The Spaceflight Narrative: A Literary History of Leaving Earth

How three hundred years of storytelling and literature laid the foundations for spaceflight, from NASA’s first chief economist.

The Spaceflight Narrative explores the earliest origins of spaceflight as it emerged through storytelling in works of literature and commentary dating back over three hundred years. Spaceflight emerged first as a cultural product that inspired, motivated, and transferred knowledge to the earliest spaceflight technology pioneers. Written by NASA’s former chief economist Alexander MacDonald, the book covers the history of the conceptual development of spaceflight from the first story, written in the 1620s, of a person building a machine that goes to the Moon, all the way through to the 1890s when visions of spacefaring adventures across the solar system had become common.

The book highlights the largely unknown contributions to spaceflight of popular cultural figures like Edgar Allan Poe, Daniel Defoe, and John Jacob Astor IV, as well as some striking forgotten figures of history like Francis Godwin, John Leonard Riddell, and Florence Carpenter Diedonné.

We travel into space because enough people have believed in a story of humanity’s future that includes a future in space and have dedicated their resources and labors to make it happen. This book is the first to trace in detail the earliest versions of this story and to explore the origins of the spaceflight narrative that today has become a mainstream part of global culture and our shared imagined future.