Long before Sputnik 1 became humankind's first orbiting spacecraft in 1957 and before the first astronauts landed on the Moon in 1969, science fiction and science fact writers provided the theories, formulas, and ideas that gave birth to space travel. Some of these thinkers and storytellers wrote fancifully. Others expressed their ideas in precise mathematical equations with intricate scientific diagrams. All of them succeeded in helping to make space travel a reality by the mid-twentieth century.

Early Works of Science Fiction

Early works of science fiction relied more on whimsical solutions to spaceflight. During the seventeenth century, Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moon employed a flock of swans to transport a voyager to the lunar surface. Frenchman Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655) wrote space travel novels that described bottles of morning dew lifting people into the sky.

Far more serious scientific thought went into the works of two nineteenth-century space fiction...