Science: Journey into Space

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The youngsters have already zoomed confidently off into the vast ocean of space; they can buy space suits, space guns and rockets in almost any toyshop. In 50-odd science fiction magazines, space travel is a favorite theme. Eight comic strips and at least two TV programs are flying through space. “Scientific” space books are brisk sellers. But not all members of the space cult are storytellers, crackpots or kids. Some serious scientists believe that space flight will surely come, and perhaps soon, but they know that separating facts and fancy about space travel is almost as difficult as a trip to the moon.

The basic principles were worked out long before World War I, but the popular vogue probably grew out of two great technical achievements of World War II. Nuclear fission convinced the public that “science can do anything.” The German V-2 rocket proved that a man-made vehicle can climb briefly into space. The head of the V-2 project, Dr. Wernher von Braun, is still only 40 and is the major prophet and hero (or wild propagandist, some scientists suspect) of space travel. As a boy, Dr. von Braun wanted to go to the moon. He still does.

Like Columbus? The cold war has thrown a blackout over all rocket research. The real rocket experts, working on guided missiles, are therefore sworn to secrecy. Not one man on earth who knows the latest developments can talk freely about them. Men who do not know can let their fancies run wild, for they have no fear of expert contradiction.

Space enthusiasts like to compare the present with the time just before Columbus, when Europeans were about ready to launch out over the Atlantic. The analogy is poor. Columbus did not know what he would find on the other side of the ocean, but he had ships that would take him across. The space men can see across their “ocean,” but they have no ships.

Up from Gravity. The best way to visualize space in terms of astronavigation is to think of it as a placid lake with a few widely separated whirlpools in its mirror surface. These sucking danger spots are the gravitational fields around the sun and its satellites. The cardinal principle of astronavigation is to keep far away from gravitational maelstroms. Unfortunately for the space men, their ships must set sail from the middle of one: the strong gravitational field that surrounds the earth.

The energy needed to escape from the earth’s suction is simple for astronauts to figure. Expressed as speed, it is 25,000 m.p.h. A space ship with this “escape velocity” would be an independent part of the solar system and could cruise, with a little more energy, all over the place.

Twenty-five thousand miles an hour is more speed than a single rocket can make, but long before World War II, the space men thought of a trick: the multi-stage rocket. This is a “beast”* that shoots upward with a smaller beast attached to its nose. When the fuel of the mother rocket is gone, the second rocket fires and begins its flight. It is already moving fast, so the energy in its own fuel gives it greater speed than a single-stage rocket. A three-stage rocket will do even better.

The trouble is, each stage must be enormously larger than the next stage. Rocket men argue endlessly about the details, but the more sensible ones believe that it would take a multi-stage rocket as big as an ocean liner to spit even a jeep-sized space ship free of the earth.

The space men believe that the leap from the earth must be made in two jumps, with a resting and refueling spot partway up the slope of the earth’s gravitational whirlpool.

If a rocket is shot straight up at less than escape velocity and makes the proper turn as it clears the atmosphere, it will be sidetracked to an orbit above the earth and will circle around endlessly. The centrifugal force of the rocket’s motion around the earth will exactly balance the pull of the earth’s gravitation. This same balance of forces keeps the moon on its rails.

Since it takes less energy to reach an orbit than to escape from the earth, astronauts believe that a moderate-sized three-stage rocket, or even a two-stage one, could make the trip with a good payload. It would park its load (e.g., fuel) in the orbit, where it would circle as safely as if it were back at the filling station.

After enough fuel had been accumulated on the little, man-made satellite, a rocket could fill its tanks and blast itself off into space. Since it would already be moving in its earth-circling orbit at a good clip (16,000 m.p.h.), it would need only a moderate additional push to give it escape velocity. Then it could cruise freely in space, like a ship that has risen out of a whirlpool and reached the smooth surface of a lake.

Approach with Caution. Astronauts who plot long journeys in space assume that such dull, preliminary steps have already been taken. Later steps are more fun. To reach the moon from an artificial orbit is elementary stuff; voyages to a planet take more figuring. One plan for a trip to Venus, for instance, uses space ships from an orbit around the earth to establish a base on the moon (see diagram). A special ship then takes off from the moon at a moment when Venus is considerably behind both earth and moon on its shorter and faster orbit around the sun.

