Space exploration, at first glance, doesn’t much look like a leftist cause. Perhaps that’s because it’s the billionaire class that are currently making it their own: Earth’s orbit, the moon, and Mars are set to become the next horizons of capitalist expansion. As we look back on the 50 anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, our image of astronautics is stubbornly stuck in “the right stuff” — rugged individualism and heroic masculinity. Jeff and Elon must love it.

This conservative image, however, is only part of the story: spaceflight and socialism have a shared history in the United States that is generally forgotten. The first successful rocketeers in the United States were activists who fought racial segregation at home and raised money for the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. In the 1930s, they believed that transforming the Earth was as important as transcending it.

Step forward Frank J. Malina — the brilliant founder of Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He designed the WAC Corporal, the first American rocket to reach “extreme altitudes” when it was launched on October 11, 1945. More than any other engineer in the United States, Frank Malina made rocketry scientifically respectable, just as his attendance at Communist Party meetings made him politically beyond the pale.