concrete results and transformed American society. And ...
