The basic archetypical stories for Western cultures are the Iliad and the Odyssey, first composed between 800 and 600 BCE. The Odyssey, recounting 20 years of travel by Odysseus (Ulysses, in Latin), is a prime example.

In the Abrahamic Bible, the first book, Genesis, is immediately followed by Exodus: departure happens soon after Creation. The story of Moses leading the Jewish people to the Promised Land – and the belief in the existence of a Promised Land that is rightfully theirs – is an unfinished narrative of travel and travail in Western cultures.

In Christian belief, the Wise Men traveled far to find the Messiah.The Muslim faithful must travel to Mecca. There appears to be an almost irresistible urge in certain cultures for humans Boldly To Go – or at least for some people, usually men, to go.

Stories and examples of heroic travel to unknown places do not exist in some cultures. They instead are told in effect to stay home, to get along with their neighbors, and to mind their own business. The urge boldly to go is found in some humans and cultures, but by no means in all. In those cultures where exploring is deeply rooted in myths, “going boldly” is almost irresistible, while in others with no such, stories, it seems almost impossible to ignite.

Astronautics—the technology of exploring space—is unique among all the sciences because it originated in art and literature. Long before engineers and scientists took the possibility of spaceflight seriously, virtually all of its aspects were explored by artists and writers. And long before the scientists themselves were taken seriously, the arts kept the torch of interest burning.

The first event took place in 1610 when the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei turned his telescope toward the sky and discovered that the planets weren’t just a special class of wandering stars. They were real worlds. Venus showed phases just like the Moon, and Mars had dusky markings. Jupiter possessed four tiny moons of its own, like a miniature solar system.

The second great event—creating the technology—occurred in 1783. Two Frenchmen, brothers Étienne and Joseph Montgolfier, invented the hot-air balloon. For the first time, human beings were able to ascend above Earth farther than they could jump. This invention launched avalanches of speculative literature about the possibility of traveling beyond Earth and what might be found on the other worlds. Science and technology had conquered the sky. It had to be only a matter of time before they conquered space as well.

Most science fiction is more about technology than it is about science. It is about how humans might behave and how society might change if/as new technologies come along. Often the “science” in science fiction is quite unscientific, though the behavior said to result from new technologies is sometimes more plausible. But much science fiction is bad social science as well as bad natural science – and not very good fiction either. Science fiction and space fiction thus exhibit a tension between two modes of knowing – one scientific, the other fictional.

Some science fiction is closer to science than to fiction, and thus often boring though factual. Most science fiction is closer to fiction than to science, thus exciting but misleading. The best science fiction finds a balance between both.

One of the first to do so was American author George Tucker. The spaceship in his 1827 novel, A Voyage to the Moon, used a mysterious substance that canceled Earth’s gravity. Tucker gave great thought to the actual conditions that might exist beyond Earth’s atmosphere and how his vehicle would have to deal with them. He succeeded in writing the first description of a spaceship that takes into account the actual conditions of outer space. For instance, the spaceship is carefully tested to make sure that it is perfectly airtight. Compressed air for breathing is carried in tanks.

Tucker was one of Edgar Allan Poe’s instructors at the University of Virginia. His novel may have inspired Poe to write his own Moon travel story: The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall. Although Poe’s character used a balloon for space travel, Poe still paid more careful attention to science than any other author before him. His descriptions of high-altitude flight and of Earth as seen from space could have been written by modern astronauts.

Jules Verne wrote his classic novel From the Earth to the Moon. In the story, a group of arms manufacturers find themselves with nothing to do after the close of the U.S. Civil War. As an outlet for their energies and creative genius, they propose building an enormous cannon. They plan to use it to launch a projectile to the Moon. The characters eventually realize that launching a projectile carrying passengers would be much more interesting than launching an unmanned projectile. In reality, this would never really work. Verne realized this and filled his book with so much science, math, and engineering that his nineteenth-century readers accepted his story without question.

With the publication of Verne’s novel, the possibility of space travel was for the first time put on a firm mathematical and technological basis. Verne’s method of sending his astronauts into space wouldn’t work in reality. But what was important was he suggested a method that employed nothing but known materials and contemporary technologies. His astronauts didn’t need to rely upon hot-air balloons or antigravity metals. He demonstrated to his readers one extremely important fact: the conquest of space was a matter of applied mathematics and engineering.

