OPINION: Watch on the Earth

Somebody is always rising to announce that mankind has arrived at a dead end, or at least a stop light. In the October issue of Harper’s, a new warning voice rolls out, announcing that civilization’s “400-year boom” is over because civilized nations have no more geographical frontiers to push back. The voice comes, oddly enough, from Texas. It belongs to Professor Walter Prescott Webb, a thoughtful student of history.

In Manhattan, some 300 scientists, doctors, astronomers, engineers, aviators and lawyers were too busy to hear it. They were gathered at the Hayden Planetarium for the first annual Symposium on Space Travel, and they were loading up modern Conestoga wagons for the interstellar frontiers.

If a rocket ship is to avoid collisions with meteors, said Dr. Fred L. Whipple, chairman of Harvard’s department of astronomy, it should keep pretty well out of the orbits of the earth and the comets, and particularly try to detour around the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. But a collision with a meteor won’t necessarily be fatal. “Most penetration,” said Dr. Whipple, “could be eliminated by a ‘meteor bumper,’ a second skin of small thickness a short distance outside the true skin of the ship. Meteorites would explode on that bumper and lose most of their power of penetration.”

From the Air Force’s department of space medicine, Dr. Heinz Haber spoke up. Said he: “The weightless condition to which a space pilot would be subjected … is not going to influence breathing or circulation noticeably—it is the nervous system that needs watching.”

A lawyer, Oscar Schachter, deputy director of the United Nations Legal Division, raised the question of who owns space. He suggested that all space beyond a planet’s atmosphere be designated as a sort of “high seas,” open to all comers under a kind of interplanetary admiralty law.

Rocket Expert Dr. Willy Ley wanted to get going on plans for a rocket platform to be shot out beyond the atmosphere so it would rotate around the earth, like the moon, as one of earth’s satellites. Such a satellite would be a marker for navigators, a refueling station for interplanetary pilots, and a wonderful “earth-watching platform,” said he.

Dr. Webb and his disappearing frontier to the contrary, it appears that there is still considerable elbow room over the next ridge.