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Summary: Profusely illustrated, Blueprint for Space covers flights of the imagination from ancient cave pictographs to the Apollo 11 Moon landing, indelibly engraved on the public mind since 1969. By the late 19th century, fantasies of space travel had seized the public imagination. Science fiction, beginning with Jules Verne's lunar tales, gained a widespread acceptance &, with the 1912 publication of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Under the Moons of Mars, reached a zenith of popularity sustained through the 1940s by pulp magazines. During the same period, scientific speculation about space & modern notions of spacecraft were taking shape in the prototypical forms of spaceships & submarines. It was in the early 20th century that space fiction began the transition to space fact. Strides in astronomy spurred scientists? desire to explore the reaches of the universe while, in more practical terms, the rocket, used for centuries for military & entertainment purposes, began to be pointed tentatively toward space. America & the world reached the golden age of space travel after World War II, as technological advances & successive Apollo missions thrust notions of space travel beyond science fiction into the realm of advertising, television, movies, magazines, & consumer goods. Blueprint for Space moves as well beyond the Apollo era & into the future. With contributors ranging from astronauts to historians, science fiction writers to scientists, the book seeks to stir again in the public mind our age-old yearnings toward the limitless skies.