Realizing that his readers would not accept rockets as a believable means of launching a spacecraft to the Moon, Jules Verne instead used a giant cannon. Verne located his cannon in Florida, only a few miles from the modern-day Kennedy Space Center. This is no coincidence. Both Verne and NASA wanted a launch site close to the equator.

Although Verne’s story used a giant cannon to launch the heroes into space instead of rockets, Verne was aware of the potential rockets had. But he was also aware of the state of the art of rocketry in the mid-1800s. His readers never would have believed that the unreliable, inefficient, and not-very-powerful rockets available at that time would ever be capable of speeding a spaceship to the Moon. Still, Verne did have his astronauts carry rockets on board. The rockets were for their eventual landing on the Moon and for steering the projectile.

Verne was one of the first to realize that rockets would work in a vacuum and would be the ideal source of propulsion in space. Verne’s novel was a great success and was translated and published all over the world. It had readers and admirers in almost every nation. Some of these readers were not just admirers, they were inspired to actually do what Verne had only written about.

The extraordinary pioneer of Russian spaceflight and space fiction, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, said his enthusiasm for space came from reading Jules Verne. In addition to his vital role in envisioning and enabling actual spaceflight, Tsiolkovsky himself wrote classics of Russian science fiction including one that the world’s first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, said was his favorite: Vne Zemli (Beyond the Earth). An enormous amount of space fiction produced in the Soviet Union was intended to inspire that nation towards new futures.

Science fiction emerged in India when the effects of the industrial revolution were being felt in urban India in the nineteenth century just as keenly as they were in Europe and the U.S. The earliest notable Bengali space fiction was Jagadananda Roy’s Shukra Bhraman (“Travels to Jupiter”), written in 1857. This story is of particular interest as it described a journey to another planet, while the existence of the creatures seen there was explained using evolutionary concepts. It should be noted that this story was published well before H. G. Well’s The War of the Worlds (1898) in which Wells described an invasion from Mars.

Chinese creation stories typically have themes involving space, the cosmos, and chaos, such as Pan Gu, who separated the heavens from Earth, and Nu Wa, who patched up the falling heavens. Similar themes are found in the earliest Chinese literature, such as Chang E Goes to the Moon by Lu An (197-122 BCE), which is about Chang E, who was able to fly to and live on the Moon.

Prior to the concept of modernity being imported into China there had been no fiction about the future. In traditional China, history did not have directionality. The introduction first of ideas about “progress” and “development” and then of Marxism changed that. The young intellectuals of the late nineteenth century in China sought to bring their “backward” country into a modern nation state. To do that – they learned from Japan and the West – science and technology was necessary. So to stimulate people’s interest in science and technology, Lu Xun introduced science fiction to China with his 1903 translation of Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon.

H. G. Wells is to English science and space fiction what Jules Verne was to European – and the world’s – science fiction. Among Wells’ best-known stories are The Time Machine (1895), The War of the Worlds (1898), and The First Men in the Moon (1901).

In the United States, science’s and space fiction’s heyday is found in the “pulp” magazine, Amazing Stories, that began publication in 1926, and Astounding Stories. Many other pulp magazines devoted to science and space fiction existed from the 1930s to 1950s, and almost all the great and not so great names of science fiction history published in them, defining the genre from that point onward.

Leading the way in the push toward space was a Russian named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Born in 1857, Tsiolkovsky was attracted to science from a young age; he was influenced early on by the work of Jules Verne. By the time he became a schoolteacher at the age of 21, he was devoting all his spare time to the study of rockets.

Robert Goddard designed, built, and fired off a large number of rockets in the New Mexico desert. Some were spectacular failures; others were merely dismal ones. But there were successes, too, and by the time of his death in August 1945, Goddard was fortunate to see that rocketry had moved from a fun idea to a genuine science. Science fiction (inspired by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells) had become science fact in the hands of men like Tsiolkovsky and Goddard.

After the blockbuster movie Star Wars in 1977 (and its successors), space fiction on television for some time was dominated by triumphal voyages of international, intercultural, and interdisciplinary members of a united Earth federation boldly exploring the cosmos, doing good (or at least not doing evil) while trying to obey “the prime directive” of not interfering in the lives of other cultures.

