As for me, I am a physics professor at the University of Texas at Austin. I have a lifelong love of junk literature of all kinds, of science fiction and fantasy films from roughly the period 1930 - 60, and of the live space adventure programs of the Golden Age of TV, 1949-55. These include CAPTAIN VIDEO, TOM CORBETT SPACE CADET, and SPACE PATROL.
I entered a university in the Fall of 1957, just as Russia jolted the US by launching the first man-made earth satellite, Sputnik 1. It marked the beginning of a real-world space program that--- sad to say--- had little resemblance to the ambitious one sketched out by Wernher Von Braun and his cohorts in the 1951-3 Colliers Space Symposium, much less the delightful fantasies of space flight that Captain Video and the Space Cadets took for granted.
