From the remarkable H. G. Wells, in a 1902 lecture at London's Royal Institution: "It is conceivable that some great unexpected mass of matter should presently rush upon us out of space, whirl sun and planets aside like dead leaves before the breeze, and collide with and utterly destroy every spark of life upon this earth... It is conceivable, too, that some pestilence may presently appear, some new disease, that will destroy not 10 or 15 or 20 per cent of the earth's inhabitants as pestilences have done in the past, but 100 per cent, and so end our race... And finally there is the reasonable certainty that this sun of ours must some day radiate itself toward extinction... There surely man must end. That of all such nightmares is the most insistently convincing. And yet one doesn't believe it. At least I do not. And I do not believe in these things because I have come to believe in certain other things--in the coherency and purpose in the world and in the greatness of human destiny....

Although it originally ran in the January, 1944 issue of Astounding, I first ran into A.E. Van Vogt's "Far Centaurus" in a collection of short stories called Destination: Universe (New York: Signet Books, 1952). It would be hard today to re-create the power of the story's opening, so imbued have we become with reality-stretching concepts, but "Far Centaurus" remains the ultimate illustration of the starship paradox: why send a slow ship when a faster one will surely be built that will one day overtake it? Van Vogt's crew arrives in Alpha Centauri space only to find that there is an inhabited planetary system waiting for them, one settled long after their departure from Earth by the much faster ships that were built later. The dialogue is a bit bumpy and the science occasionally awry (van Vogt seems to think there are four, rather than three Centauri stars, for example), but the story has retained its power to this day. Image: The first paperback edition of Destination: Universe....

Patrick Moore and illustrator David Hardy first collaborated in the early 1950s, and by 1954 had drawn up plans to produce a book filled with images of space stations, Mars missions and journeys to the outer Solar System. That book never came together, though the two produced others in the 1970s. Now Moore and Hardy have teamed up again with Futures: Fifty Years in Space, subtitled 'The Challenge of the Stars.' Its lovely images fall into the 'don't miss' category, ranging from the exploration of nearby planets to strange worlds around stars thousands of light years from Earth. We need the imagining of these places -- it's a key part of the drive to explore -- and astronomical artists have been delivering scenes no one alive may ever see for a long time now. Moore and Hardy's book reminds me of the excellence of Wyn Wachhorst's The Dream of Spaceflight, a non-illustrated meditation on growing up in the space age and the nature of our compulsion to move into new terrain. Wachhorst...

Presentations from NASA's "Risk and Exploration: Earth, Sea and the Stars" symposium are now online here. Replays of the various sessions will be available on NASA TV, according to NASA Watch. Particularly germane to the interstellar question is Session Four: Why We Explore.

Theologian and scientist John Wilkins realized in 1640 that it would be possible to fly to the moon. And then Wilkins did something that hadn't been done before: he designed a vehicle consistent with the principles of his time that could make the journey. Professor Allan Chapman of Oxford, who presented the story in a lecture at Gresham College in London, thinks Wilkins' work was the first serious investigation of manned flight to the moon. You can read more in Cromwell's moonshot: how one Jacobean scientist tried to kick off the space race in the Independent. Of course, it wouldn't have worked. Wilkins believed that gravity and magnetism were more or less the same thing, and that if you could reach an altitude of 20 miles, you would escape the effects of both, continuing on to sail easily to the moon. His vehicle was a flying chariot with feathered, flapping wings and gunpowder boosters. A brief excerpt: Although earlier philosophers and poets had written about visiting the Moon,...

Long-term thinking, so unusual in our era, was once commonplace, as the centuries-long construction of the great cathedrals of Europe reminds us. Or how about the remarkable Ise Shrine, a Shinto temple in Japan whose wooden structure is periodically rebuilt, and has been every twenty years for the last thousand. So the idea of constructing a star probe whose mission might last a century -- or a thousand years -- is not inconceivable, as long as we view it as a gift to the human future as much as a mission whose end we will see. But projects with a focus on 'the long now,' as Stewart Brand calls this multilayered view of time, can be found even in our own frenetic culture. Brand's book The Clock of the Long Now describes Danny Hillis' idea of a timepiece that will last for ten thousand years, and the Long Now Foundation envisions a 10,000-year library along the same lines. The most recent time-stretching project to come to my attention is the Deccan College dictionary of Sanskrit....

SpaceShipOne's splendid achievments have me re-visiting the days of my youth, when the most remarkable video I had ever seen was the jerky footage taken from a modified V-2 rocket as it lifted off some time after the war -- Walter Kronkite used this footage as the introduction to the CBS documentary series 'Twentieth Century.' You would see the launching pad dwindling below, then the scrub desert not all that far from where SpaceShipOne flew, and as the flight progressed, just a glimpse of a stunningly curved horizon that told you how far into the unfathomable black you had traveled. How exciting the future looked in those days, as I followed the flights of the X-15, a rocket vehicle whose altitude record SpaceShipOne exceeded today. I began to puzzle over the question of nostalgia for a future that never happened, an odd notion that makes me think of all the dreams we as a culture have assigned to the future at different times in our history. Then along comes a fine essay called...

The continuing success of SpaceShipOne -- and other ventures suggestive of future commercial space activities like Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and Robert Bigelow's Bigelow Aerospace -- bring me back to Freeman Dyson. It was in 1979, in his book Disturbing the Universe, that Dyson wrote about what he called the three 'romantic ages' of spaceflight. The first, beginning in 1927, was inaugurated by the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, Germany's Society for Space Travel, which met in Breslau that year. The VfR would include such luminaries as a young Wernher von Braun, and would make an enthusiastic contribution to early rocketry before its talents were hijacked by the German military. Dyson's second age was the era of Orion, Ted Taylor's nuclear spaceship. Working on an outrageous but theoretically plausible design that involved enormous shock absorbers cushioning nuclear blasts behind the vehicle, Orion's slogan was 'Saturn by 1970.' When in 1959 the decision was made not to use...