Shooting for the Stars: Captain Video, the Rocket Rangers, and America’s Conquest of Space

Abstract

In 1899, a boy named Robert Goddard climbed to the furthest reaches of a cherry tree, gazed at the limitless sky, and allowed his sense of wonder to contemplate just what was out there. Just the year before, he had been awestruck by H. G. Wells’ imaginative War of the Worlds (1898) in which Martians in fantastic machines descended upon mankind with a vengeance, and now, Goddard imagined how such applied science would be necessary to turn that fiction into fact and allow humankind to rise up and touch the surface of Mars. Thus the young Goddard, who would become the father of American rocketry, received his inspiration and his epiphany. His great achievements would be felt most keenly as the 1950s got underway. It was the era of televised rocketman series, when youngsters spent their nights not only looking at the stars and wondering about them, but like Goddard, contemplated the very means and methods by which to reach and conquer them. Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury echoed these imaginings in his introduction to the 1962 edition of R is for Rocket, recalling that, as a boy in the Midwest, he would go out and look at the stars at night and wonder about them, and guessing that every boy of his era had done likewise.

The child is father of the man.

—William Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up” (1802)