Reality has a way of laughing at science fiction: the gap between where we are and where we were supposed to be sometimes yawns ludicrously wide. 2001: A Space Odyssey posited moonbases, Jupiter missions and sentient computers for the titular year, and there are plenty of other such mis-schedulings. The much-loved British cartoon strip Dan Dare, the inspiration for a small but absorbing show at London’s Science Museum, envisaged a world space fleet for 1995, with a significant British presence and a spaceport near Formby; this nearly a decade before the UK’s ill-fated Beagle 2 probe crashed ignominiously into Mars. Oh the optimism.

But optimism is the central theme of Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain. Its purpose is to show how Britain sought to reinvent itself through high technology after the second world war. A fascinating selection of exhibits shows how the belief that social justice could be achieved through the new welfare state was allied with a faith in homegrown technology as the key to national prosperity. Nuclear power would provide electricity too cheap to meter; whizzier factories would churn out better clothes and cars; aerospace boffins would create the missiles and jets befitting a great power. Spacefaring by the mid-1990s couldn’t be such a stretch: hence Dare, the “pilot of the future”, who each week thwarted malign Venusians in the pages of the Eagle, the boys’ comic launched in 1950 by Marcus Morris.