The Public’s Imagination
Can you imagine launching a spaceship—manned by an American family—to travel the outer limits of space in the next five years? Maybe you can imagine it because of a movie or a TV show you saw. Or maybe you think it’s impossible. But do you think technology will make it possible in 10 years? In 20 years? What about in 100 years?

Before society can do anything big—like sending a man to the moon—people have to be able to imagine it happening first. In 1949, only 15% of all Americans believed that men in rocket ships would be able to travel to the moon within 50 years. How was public opinion changed? At the Newseum’s "Dateline Moon: The Media and the Space Race" exhibit, you will find out how President John Kennedy, magazine articles and even Walt Disney films all helped to change the public’s perception about what the space program could accomplish.

Way back in 1926, Amazing Stories—a popular science fiction magazine of the time—used the slogan "Extravagant fiction today, cold fact tomorrow." But when is tomorrow? Sometimes people can imagine going to new planets or inventing new technologies faster than scientists can do the work. Is this what happened during the space race? Or did scientists come close to flying a man to the moon before people imagined it was possible?

When you’re at the Newseum, you can be a reporter covering the space race. Examine different artifacts from the past and see how the race to be the first country to get a man on the moon happened.

Questions to Think About at the Newseum
How did people imagine space travel?
How did Collier’s magazine write about rocket ships before the first trip to the moon?
How did Walt Disney portray astronauts in his films?
When did the public start to believe that man would travel to the moon?

Talk of space travel in the 1960s led people and reporters to imagine great things. In fact, they imagined some things that scientists could not yet make into reality. What do you notice in magazines and films of the 1950s that did and did not come true in the 1960s?