Sigma Xi: did Science fiction influence you? (July 2010)

"My entire life has been influenced by reading a Robert Heinlein story in The Saturday Evening Post when I was about twelve years old. The story (note: probaby The Green Hills of Earth, Feb 1947) and the accompanying illustration convinced  me that I wanted to become an engineer and perhaps advance, by as much as a single day, the epoch in which Man would travel in space. I joined the British Interplanetary Society and the American Rocket Society, which later got respectable and became the AIAA. As it happened, by the time I received my Ph.D, the space program was well under way and it was obvious that I would not make any fundamental contributions, so I fell back to designing instruments for high altitude research from small rockets. That led to instruments for stratospheric balloons and later for military satellites. I might note that it is important to make a distinction between real science fiction as Heinlein wrote it and fantasy as practiced by Ray Bradbury, who was happy to sit back and allow the media to refer to him as some kind of a “dean” of science fiction writers." -Robert O. Woods (Sigma Xi 1965)