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

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 conquering the cosmos through atomic power.  Sputnik energised the US rocket program that led to Apollo and the space shuttle.  And the space station has arrived – even if it does fall short of Clarke and Kubrick’s vision for ‘2001’.

Perhaps blinded by the blistering activity that characterised the period leading up to Apollo, it’s easy to forget that rocket ship vocabularly was a part of 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.

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, found themselves working at an embryonic NASA.