Editor’s note: Every Sunday, Fortune publishes a story fromour magazine archives. This week, Elon Musk’s company SpaceX celebrated the landing of the Dragon capsule, the world’s first commercial spacecraft, marking a new era in space exploration in which private companies will step in to help NASA push the final frontier. This week’s classic turns to 1959, ten years before the Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon. Companies were starting to build the crafts that would enable U.S. astronauts to fly. Then as now, scientists and government officials debated the costs and benefits of space travel and the possibility of discovering life.

“…Suppose when we get to the moon we find sitting in the middle of a crater a strange little marker bearing a carefully chiseled but totally incomprehensible inscription,” one scientist told Fortune writer Bello; “Then space would really get exciting.”

The space business, not counting missiles, already amounts to a billion dollars a year. U.S. industry is at work on rocket engines of awesome power, and on a vehicle to carry a man to the moonand back.

By Francis Bello

FORTUNE — Anyone who has wondered what it was like to live in the era that followed Columbus’ voyage to America now has his chance to find out. Then, as now, thoughtful men disputed the merits of pressing into the unknown, argued that the possible fruits could not justify the cost, warned that the hazards to life and limb were immense. And then as now, the young, the venturesome, and the insatiably curious plunged ahead. “What we are witnessing,” says one prominent member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, “is another irresistible urge of the human race. The justifications given for going into space have no more relevance than the desire for spices had for the discovery of America.”

Privately, and sometimes openly, many scientists deplore the fact that enormous funds are going into space when there are so many unfinished problems, both scientific and human, lying much closer at hand. One persuasive answer to this viewpoint is offered by Herbert F. York, the young physicist who is Director of Defense Research and Engineering. “Everyone would agree,” he says, “that we should be trying to raise the standard of living in India, and building dams in the Middle East. But no one is asking us to choose between dams and space–we could easily afford both. The space effort isn’t a plot; it’s something that appeals to a great many people for a great many reasons.”

No one has responded to space more spontaneously and enthusiastically than U.S. industry. And the vigor of the response is out of all proportion to the money to be made in the space business, at least. in the foreseeable future. Companies have been setting up “space” and “astro” divisions (see box, page 88) with much the same exuberance with which they created atomic and nuclear divisions five or six years ago. (This article is not concerned with military missiles except as they can be used as power stages for space propulsion.) Space, however, is much less hedged about with secrecy than the atom was in 1953 and 1954, and it offers a far wider range of technical challenges. Moreover, the investment needed to make a useful contribution to space technology, especially its electronic aspects, is far smaller than that needed to contribute to nuclear technology. For example, the instruments that James Van Allen used to detect the great belts of radiation that now bear his name were built in a basement of the physics department at the State University of Iowa.

The Space Age has already created sharp geographical rivalries. Southern California, particularly Los Angeles, sees an opportunity to be to space what Pittsburgh is to steel and Detroit to the automobile. California’s claim to be the heartland of the space industry is only slightly diluted by the presence of Patrick Air Force Base at Cape Canaveral in Florida, of Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, and of Martin’s Titan ICBM plant near Denver. Canaveral can be explained away as an accident of geography that provided a matchless pattern of islands for down-range tracking stations. (And, of course, California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base and the Pacific Missile Range will eventually rival Canaveral in size and importance.) The selection of Redstone Arsenal as the home of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency can be explained largely by its proximity to Canaveral and to the Pentagon. And as for Martin in Denver–at least this old Baltimore outfit had to come two-thirds of the way to the Coast.

The cosmic testing range

Progress in space technology will dramatize a nation’s total technological capabilities in a way that nothing else ever could. In the momentous years ahead, the world may compare U.S. and Soviet industrial and scientific resources less and less in terms of steel, oil, and electric-power production, and more and more in terms of the number, weight, and complexity of vehicles the two countries have been able to thrust into outer space.

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