Such larger bodies as Mars and Venus, both powerful gravitational whirlpools, should be approached with caution. But Mars and Venus both have atmospheres, which the space men plan to use as frictional buffers. Their ships would circle in the atmospheric fringes until they were moving slowly enough to land. An alternate plan: cruise warily around the planet and send small space-dinghies down to explore its surface.

The Long Voyage Home. How to get back home is the really tough problem. If the space men want to see the earth again, they must climb back out of the gravitational field of the target planet. This would be about as difficult as the painful escape from the earth, and every pound of fuel for the effort would have to be brought from the earth.

The moon would be a poor, dismal place to start a colony. It has no detectable atmosphere, certainly no water. Other planets are not much better. Mercury is fiercely hot on the side that it keeps toward the sun and fiercely cold on its sunless side. Outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) are cold worlds with hostile atmospheres of methane and ammonia.

Venus has an atmosphere that is mostly carbon dioxide and is always blanketed in brilliant white clouds. Most astronomers think its hidden surface is too hot to support the “carbon-cycle” life that exists on the earth. Mars is the best bet, but it is not too promising. U.S. Astronomer Percival Lowell, who died in 1916, spent 30 years studying the “canals” on Mars. He was convinced (and convinced a large public) that they were attempts by Martians to irrigate their arid planet with water from its polar snowcaps. Modern astronomers believe that Lowell was describing more than meets science’s eye, but the Lowell hypothesis is still popular among space enthusiasts.

Poor Neighbors. In spite of imaginative efforts to make the planets sound attractive, scientists consider earth’s neighborhood rather slummy. But the space planners are optimistic. Colonists on the airless moon, they say. could erect Plexiglas domes and fill them with any atmosphere they liked. They could grow bumper crops in the unfailing sunlight, could extract metals and oxygen from the rocks. Arthur C. Clarke in The Explora, tion of Space argues that man might thrive under such conditions better than he does on earth.

Astronomer Fritz Zwicky has a more ambitious scheme: an interplanetary reclamation project. Using his new tool, nuclear energy, man could improve the circumstances of underprivileged planets, change their atmosphere or even relocate them in more favorable orbits.

The Time Problem. Other stars may have better planets. But a handicap to interstellar voyages is that they must conquer not only space but time. Even the nearest stars are light-years away, and each light-year is six trillion miles. If a space ship traveled at 50,000 m.p.h. (high speed in the solar system), it would take many thousands of years to reach a nearby star. Its crew would die of old age before the voyage had really gotten under way.

One answer to the time problem is “nature’s way”: reproduction. Individuals die, but species need not. An interstellar breeding-ship with a male & female crew would need close population control and the careful “recycling of biological material” (i.e., eating the dead). It would also need a university on board to preserve the cultural level of the original crew. But if all went well, the generation could colonize the Pleiades.

Some interstellar space men have a more ingenious answer than this Noah’s Ark method. If a space ship moves at nearly the speed of light, its time slows down. It can sail like a cosmic ray for thousands of earth-years from star to star, but for its crew only weeks will pass. When they return to earth, however, they will all be Rip Van Winkles: their friends and families will long since have passed into ancient history.

Other interstellar enthusiasts favor taking short cuts through the fourth dimension. The best way to visualize this scheme is to imagine “two-dimensional people” who spend their lives on the surface of a sheet of paper, and who cannot form any conception of the three-dimensional world. If the paper were bent into a deep U, they could not cut across from one edge to the other; they would have to go around the fold.

Perhaps (who knows?) man’s three-dimensional space is folded. At present man cannot cut through the fourth dimension to another part of space, but with new understanding, he might learn. A space ship using this tactic could vanish from nearby space and pop up at once a billion light-years away.

Oversold Public. A large public, happily mixing fact & fiction, apparently believes that space travel is just around the corner. Two years ago New York’s Hayden Planetarium whimsically offered “reservations” to the moon and planets. It got 25,000 requests, many of them deadly serious, from all over the world. Every military guided missile center has to chase “space volunteers” away from its guarded perimeter.

