The age of Jules Verne is upon us. The sci-fi writers of the 50s and 60s understood that starships would be Navy ships. The only difference between water and air and deep space is the viscosity. Will we see space battleships propelled by giant photon catching sails and armed with smoothbore cannon firing computer directed solid shot for a kinetic kill? Or will we see sights undreamed of by our planet bound minds?

Galleons and frigates swif

Once ruled the rolling seas

To be replaced in time by ships

Who sailed where they may please

Whose clouds of canvas caught the lightest

Airs and drove her on

And gloried in the names they bore

Like Wasp and Oberon

To be in turn replaced by iron

And steam and hard Welsh coal

The Great White Fleet passed into fame

With oil run steel her foal

And there she stayed for many years

As ship borne flying fields

And Boomers cruising silently

With missiled mega-yields

Until with hardly blink of eye

The surface Navy rose

From watery depths to outer space

The path that History chose

What will she look like, this new ship?

What power drives her on?

But this we know, proud names they’ll bear

Like Wasp and Oberon