The objects above us in the sky seem to move constantly, but often in some kind of a repeating pattern. Knowing what formation the stars take just before the seasons change is important information for any successful agricultural community. This might have been one of the earliest practical uses of astronomical information. Clearly the apparent rising and setting of the Sun and Moon affected humans and Earth. So also might the stars generally, it was often reasoned. Hence, in some cultures there developed a method of predicting the future based on the movement of the stars, now known as astrology.

Space illustrations, as a self-conscious genre, began at the same time as written space fiction, and many early illustrations were created to accompany and make visual the ideas in written texts. Depictions of space environments, some intending to be factually while others were fantastically presented, flourished throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reaching their heights on the covers and sometimes pages of the pulp fiction magazines.

It was probably the depictions in the large-sized popular picture magazines in the United States, such as Life, Collier's, and Coronet in the 1950s and early 1960s, that really brought space illustrations to the eye of the public and ignited popular support for space exploration as it became technologically possible for the first time.

Astrophotographs – photographs of the sky, or, more recently of space through telescopes – are often treated as works of art. Indeed, as presented to the general public, astrophotographs, such as those taken via the Hubble Space Telescope, must be viewed primarily as works of art since they are framed and color-enhanced for maximum aesthetic effect.

The phrase “Move to light speed and beyond!” sounds great when you’re in a hurry, but the reality is that anything with mass is constrained to the speed of light. Einstein’s theory of special relativity is largely to blame. Einstein showed it’s theoretically possible to travel at speeds that approach the speed of light, but it’s scientifically impossible to go any faster.

Various movies and television shows have relied on things like warp speed and hyperdrive to refer to faster-than-light space travel. Because distances in the galaxy are vast, it’d still take more than four years to reach the nearest star system when traveling at the speed of light — a fact that makes for not so-entertaining entertainment! Unless scientists of the future come up with a way to change the laws of physics, it’s unlikely that the future of space cruisers and starships warping between stars in a matter of hours or days will ever become reality.

Wormholes are hypothetical ways of circumventing the normal laws of space and time; they’re an unproven phenomenon that can’t be summoned on demand. Also, although general relativity does provide for the possibility of wormholes connecting universes, scientists think they’d consist of a tunnel like boundary. In the movies and on television, wormholes can lead anywhere at any time.

What scientists know about wormholes suggest that they’re incredibly tiny and exist only for a very brief amount of time — less than a second — suggesting that sending anything as large as a spaceship through one for an extended period of time is sheer folly (but, we admit, great entertainment).

A vacuum is defined as matter-free space, or space with a gaseous pressure significantly lower than its atmospheric pressure. The parts of outer space that lie between planets and stars (in other words, most of it) are considered a vacuum. Sound waves are mechanical vibrations that require a molecular substance, such as water or air, to travel through. Vacuums are devoid of those molecules, so there’s no way sound can transmit through them.

The classic 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey got this one right. During the scenes in which an astronaut travels outside his ship in a spacesuit, all you can hear is his breathing. Unfortunately for scientific accuracy, audiences find silence boring. They much prefer special effects, so expect on-screen spaceships to continue whooshing by.

True, exposure to vacuum is never a good idea, but you aren’t going to die instantly if you find yourself in such a scenario. Both theory and actual tests show that you can probably survive exposure to vacuum for between 60 and 90 seconds without lasting effects. (You’d only remain conscious for about 10 seconds, though, so you should make sure to get to safety as soon as possible.) You won’t explode because your skin is strong enough to keep your body intact and your blood from boiling. And although you’d eventually freeze, it’d take hours for your body to lose all of its heat. The actual cause of death would be a lack of oxygen.

2001: A Space Odyssey actually got this one right. In the film, a main character must travel through space from a ship to an airlock for a few seconds without his helmet. He survives without too much incident. So did a NASA astronaut-in-training from the 1960s. His spacesuit sprung a leak, and he lost consciousness after 14 seconds. When the chamber was repressurized, he regained consciousness and was just fine.

Because long-term exposure to microgravity environments can have negative consequences for the strength of an astronaut’s bones, inhabitants of the International Space Station must exercise daily.

One way to simulate gravity in space is by spinning a space station or spaceship. The motion results in a centripetal force that pushes the contents of the spacecraft toward the outside, simulating gravity. Such a spinning space station was correctly depicted in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, most spacecraft you encounter on screen don’t spin. Some sort of artificial gravity device would therefore be necessary to allow the ships’ inhabitants to walk around inside.