Wilma Deering

In a piece for the Washington Post this week, movie director James Cameron gave his analysis of the NASA budget, and reminded us of the inspirational importance of space exploration; with the reciprocal suggestion that, when it comes to winning popular support for space, “rockets really do run on dreams”.

Inspired!

The inspirational power of space and rocket ships is nothing new, and we can learn from history in properly valuing the less tangible motivating, emotional, and  cultural impacts of future programs.

In the 1950s and 60s – a ‘Golden Age of American Science ‘ – folk thrilled at the prospect of great wheel-shaped space stations in orbit, and cosmic conquest through atomic power.  Sputnik energised the US rocket program: leading to Apollo, man on the moon, and the space shuttle.  And the space station did indeed arrive – impressive, despite falling short of Clarke and Kubrick’s vision for ’2001′.

And yet, perhaps blinded by the blistering activity that characterised the period leading up to Apollo and beyond, it’s easy to forget that a rocket ship vocabularly was already well embedded in the popular psyche long before the space race of the cold war years.

Buck Rogers first appeared in the magazine Amazing Stories in 1928, and as a newspaper comic strip in 1929.

Buck Rogers comic from the 1940s (picture credit: lambiek.net)

The outer space exploits of Buck and his futuristic companion Wilma captivated and fired the scientific and technological imagination of a generation of young people.  Some became the scientists and engineers of the Golden Age, and some, like my father-in-law, who as a schoolboy in 1940s Glendale made the copper artwork above, would find their own piece of space at an embryonic NASA.