From the Earth to the Moon: Passage Direct in 97 Hours saw its first American publication in 1869. The author, an obscure Frenchman named Jules Verne writing only his second novel, saw fit to place the launchsite of his moon capsule holding three men in Florida. Exactly 100 years later, the American moon program (confusing named Apollo, a sun god, probably because moon deities were unacceptably female, and hey, it's all up, isn't it?) stuck a capsule holding three men on top of a rocket lifting off from Florida.

For all of those 100 years, and the almost half century since, rocketships have been the prime symbol of the Future. Space was our destiny, the New Frontier, the playground for the stoic loner too crowded in the bustling cities, too independent to play by bureaucratic rules (except for all those times he was a Captain in the Space Navy), too stalwart and daunting to face down any enemy lesser than a one-eyed, one-horned, flyin' purple people eater.

Verne shot his capsule of a giant cannon, so he isn't technically the father of the rocket, not that anyone cares. Nor did it matter. Rockets are the one product of the Future that stem from science fiction and they appear long before my starting point of 1893 or Wells' Martian invasion of 1898. The indefatigable Edward Bleiler found Elbert Perce's Gulliver Joi: His Three Voyages, one of which, written in 1852, is in a very rocket-like device to the planet Kailoo. The Dominion of 1983 forecasted a technology-transformed Canada a hundred years hence as depicted by a "Ralph Centennis." "Rocket ships span the continent," Bleiler says, "making intercontinental flights at a mile per second." By the 20th century an index entry for rockets in SF would be "all of them." To this day, SF is synonymous with rocketships, an albatross around its neck that was hung there by space-happy writers.

It would not surprise me too much if somebody in the future tried to make out a case that during the years 1953 and 1954 a number of “space-happy” scientists (to use a term coined by Robert A. Heinlein) carried out a conspiracy to talk their governments out of tax money for their wild schemes. Scientific institutions, public lecture halls, the magazines, the newspapers, the radio waves, and the television channels were full of space-travel and satellite talk.