Abstract
All Men dream; but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dustyrecesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; butthe dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act theirdreams with open eyes, to make it possible.(T.E. Lawrence [1926] 1991, 24)In the years following the end of the Second World War, the locus ofAmerican dreams of adventure and conquest shifted from the great Westernfrontier to the final frontier of space. The large-scale systems of industrialproduction and the new technologies of rocketry and nuclear powerdeveloped during the war had finally removed space travel from the realmsof science fiction into that of practical engineering. As a result, images of afuture in space became increasingly visible in American culture, culminatingin the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration(NASA) in the late 1950s. Paradoxically, much of the credit for popularizingthe idea of an American future in space belong to two German emigres,Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley. Between them, these two men dominatedAmerican popular science and science fiction. Their influential body of workis the foundation of what I call astrofuturism, a technological vision whichreorganized old narratives of conquest and Utopia around new technologies.
Published Version
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