The first workable proposal for a space program is apparently Wernher von Braun’s Project Mars. Project Mars is a work of fiction, but it lays out a space program that could probably take humans to Mars with the technology of 1955.
Project Mars didn’t see print until 2006, although it’s technical appendix was published as The Mars Project. in 1953.
If you’re in or around Denver, Colorado, you should visit Wings Over the Rockies. This museum has a flock of jets, airplanes, rockets and flying things.
You will see aerospace-related things there you can see nowhere else, and you’ll see them close up.
This is the book that led me to a bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering:
In my post about Lester Del Rey’s 1956 sci-fi thriller Mission to the Moon, I criticized Del Rey’s cis-lunar flight orbital mechanics. Del Rey had his moon missions leaving from a polar orbit around the earth. This struck me as very odd - all real lunar and interplanetary missions have left from a more-or-less equatorial orbit, or maybe even fly directly into an interplanetary orbit. I thought Del Rey had completely misunderstood orbital mechanics, or had mis-read von Braun.
I was wrong.
