Between the dream and the programme, the border long remained porous, and that border is what this theme explores. Seriously calculated utopias, illustrated anticipations with landscapes so convincing they became the mental scenery of the real conquest, novels that precede, and sometimes inspire, the engineers.
Fiction has never ceased to accompany the programmes, from orbital colonies to terraformed planets, each generation projecting its hopes and anxieties into space. The theme recalls a historian's truth: astronautics was a fiction before it was an industry.