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I want to tell you a story about stories.

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And I want to tell you this story
because I think we need to remember

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that sometimes the stories
we tell each other

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are more than just tales
or entertainment or narratives.

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They're also vehicles

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for sowing inspiration
and ideas across our societies

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and across time.

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The story I'm about to tell you

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is about how one of the most advanced
technological achievements

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of the modern era

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has its roots in stories,

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and how some of the most important
transformations yet to come might also.

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The story begins over 300 years ago,

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when Galileo Galilei first learned
of the recent Dutch invention

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that took two pieces of shaped glass
and put them in a long tube

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and thereby extended human sight
farther than ever before.

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When Galileo turned
his new telescope to the heavens

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and to the Moon in particular,

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he discovered something incredible.

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These are pages from Galileo's book
"Sidereus Nuncius," published in 1610.

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And in them, he revealed to the world
what he had discovered.

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And what he discovered was that the Moon
was not just a celestial object

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wandering across the night sky,

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but rather, it was a world,

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a world with high, sunlit mountains

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and dark "mare," the Latin word for seas.

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And once this new world
and the Moon had been discovered,

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people immediately began
to think about how to travel there.

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And just as importantly,

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they began to write stories

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about how that might happen

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and what those voyages might be like.

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One of the first people to do so
was actually the Bishop of Hereford,

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a man named Francis Godwin.

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Godwin wrote a story
about a Spanish explorer,

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Domingo Gonsales,

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who ended up marooned
on the island of St. Helena

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in the middle of the Atlantic,

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and there, in an effort to get home,

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developed a machine, an invention,

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to harness the power
of the local wild geese

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to allow him to fly --

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and eventually to embark
on a voyage to the Moon.

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Godwin's book, "The Man in the Moone,
or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither,"

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was only published posthumously
and anonymously in 1638,

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likely on account of the number
of controversial ideas that it contained,

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including an endorsement
of the Copernican view of the universe

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that put the Sun at the center
of the Solar System,

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as well as a pre-Newtonian
concept of gravity

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that had the idea
that the weight of an object

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would decrease with increasing
distance from Earth.

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And that's to say nothing
of his idea of a goose machine

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that could go to the Moon.

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(Laughter)

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And while this idea of a voyage
to the Moon by goose machine

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might not seem particularly insightful
or technically creative to us today,

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what's important is that Godwin described
getting to the Moon not by a dream

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or by magic, as Johannes Kepler
had written about,

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but rather, through human invention.

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And it was this idea
that we could build machines

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that could travel into the heavens,

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that would plant its seed
in minds across the generations.

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The idea was next taken up
by his contemporary, John Wilkins,

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then just a young student at Oxford,

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but later, one of the founders
of the Royal Society.

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John Wilkins took the idea of space travel
in Godwin's text seriously

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and wrote not just another story

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but a nonfiction philosophical treatise,

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entitled, "Discovery
of the New World in the Moon,

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or, a Discourse Tending to Prove

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that 'tis Probable There May Be
Another Habitable World in that Planet."

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And note, by the way,
that word "habitable."

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That idea in itself would have
been a powerful incentive

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for people thinking about how to build
machines that could go there.

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In his books, Wilkins seriously considered
a number of technical methods

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for spaceflight,

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and it remains to this day
the earliest known nonfiction account

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of how we might travel to the Moon.

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Other stories would soon follow,
most notably by Cyrano de Bergerac,

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with his "Lunar Tales."

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By the mid-17th century,
the idea of people building machines

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that could travel to the heavens

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was growing in complexity
and technical nuance.

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And yet, in the late 17th century,

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this intellectual progress
effectively ceased.

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People still told stories
about getting to the Moon,

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but they relied on the old ideas

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or, once again, on dreams or on magic.

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Why?

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Well, because the discovery
of the laws of gravity by Newton

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and the invention of the vacuum pump
by Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle

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meant that people now understood

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that a condition of vacuum
existed between the planets,

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and consequentially
between the Earth and the Moon.

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And they had no way of overcoming this,

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no way of thinking about overcoming this.

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And so, for well over a century,

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the idea of a voyage to the Moon
made very little intellectual progress

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until the rise of
the Industrial Revolution

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and the development
of steam engines and boilers

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and most importantly, pressure vessels.

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And these gave people the tools to think
about how they could build a capsule

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that could resist the vacuum of space.

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So it was in this context, in 1835,

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that the next great story
of spaceflight was written,

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by Edgar Allan Poe.

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Now, today we think of Poe
in terms of gothic poems

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and telltale hearts and ravens.

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But he considered himself
a technical thinker.

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He grew up in Baltimore,

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the first American city
with gas street lighting,

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and he was fascinated
by the technological revolution

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that he saw going on all around him.

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He considered his own greatest work
not to be one of his gothic tales

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but rather his epic prose poem "Eureka,"

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in which he expounded
his own personal view

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of the cosmographical nature
of the universe.

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In his stories, he would describe
in fantastical technical detail

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machines and contraptions,

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and nowhere was he more influential
in this than in his short story,

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"The Unparalleled Adventure
of One Hans Pfaall."

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It's a story of an unemployed
bellows maker in Rotterdam,

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who, depressed and tired of life --
this is Poe, after all --

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and deeply in debt,

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he decides to build a hermetically
enclosed balloon-borne carriage

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that is launched into the air by dynamite

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and from there, floats
through the vacuum of space

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all the way to the lunar surface.

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And importantly, he did not
develop this story alone,

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for in the appendix to his tale,

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he explicitly acknowledged Godwin's
"A Man in the Moone"

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from over 200 years earlier

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as an influence,

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calling it "a singular and somewhat
ingenious little book."

