Space Predictions by Experts

"Space travel is utter bilge."
-- Richard Van Der Riet Woolley, upon assuming the post of Astronomer Royal in 1956.

"Space travel is bunk."
-- Sir Harold Spencer Jones, Astronomer Royal of the UK, 1957 (two weeks later Sputnik orbited the Earth).

"To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth - all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances."
-- Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, in 1926.

"We stand on the threshold of rocket mail."
-- U.S. postmaster general Arthur Summerfield, in 1959.

"... too far-fetched to be considered."
-- Editor of Scientific American, in a letter to Robert Goddard about Goddard's idea of a rocket-accelerated airplane bomb, 1940 (German V2 missiles came down on London 3 years later).

"A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth's atmosphere."
-- New York Times, 1936.

So what's the moral of the story? Never trust the experts to say anything more that what the majority hasn't already given its approval of.