It’s hard to know what to be more nostalgic about, all those childhood dreams of space opera or the optimism of an era in which imagination and technology were booming and every other ad ended with a pitch to come work for the thriving company of the future. “To advance yourself professionally, you should become a member of one these teams. Write to N. M. Pagan,” reads a typical notice from the Martin Company, now part of Lockheed Martin.

You don’t hear that much these days.

Back then, you, too, sitting at a drafting table or in a cubicle, designing antennas or self-locking nuts among acres of such boards and cubicles — “Reaching for the Moon, Mr. Designer?” reads a Kaylock ad — could be a space hero.

And of course it was almost exclusively men depicted in the ads. One exception was an ad from the National Cash Register Company for a new electronic machine for posting checks. “And what the POST-TRONIC does electronically the operator cannot do wrong — because she doesn’t do it at all!” says the ad showing a woman floating in space at the machine’s console.

Naturally, there was a hook to those recruitment ads, as Ms. Prelinger points out. The real business of most of those aerospace companies was not the space program but defense — building fighters, bombers, missiles and other implements of the cold war, not to mention commercial airliners. For many of these places, the space program was more of a hindrance than a boost to the bottom line, a sort of prestigious loss leader to attract cutting-edge talent.

Image Credit... From "Another Science Fiction"/Blast Books

Occasionally, as Ms. Prelinger reports, the darker side of this work bled through into the trade press and the ads, like when the Marquardt Corporation, which made small control rockets for satellites, showed a spy satellite aiming its lens down at Earth.

If the space fever began in 1957 with Sputnik, it cooled by 1962, when the basic plan for the Apollo moon missions was set and there was no more space for imaginations to run wild. Also, by then NASA’s budget was leveling off. Ms. Prelinger said that during this period about half a million engineers, scientists, draftsmen and other people followed the clarion call to blend their talents into the new age, swelling the ranks of aerospace workers to more than a million.