Lunar colonization was a distant dream in Rhodes’s day and even seems far-fetched now, but at the time, it appeared graspable. One has to keep in mind the wrenching technological innovations that the leaders of the United States had already witnessed in their lifetime. Dwight Eisenhower was born into a world containing only a countable handful of cars, a world where lightbulbs were still a novelty. Yet he lived to see computers, nuclear bombs, supersonic jets, and manned spacecraft. Who was to say that the science-fiction tales of settling distant planets were fantasies?
