Early Fictional Space Travel

HG Wells' Cavor designs a spaceship and flies it to the Moon. Following in Cavor's footsteps, Robert Heinlein's Dr. Cargraves refits a mail rocket and flies it to the Moon whereas CS Lewis' Edward Weston, Poul Anderson's Alaric Wayne and James Blish's Adolph Haertel each design a spaceship and fly it to Mars. Such one-man enterprises are no longer plausible although "retro" sf has emerged.

In Anderson's Twilight World, Alaric Wayne leads his fellow "supermen" to Mars. In Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years, Hanno leads his fellow immortals beyond the Solar System. In Anderson's Orbit Unlimited and Harvest Of Stars, other groups of misfits leave the Solar System. In American sf, interstellar travel is the ultimate symbol of freedom. However, would leaving Earth solve problems that had existed on Earth?

(Haertel's immediate successor, Gordon Arpe, visits the microcosm, like characters in a current superhero film. For Arpe, see Dirac and The Haertel History. For the film, see here.)