Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America

8. “We Want to Play with Spaceships”: Popular Rocket Science in Action

8 “WeWanttoPlaywithSpaceships”: PopularRocketScienceinAction The urge to explore, to discover, to “follow knowledge like a sinking star,” is a primary human impulse which needs and can receive no further justification than its own existence. The search for knowledge, said a modern Chinese philosopher, is a form of play. Very well: we want to play with spaceships. —Arthur C. Clarke, “The Challenge of the Spaceship”1 In the summer of 1931 Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories of Super Science, and Wonder Stories each published letters to the editor from the American Interplanetary Society (AIS). Writing on its behalf, Secretary Nathan Schachner declared its goals and purpose. “To your readers,” he said, “we offer our active and associate memberships.” Society membership, he explained , gave “lovers of science fiction a chance to assist in the bringing to realization of the dream of all interplanetary travel.”2 Each letter included the society’s address to write for further information. Schachner’s call to the interplanetary cause reflected the different environment for imagining, pursuing, and producing science that science fiction ’s emergence enabled. A generation earlier a young Robert Goddard read and was inspired by scientific romances to pursue science, specifically rocket science, but his reading and subsequent research were, and continued throughout his career to be, solitary endeavors.3 Interwar science fiction similarly inspired its readers to science, but having also fostered a community for like-minded enthusiasts, their attempts to realize science’s imagined 252 Practice potential were collective and communal. While an older Goddard continued his research in private, the possibilities for a rocket science that was part information , part ingenuity, and part effort remained open to social invitation. Other rocket enthusiasts filled the public vacuum he left in his withdrawal, forming organizations, most notably the American Interplanetary Society, to pursue its cause. Not only inspired by science fiction’s stories, they used its letters columns to advertise and recruit members to their community. The AIS in particular also included science fiction editors and writers as well as enthusiasts among its original members and leaders. Like science fiction fans, their evolving practice confronted issues of legitimacy, authority, and an emerging distinction between amateurs and professionals, but while the issues were similar, their circumstances and conditions were neither parallel nor congruent. Successful science in the interwar period increasingly required social as well as material capital and, in the process, transformed its practice. This new, expert science emphasized its “making,” accumulating data and producing results that were neither final nor finished but that nevertheless marked rigorous and principled method. Although discovering extraordinary wonders still won acclaim, demonstrating proper method in achieving more ordinary outcomes, particularly those that were repeatable, also won acknowledgment , recognition, and their concomitant authority.4 While rocket enthusiasts, many of them amateurs, began endeavoring to build working rockets, those who realized more success tempered their efforts, delaying their larger aspirations to pursue its incremental, technical details. Moving from launching rockets entirely from scratch, they experimented with and tested rocket components, fuels, and materials. Such practice, however, still required “imagining” science in the same fashion that interwar science fiction proposed, articulating an inspiring vision to connect the data and results of science in the making to their eventual potential and final purpose. The enterprising efforts of amateur interwar rocket societies presented and represented popular rocket science in action. For most amateur rocketry groups in the interwar period, science was science fiction; its practice began with imagining science. This was doubly the case for the American Interplanetary Society.5 The society was formed in the spring of 1930 in New York City, and nine of its twelve original members were editors or writers for Hugo Gernsback’s Science Wonder Stories.6 David Lasser, the organization’s first president, was a graduate of the Mas- 253 “PlaywithSpaceships” sachusetts Institute of Technology and managing editor for Science Wonder and the other magazines in Gernsback’s Stellar Publications chain.7 Nathan Schachner, the AIS secretary; Fletcher Pratt; Laurence Manning; and William Lemkin, Ph.D., were relatively well-known science fiction writers.8 Charles P. Mason was associate editor of Science Wonder and editor of Everyday Science and Mechanics, another Gernsback publication, and he, Charles W. Van Devander, and G. Edward Pendray, the society’s vice president, also wrote science fiction under the pseudonyms of Epaminondas T. Snooks, Peter Arnold , and Gawain Edwards respectively.9 Adolph L. Fierst was Gernsback’s rewrite man.10 Rounding out the...