RAND's 1946 publication 'Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship' anticipated satellites 11 years before Sputnik in 1957 and before ICBMs, demonstrating that important technology futures can be reasoned about in advance despite uncertainty, and that anticipatory analysis about futures like nuclear weapons on missiles (when bombs were 1,000 times too heavy) informed subsequent U.S. policy on bioweapons and other technologies.