Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei developed the scientific knowledge that became the underpinning of spaceflight. Edward Everett Hale in ‘‘The Brick Moon’’ and Jules Verne in ‘‘From the Earth to the Moon’’ dreamed and wrote about it. But finally in the last half of the twentieth century, it was the Americans and the Soviet Russians, locked in the throes of the Cold War, who accomplished it. A good case can be made that when historians look back at the twentieth century, the initial efforts of humankind to slip ‘‘the surly bonds of Earth’’ will play a dominant role