The practical rocket men fear that their gradual march toward space may disappoint the oversold public. All the necessary, cautious first steps (a small missile shot into an orbit, a hit on the moon with a small payload. etc.) are a long way from manned space ships. But Dr. von Braun (of the V-2s), who would hurry the cautious missile men along, says that manned space flight “is as sure as the rising of the sun.” He tells just how the U.S. military can establish a “satellite space station” in an orbit around the earth, and he insists that such a station could dominate mankind.

A popular and “unclassified” version of Wernher von Braun’s proposal can be found in Across the Space Frontier (Viking $3.95). Von Braun, who wrote one chapter, leads off with the statement: “Within the next 10 or 15 years, the earth can have a new companion in the skies, a man-made satellite which will be man’s first foothold in space.”

To raise the satellite station into its orbit 1,075 miles above the earth, Von Braun proposes to build a fleet of three-stage rockets, each standing 265 feet high and weighing 7,000 tons when fueled. The 51 motors in the first stage will have a thrust of 14,000 tons. The second stage will be smaller, and the third, containing the crew, control apparatus and final payload, will be a winged vehicle rather like an airplane.

The ascent of one of these monster rockets will be something to see and hear. It will roar up vertically and turn its course toward the east to take advantage of the spin of the earth (1,038 m.p.h. at the equator). At the altitude of 24.9 miles and the speed of 5,256 m.p.h., the first section will separate and return to earth, braked by a steel-mesh parachute and downward-firing rockets. The second section will carry on, its motors lifting the rocket to 39.8 miles and boosting its speed to 14,364 m.p.h. Then it too will drop off, leaving the final, manned section to blast itself upward alone, attaining the speed of 18,468 m.p.h. When it reaches the desired altitude (1,075 miles), it will have spiraled halfway around the earth and will have been slowed by gravitation to 14,770 m.p.h. This is not quite fast enough to keep it in its orbit. If left to itself, it would follow an elliptical course down to the atmosphere.

So the crew must make a “power maneuver.” They observe the stars to fix their position; then, by spinning three little flywheels, they point their rockets in the right direction and turn on the power for 15 seconds. If all goes well, the ship will move into a circular orbit, speeding around the earth at 15,840 m.p.h. Unless brought down deliberately, it will circle there forever.

Red-Hot Descent. At this point the crew may shake hands all round, but they still have excitement ahead. They unload the 36 tons of cargo (sections of the satellite station) and park it in space. There’s no danger of its falling: it has the same speed as the rocket, and will stay in the orbit indefinitely.

Then the crewmen make another power maneuver. They turn the ship so that its rocket motors are pointing forward. A brief blast from them reduces the ship’s speed by 1,070 m.p.h. and puts it into an elliptical course which swings down toward the atmosphere. In its outer fringes, 50 miles up, air resistance heats the rocket’s skin and wings to a brightly glowing red (1,300° F.), but the crew, protected by insulation and liquid-cooled windows, do not feel the heat. The ship glides on, part meteor, part airplane. Gradually its energy is dissipated; it spirals down, slows to subsonic speed and lands at its base, says Von Braun, at an easy 65 m.p.h. The crewmen step out for a Coke at the space pilots’ club while their ship cools off and is made ready for another shuttle to the orbit.

According to Von Braun’s calculations, it will take about a dozen such shuttles to ferry the knocked-down parts of the space station into its orbit, where men clad in space suits will assemble it. Their task will be lightened somewhat by the absence of gravity, but they will have to be pushed to & from their work stations by small rockets bearing against their navels.

Revolving Doughnut. The completed satellite station will be a doughnut-shaped object 250 feet in diameter, made of plastic-impregnated nylon inflated with air. It will revolve slowly, its motion providing a centrifugal substitute for gravity. “Down” will be outward, so the crew will walk with their feet toward the outer wall of the ring.

Such a station, says Von Braun, could dominate the world. Every two hours it would circle the earth, and as the earth turns below it, every part of its surface would come into view. A 100-inch telescope parked in space and manipulated by remote controls could distinguish objects on the earth only 16 inches apart. This, he believes, would permit U.S. observers to report, say, every change of the Kremlin guard. Large objects, such as Russian air bases, would show up plain as day.

