One weekend in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, visitors to London's Science Museum might have come across a dozen young men peering through a contrivance of rotating mirrors at a spinning disk a few meters away. Hanging just above them was the 1903 Wright Flyer—but the experimenters had set their sights on something far more ambitious than flight in the atmosphere. They believed that one day it would be possible to travel to other worlds and were trying to design the navigational equipment needed for such voyages.

I am now the only survivor of that little group of British Interplanetary Society members. Though none of us could have guessed that the first moon landing was only three