1961 - Lee and Kirby create the Fantastic Four. While there was clearly a government connection to Prof. Reed Richards' project to get to the stars "before the Russians," much of the funding for the project came from Reed's inheritance. This was not the first private citizen sending a mission to space in fiction - certainly Heinlein's groundbreaking tales came first - but it was the one I met first as a kid. And even though everything went awry in that first and only flight of Reed Richards' prototype, it always stuck with me. Here were four adventurers who wanted to go Out There, led by a man with a vision.
1979 - Salvage One. I suspect few remember this series, starring Andy Griffith and Joel Higgins (later the dad on Silver Spoons), but it was the kind of show a kid with his head in the stars - one just discovering Star Trek and comic books - might like. Griffith was a junkman in LA who came up with a nutty scheme: build a spaceship and go to the moon to collect all the salvage left there by the moon missions. Seems kind of dopey. And it was. but I remember it fondly. No, this was not a visionary image of Man in Space, but was a vision of making space into something that everyone could get to. If a junkman could get a spaceship of his own, why, anyone could! And certainly the notion of making money from space travel was a wild one.
The show lasted a year, and vanished. But it remained in my head. The homespun Andy Griffith, sitting in a homemade mission control, while trying to cope with a very befuddled FAA agent and a government that just didn't know what to make of him, still bounces around my head.
2003 - A new Fantastic Four comic, part of Marvel's Ultimate line, is introduced. But writers Mark Millar and Brian Michael Bendis leave out the space race aspects, sating that today's kids don't get energized by the space program at all. Hard to say that they are wrong, I think at the time. Other pseudo-scientific ideas are used. Space is left behind.
Today - I find myself wondering about the inspirations that Burt Rutan and Paul Allen have. Allen also helped to found the new Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, a sign of the major role he assigns SF in creating the visions of tomorrow. Did either of these men follow Heinlein's DS Harriman, or Reed Richards, as they spent their own money to shape a space program to their liking? Did either get any ideas about how space travel could be profitable from Harriman, title character in "The Man Who Sold the Moon" or from Andy Griffith's unlikely junkman?
I can't help but wonder if the writers of the Ultimate version of the Fantastic Four might have missed the boat. After all, Bendis and Millar have now passed the book into writer Warren Ellis. Ellis wrote "Orbiter" for Vertigo, a paen to the space program that speaks broadly of the wonder it inspired in him as a child. Today, space travel seems perhaps a little less unlikely, even if the way there is still bumpy and the tech is not perfect. I can't help but think that a new Reed Richards might have found himself among the Burt Rutans and Paul Allens of the world, and that even if his mission were to fail again, he would have perhaps ignited the imaginations of another generation.
But today we at least have SpaceShipOne - a slightly unwieldly name but reminiscent of Heinlein's Space Station One - and a pilot named Mike Melvill, who got his ship to behave and did what no one ever did before in earning civilian astronaut wings.
Sometimes, we turn to fiction to fuel the imagination. Sometimes, the real world surprises us and does the job as well.
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