The station would also be useful, Von Braun says, for launching atom-armed guided missiles. They would spiral downward red hot, and their descent would be timed to keep them in view of the space station. Their targets on earth would be visible too. As the missile approaches its target, its course could be corrected by radio from the station, making a square hit inevitable. Once a supply of such missiles had been stockpiled in the orbit, potential aggressors below would be forced to keep the global peace.

Von Braun has pushed his startling proposal both publicly and privately before many different audiences. He is quite serious. A more elaborate version of his plan, with full secret details, is believed to be circulating among Washington military bigwigs. There are also rival satellite plans.

Any rumor that one of these plans may be adopted for immediate action sends practical rocket men into a cold sweat. Neither Von Braun nor his critics can debate freely in public. Von Braun works for Army Ordnance at its guided missile center at Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville, Ala. His job is military missiles, not space ships, but nearly all the facts that bear on space flight also apply to missiles and are, therefore, strictly secret. His opponents are muzzled by the same difficulty.

Cautious Viking. Most articulate critic of the Von Braun plan is Dr. Milton Rosen of the Naval Research Laboratory at Washington, a careful, meticulous man. As head of the Navy’s Viking Project, Dr. Rosen can talk comparatively freely, because the Viking is a high-altitude research rocket, not a fighting missile.

Dr. Rosen is frankly aghast at difficulties that Von Braun lightly brushes aside. Every ambitious rocket, he says, contains a long series of intricate components; all of them must work perfectly or the whole rocket will fail. Each new element—down to valves and gaskets—must be tested over & over until its reliability is close to absolute.

This makes rocket progress necessarily slow. Rosen believes that Von Braun’s 7,000-ton shuttle rockets — to say nothing of his space station—would be a reckless leap into the blind future, like trying to build a B-36 out of the engines and wing sections used in World War I. The inevitable outcome, he thinks, would be a gigantic fiasco.

Rosen admits that chemical fuels, burned in a multi-stage rocket, can theoretically place a payload in a permanent orbit. But he points out that the Von Braun plan would expend more than 6,000 tons of fuel for each 36-ton payload. Even if the shuttle rockets survived more than one trip (Rosen thinks it unlikely), the carrying charge on each ton of payload would be fantastic.

The space station, Dr. Rosen thinks, would have little military value. Equipping it to make observations would be exceedingly difficult, and any missiles that it might drop would be lucky to hit the-right country. The project, Rosen warns, would sop up most of the U.S. supply of qualified technical men. While they were aiming at space, the guided missile program—which military planners consider vital to U.S. safety—would grind to a halt.

Space travel will probably have to wait, Rosen believes, until the scientists have made some basic discovery equal in novelty to Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetism. A beam of high-speed particles pushed at close to the speed of light by nuclear energy might do the trick. No one yet has the foggiest idea about how to do it.

Specialized Difficulties. At White Sands Proving Ground, where most U.S. rockets are put to the test, Von Braun’s theories are received with a mixture of fascination and alarm. Most rocket engineers, even the hard-handed practical ones, are deeply moved by the idea of space flight. But when they look closely at Von Braun’s proposal, each man sees the worst difficulties in the specialty he knows best. Propulsion experts, for example, know that they must baby even a single rocket motor. They hate to think of making 51 of them fire properly and at the same instant. The failure of a single motor would make the whole rocket fail, perhaps in a flaming crash.

The most pessimistic men at White Sands are those who try to get instruments back to earth undamaged from the comparatively modest heights (100 miles or so) reached by present-day rockets. All they have managed to recover are a few extra-tough items, such as rolls of film in thick-walled steel cylinders. Parachutes, even if made of steel, do not open until the rocket is falling so fast that the first brush of air resistance burns them up. The highest-flying rocket so far (the two-stage “Bumper WAC Corporal,” which rose 250 miles) came back to earth with its steel fins partially fused. The recovery men shudder at the thought of what would happen to Von Braun’s returning crews. Their red-hot spiral around the earth may be theoretically possible, but even a slight mischance would be fatal.

