The ideas of inventors and scientists of yesteryear often look amateurish and completely wrong-footed.  We can mock.  We regularly do.  However, without these ideas being bounced about, planned and projected there would never be any real progress as those ideas that do make it to reality would not have been given a chance either.

So it is and was with space travel.  Many of the ideas seem ludicrous to us but they should be remembered as part of the scientific struggle for progress and this interesting article by certainly does that.  Mind you, some of the ideas are closer to our truth than even the scientists involved may have envisioned.