In early 2026, the Star Trek franchise will boldly go where it's never gone before: An entire TV series devoted to the institution known as Starfleet Academy. By its very nature, a show about a space academy will, of course, focus on space cadets; people training to become futuristic types of astronauts. But, Star Trek, of course, did not invent this idea, nor did that famous franchise even popularize the notion of a “space cadet.” Instead, that perennial sci-fi trope had a circuitous route into the zeitgeist, first as an unsold comic book, and then as an unsold radio show. And strangely enough, the success of one book, called Space Cadet — written by Robert A. Heinlein — is what actually helped get Tom Corbett, Space Cadet on the air.
But Heinlein didn’t create Tom Corbett; writer Joseph Greene did. And in dreaming up this specific future-tense world, Greene was prescient in one specific way: sci-fi stories that were also about groups of adolescents would always have an audience.
