Long before the Cold War and the Space Race, people dreamed of traveling to places beyond Earth, like islands in a mythical sea, and they persist now that the Cold War is over. Dreams change, however, with the centuries’ achievements and the day’s technology and society. An odd mixture of myth, politics, and scientific knowledge sets the goals. More than five decades after the first robotic Moon missions, we have seen enough cycles of interest and dispassion about space exploration to see why we sometimes advance and at other times fail. To grasp the difference between the times in which Apollo was born versus later thrusts into space (and to understand why some succeed), momentarily let us return to the beginning.

Humans have dreamed of space flight for thousands of years. In second century AD Syria, Lucian of Samosata wrote of a sailing ship blown hundreds of kilometers skyward to an inhabited, cultivated, and luminescent island: the Moon. After war between the kings of the Moon and of the Sun, the ship and sailors return home to the Mediterranean. Before rocketry’s importance was realized, imaginative means were proposed to reach the Moon. In eleventh-century Persia, Firdausí wrote of King Kai-Kaus who “fetched four vigorous eagles and bound them firmly to the throne” to ride them to the Moon, much like the hero in Lucian’s other space fiction (Icaro-Menippus), whereas in 1630 the protagonist of Johannes Kepler’s Somnium is transported by demons. In Francis Godwin’s 1638 The Man in the Moone, the traveler exploits a flock of magic geese to find himself on the Moon with its human inhabitants (Christians, no less). In 1657 Cyrano de Bergerac’s hero reached the Moon propelled by rockets (fireworks, actually). In 1870 Edward Hale described a “brick moon” to be built in Earth’s orbit as a navigational aid for shipping.