Word: space
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...telescope to study the heavens spawned a host of moon stories. The Man in the Moone, written by Francis Godwin, Bishop of Llandoff, and published in 1638, offered a hero who was carried to his destination on a frail raft pulled by swans. Unaware of the vacuum in space, the traveler had no difficulty breathing on the trip, but he did find that his weight lessened as he left the earth. That remarkable scientific insight by Godwin preceded Newton's discovery of the laws of gravity by many years...
...same scientific league with Somnium, a piece of science fiction by Johann Kepler, the famed 17th century astronomer and mathematician who explained the laws of planetary motion. Describing space flight, Kepler called the "initial movement," or launch, "most uncomfortable and dangerous, for the traveler is torn aloft as if blown up by gunpowder." He explained the bitter cold and airlessness of space, discussed weightlessness, and even suggested the equivalent of reverse thrust to land gently on the moon...
...classic science-fiction novel, From the Earth to the Moon, published in 1865, Jules Verne moved even closer to an accurate description of 20th century space flight. His man-carrying space projectile was shot from a giant cannon in Florida, reached an escape velocity of almost 25,000 m.p.h., became almost red-hot as it passed through the atmosphere, was steered by rockets, and circumnavigated the moon...
...until close to the turn of the century was man ready to turn his attention from fanciful to actual space flights. By 1898, a deaf Russian schoolteacher named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky had calculated the mathematical laws of rocket motion and begun to publish scores of articles about space travel. His descriptions of earth satellites, liquid-fuel rockets, space suits, solar energy and the eventual colonization of the solar system, stimulated Russia's insatiable appetite for space travel...
Soon, European amateurs and scientists alike were also experimenting with rockets, most of them inspired by The Rocket into Interplanetary Space, a booklet published in 1923 by Rumanian Professor Hermann Oberth. German rocketeers eventually constructed a liquid-fuel rocket strikingly similar to Goddard's. By 1942, under the direction of Walter Dornberger and Wernher Von Braun, it had evolved into the dread V2, the first space-age rocket. After the successful test-firing of the V2, Dornberger turned to Von Braun and shouted exultantly: "Do you realize what we accomplished today? Today the spaceship was born...