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kilobug comments on Why space stopped captivating minds ? - Less Wrong
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I can just imagine the awkward situation of some of the last century's science fiction writers who have started to die off at fairly advanced ages since the 1980's, beginning with Robert Heinlein. They had made their livings decades ago by publishing stories premised on the idea that we live in a technologically successful manned "space age," yet in the real world they lived long enough to see that the "space age" effectively ended in the early 1970's. How does it feel to the still-living septuagenarian+ science fiction writers like, say, Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven and Ben Bova, when they realize that they have outlived the basis of their careers by a couple of generations?
On a bit more cheerful mode, I would point to Jules Verne, who wrote in 1865 about going to the Moon, and we did it a century later, using means significantly different from the one he envisioned. We can only hope the same will happen : the space age will come, just later than predicted and using different technologies (space elevator ? launch loop ? replicating nano-bots to produce the base first, and then sending people there ?).