The concept of the generation starship constitutes a feasible response to the serious travel-time restrictions that the light-speed limit imposes upon human exploration of deep space -"feasible" in the sense that it could be realized within a reasonably short time span, given our present state of technological advancement. It was Tsiolkovsky, the Russian pioneer of space flight, who first conceptualized the generation starship. In his 1928 paper, The Future of Earth and Mankind, Tsiolkovsky imagines the creation of a fleet of "Noah's Arks," self-sufficient, man-made worldlets that would travel to a distant star system over a period of hundreds or thousands of years, while the crew onboard simply live out their lives maintaining and piloting the ships, and have children whom they teach the necessary skills to do the same once they are gone. Their distant descendants, tens or hundreds of generations in the future, will complete the voyage when the ships finally arrive at their appointed destination. Since Tsiolkovsky's time, science and science fiction have leapfrogged each other in an attempt to imagine what the conditions and consequences of such a venture could be. For example: how could one maintain a stable society throughout such a long period of time -and what sort of governing body should operate during the voyage? How would the composition and number of the crew influence the danger of genetic drift or decay? How might the ship-born generations retain their commitment to the goals of the culture(s) that first built and then equipped the ship back on Earth, when Earth itself has become less than a memory to them? How will space change them, both biologically and psychologically? Is it possible to imaginatively explore the impact of imponderable, unexpected factors -a shipboard emergency, a previously unobserved physical phenomenon, a paradigmchanging discovery? This paper explores the evolution of the generation starship concept between 1940 and 1970, and the lessons that future planners of long-term space missions might glean from these imaginative efforts.

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