For the May 1967 issue of Analog, the influential science fiction magazine that began under the name Astounding Stories of Super-Science in 1930, editor (and sometimes author) John W. Campbell, Jr. composed an editorial titled ‘The Safest Form of Transportation.’ Campbell wrote the editorial, he tells us, in the days immediately following the Apollo 1 disaster, an incident that occurred on January 27, 1967, in which a cabin fire broke out in a space module as it sat on the ground during a launch rehearsal test. Three NASA astronauts were trapped inside the module and killed by the fire. Campbell, concerned that this disaster might halt subsequent development of human space flight programs, opens his editorial by brazenly declaring: ‘As of January 30th, 1967 travel by spaceship retains its unblemished record as the safest known form of travel; in hundreds of millions of miles of travel, not one person has been killed or injured.’...