I don’t use that term pejoratively, indeed, I consider myself one, and I’ve been one for as long as I can remember. Long before Sputnik I was reading science fiction and speculating about voyaging to the stars. I devoured everything I could about space, and especially the coming age of space exploration, and it was coming. None of us had the slightest doubt about that. I know I’m not that much different in that respect from anyone else who posts or lurks here. The coming space age guided my studies and my career. It wasn’t just an outside interest.

Space groupies have been around a long time. Nineteenth century SF writers wrote of interplanetary voyages, and the three scientific pioneers of space travel, the guys who actually worked out the math and built working prototypes, Tsiolkovsky, Goddard and Oberth, were all born prior to the twentieth century. Serious engineering and scientific speculation continued under the German Spaceflight Society (1927), the American Interplanetary Society (1930), and the British Interplanetary Society (1933-and still in business).

By the time I was born, rockets designed and built by the second generation of space enthusiasts, like Werner von Braun, were already a practical reality, in that most practical theater of all–war. All of the major scientific and engineering principles of astronautics and planetary navigation, such as staging, transfer orbits and orbital maneuvers had already been worked out in detail, long before any hardware had actually been launched into the vacuum of space. The space groupies weren’t just pencil-necked geeks or socially inept science nerds. The human assault on space was conceived and planned long before Sputnik. The latter event, which I had taken as a personal vindication as a ten year old, was big news to most people but not to me. I was wondering why it had taken them so long.

Space travel is routine now, anyone in his forties or younger can’t remember a time before men walked on the moon. Using the history of aviation as a model, we are about as far away in time from Sputnik as the first commercial jet airliners were from the Wright Brothers. But we still have space groupies.

What drives these folks, or perhaps I should say, what drives us? What is it about the Wild Black Yonder that inspires such interest, such dedication? Many of us here started our studies and careers based on the dream of space. What drives us, and what inspires those whose obsession and determination to go into space allowed them to make such questionable moral choices, such as the team that built the V-2? I’m not talking about just the decision to work in the Nazi weapons program, but to continue to do so after its reliance on slave labor and mass murder was common knowledge.

I am not making moral judgments here, I wasn’t alive during those days and I cannot guess how I would have responded to those same choices and circumstances–and pressures, if they had been offered to me. I suspect I would have rationalized it away just like they did. I simply wonder just what price are we willing to pay to travel to the stars. That was not just another wartime engineering program, it was intimately tied up with dreams and obsessions, that we, to a certain extent, share. I don’t think it can be realistically denied that the early German academic and enthusiast interest in rocketry, the fandom of its day, played a major role in that country’s development of those weapons.

Sure, we had the Manhattan Project, but that weapon was built by free men.