Space does not belong to engineers alone. Very early on, law, history, economics, geography, linguistics and sociology made it an object of study, often at the very moment space activity was being invented, sometimes before it existed.
This scholarly literature, often rare and seldom reprinted, holds particular value for research: each work documents how a discipline discovered space as an object. From nascent space law to contemporary cultural studies and historiography, the theme follows the slow constitution of spaceflight as an object of the human sciences.