Back story

James Oberg was 11 in 1955 when his grandfather gave him a copy of Jules Verne¿s classic From the Earth to the Moon. He was hooked by the 19th-century fantasy and dreamed of building spaceships¿someday. Two years later, he sat on a sidewalk next to a stack of newspapers intended for his paper route and devoured the front-page stories: The Soviets had just launched Sputnik. No longer was space exploration the stuff of science fiction. It was happening, right now.