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And although this idea of a balloon-borne
voyage to the Moon may seem

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not much more technically sophisticated
than the goose machine,

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in fact, Poe was sufficiently detailed

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in the description
of the construction of the device

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and in terms of the orbital
dynamics of the voyage

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that it could be diagrammed
in the very first spaceflight encyclopedia

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as a mission in the 1920s.

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And it was this attention to detail,
or to "verisimilitude," as he called it,

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that would influence the next great story:

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Jules Verne's "From the Earth
to the Moon," written in 1865.

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And it's a story that has
a remarkable legacy

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and a remarkable similarity
to the real voyages to the Moon

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that would take place
over a hundred years later.

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Because in the story, the first voyage
to the Moon takes place from Florida,

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with three people on board,

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in a trip that takes three days --

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exactly the parameters that would prevail
during the Apollo program itself.

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And in an explicit tribute
to Poe's influence on him,

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Verne situated the group responsible
for this feat in the book in Baltimore,

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at the Baltimore Gun Club,

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with its members shouting,
"Cheers for Edgar Poe!"

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as they began to lay out their plans
for their conquest of the Moon.

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And just as Verne was influenced by Poe,

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so, too, would Verne's own story
go on to influence and inspire

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the first generation of rocket scientists.

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The two great pioneers of liquid fuel
rocketry in Russia and in Germany,

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Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth,

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both traced their own commitment
to the field of spaceflight

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to their reading "From the Earth
to the Moon" as teenagers,

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and then subsequently
committing themselves

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to trying to make that story a reality.

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And Verne's story was not
the only one in the 19th century

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with a long arm of influence.

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On the other side of the Atlantic,

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H.G. Wells's "War of the Worlds"
directly inspired

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a young man in Massachusetts,
Robert Goddard.

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And it was after reading
"War of the Worlds"

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that Goddard wrote in his diary,

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one day in the late 1890s,

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of resting while trimming
a cherry tree on his family's farm

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and having a vision of a spacecraft
taking off from the valley below

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and ascending into the heavens.

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And he decided then and there
that he would commit the rest of his life

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to the development of the spacecraft
that he saw in his mind's eye.

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And he did exactly that.

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Throughout his career,
he would celebrate that day

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as his anniversary day,
his cherry tree day,

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and he would regularly read and reread
the works of Verne and of Wells

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in order to renew his inspiration
and his commitment

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over the decades of labor
and effort that would be required

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to realize the first part of his dream:

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the flight of a liquid fuel rocket,

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which he finally achieved in 1926.

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So it was while reading "From the Earth
to the Moon" and "The War of the Worlds"

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that the first pioneers of astronautics
were inspired to dedicate their lives

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to solving the problems of spaceflight.

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And it was their treatises
and their works in turn

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that inspired the first
technical communities

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and the first projects of spaceflight,

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thus creating a direct chain of influence

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that goes from Godwin to Poe to Verne

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to the Apollo program

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and to the present-day
communities of spaceflight.

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So why I have told you all this?

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Is it just because I think it's cool,

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or because I'm just
weirdly fascinated by stories

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of 17th- and 19th-century science fiction?

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It is, admittedly, partly that.

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But I also think
that these stories remind us

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of the cultural processes
driving spaceflight

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and even technological
innovation more broadly.

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As an economist working at NASA,

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I spend time thinking about
the economic origins

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of our movement out into the cosmos.

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And when you look before the investments
of billionaire tech entrepreneurs

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and before the Cold War Space Race,

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and even before the military investments
in liquid fuel rocketry,

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the economic origins of spaceflight
are found in stories and in ideas.

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It was in these stories that the first
concepts for spaceflight were articulated.

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And it was through these stories

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that the narrative of a future
for humanity in space

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began to propagate from mind to mind,

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eventually creating an intergenerational
intellectual community

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that would iterate
on the ideas for spacecraft

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until such a time
as they could finally be built.

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This process has now been going on
for over 300 years,

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and the result is
a culture of spaceflight.

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It's a culture that involves
thousands of people

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over hundreds of years.

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Because for hundreds of years,
some of us have looked at the stars

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and longed to go.

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And because for hundreds of years,

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some of us have dedicated our labors

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to the development
of the concepts and systems

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required to make those voyages possible.

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I also wanted to tell you
about Godwin, Poe and Verne

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because I think their stories
also tell us of the importance

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of the stories that we tell each other
about the future more generally.

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Because these stories don't just
transmit information or ideas.

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They can also nurture passions,

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passions that can lead us
to dedicate our lives

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to the realization of important projects.

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Which means that these stories can and do

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influence social and technological forces

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centuries into the future.

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I think we need to realize this
and remember it when we tell our stories.

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We need to work hard to write stories

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that don't just show us the possible
dystopian paths we may take

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for a fear that the more dystopian
stories we tell each other,

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the more we plant seeds
for possible dystopian futures.

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Instead we need to tell stories
that plant the seeds,

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if not necessarily for utopias,

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then at least for great new projects
of technological, societal

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and institutional transformation.

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And if we think of this idea
that the stories we tell each other

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can transform the future

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is fanciful or impossible,

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then I think we need to remember
the example of this,

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our voyage to the Moon,

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an idea from the 17th century

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that propagated culturally
for over 300 years

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until it could finally be realized.

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So, we need to write new stories,

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stories that, 300 years in the future,

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people will be able
to look back upon and remark

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how they inspired us
to new heights and to new shores,

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how they showed us new paths
and new possibilities,

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and how they shaped
our world for the better.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)