Before nations started spewing rockets and satellites into orbit, folks thought there was a boundary layer surrounding the earth. Indeed, there were a lot of pulp-era science fiction authors that made a lot of hay with this theory.
Captain Sterner St. Paul Meeks, writing as S.P. Meeks, wrote several novellas cocerning what he called the "heaviside layer". He posited that there was a spherical layer of aether surrounding the planet, and that there were giant amoeba-like creatures that lived there. Humans couldn't get any rockets out into space because the monsters would always catch the fastest ships with their tentacles and rip them apart.
Eventually someone came up with a method to defeat these creatures, finally allowing the Earthlings to begin their spread out into the cosmos. This worked well until the folks living on Jupiter discovered us and took over our planet...but that's a different novella.
Iron Noder 2017