Thirty-five years later, residency on Roddenberry s final frontier amounts to a small and intermittently occupied Mir space station and periodic shuttle flights.
Colonization seems as far away today as it did then.
Howard McCurdy explores why in Space and the American Imagination. This is an interesting, is sometimes repetitious, book that covers the divergence of perception and reality that has marked the Space Age. McCurdy begins his story in the pre-Space Age, recounting how dreamers such as H.G. Wells and Jules Verne envisioned a region they could only see through telescopes. Although they often got the technical details wrong, their tales inspired scientists like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth, who set about the task of figuring out how to make these dreams a reality. Oberth would serve as a mentor to Wernher von Braun, the architect of the Saturn 5 moon rocket.