Space: The final frontier?

We have been looking at the night skies for thousands of years.

We have used the stars to steer by, to work out our calendars and even to try and predict the future! Often, though, we just wonder what is out there.

© Cover illustration, copyright 1965, Scholastic Inc. All rights reserved.

When Galileo pointed his telescope at Jupiter in 1610 and discovered four moons orbiting this huge planet he had proof that ours was not the only world in space.

Writers such as Cyrano de Bergerac and Samuel Brunt went on to imagine ways of travelling to these worlds. Their ‘spacecraft' appear fanciful to us but paved the way for Jules Verne and his best-selling From the Earth to the Moon. It was this thoroughly researched nineteenth century science-fiction novel which, despite technical flaws, inspired people to devise ‘real' spaceflight in the twentieth century.

This story looks at how human beings have breached the ‘final frontier' and learned how to reach and travel in space.