The Fragile Crew. Other pessimists are to be found at the Air Force School of Space Medicine at San Antonio, Texas. How will human bodies and brains function in space? The medical experts are willing to believe that rockets can be built to navigate space, but they are not so sure that the human crews can take it. At 50,000 ft., where a jet plane can fly, the air is no use to the pilot. If his cabin should lose its pressurizing, he would die just as quickly (about 15 seconds) as if he were in the vacuum of space. At a slightly higher altitude (63,000 ft.), his warm blood would boil, making his flesh swell up with bubbles like cookies baking in an oven.

To avert such misadventures, the Air Force uses a “partial pressure suit” made like a skintight union suit of strong, greenish material, with an airtight helmet. When the cabin air pressure falls too low, an automatic valve shoots oxygen into the helmet at about ten Ibs. pressure per square inch. It also inflates rubber bladders along the wearer’s limbs and body, making the suit even tighter. This enables the man to breathe and keeps gas bubbles from forming in his blood. He stays conscious longer and has a chance to bring his damaged plane down to inhabitable air.

But the pressure suit, says the Air Force, is nothing like those brief, becoming space suits worn in the comics. It will keep a man alive in a virtual vacuum for about ten minutes, but he breathes with difficulty. His hands, not fully pressurized, swell up with blue venous blood. His throat is another trouble spot: the medicos have not learned how to pressurize a throat without strangling its owner.

Pressure suits will improve, say the space doctors, but not enough to permit their wearers to work freely in a vacuum for long periods of time. Dr. Fritz Haber of the School of Space Medicine believes that the whole space-suit idea will have to be abandoned. If space men want to float around outside their space ship (as they did in the movie, Destination Moon), they will have to stay inside rigid cylinders and do their work by remote-control devices operated from inside.

One thing the space doctors are sure of: human bodies and nervous systems resent fluctuations of gravity. Moderate increases are not too bad if they do not last long. The crews of Von Braun’s shuttle rockets would have to withstand nine “Gs” (nine times normal gravity) for brief periods as they left the earth. They could survive by lying on their backs on contour couches, say the space doctors, but they would not enjoy it.

When the rocket’s power cuts off and it orbits freely in space, the crew would feel no gravity at all. In this “zero gravity field,” they could neither stand nor sit unless held firmly in position. If they tried to sleep in bunks, the slightest motion would flip them out. The jet effect of even gentle breathing would waft them across the cabin.

The probable effect of zero gravity on the human nervous system is far more serious. The nervous system, says Dr. H. Strughold, head of the School of Space Medicine, was designed to work on the surface of the earth in a gravity field of one G. How would the rocket crew feel while the rocket was accelerating? They would lie barely conscious on their contoured G-couches. At this stage the rocket would be under automatic control; the men, weighing nine times normal, would not be capable of any action at all. With the power cut off and the rocket coasting upward, gravity would drop to zero. The men would be expected to rise from their beds of pain (not knowing which end is up) and perform navigation feats that would tax a professor of celestial mechanics. Dr. Strughold does not think they could work at peak form; they would be lucky to accomplish anything.

Meteors & Rays. There are other, outside hazards as a space ship soars out of the shelter of earth’s atmosphere. From the sun comes a blast of fierce ultraviolet rays which turn glass black. Ordinary light and heat from the sun are also terrors of space. Most surfaces, especially metals, exposed to the sun above the atmosphere get too hot for comfort. Laboratory calculations show that sunlit aluminum will reach 802° F., well above its softening point.

Another, and the least known, terror of space is cosmic rays. These mysterious particles, voyaging across the universe at nearly the speed of light, are normally gentled by the atmosphere before they reach the earth’s surface. Men in space would feel their full fury. No shield is effective against them, and certain types leave streaks of dead cells when they pass through living tissue.

One of Von Braun’s bitterest critics, an important missile expert, says: “Look at this Von Braun! He is the man who lost the war for Hitler. His V-2 was a great engineering achievement, but it had almost no military effect and it drained German brains and material from more practical weapons. Von Braun has always wanted to be the Columbus of space. He was thinking of space flight, not weapons, when he sold the V-2 to Hitler. He says so himself. He is still thinking of space flight, not weapons, and he is trying to sell the U.S. a space flight project disguised as a means of dominating the world.”

This opinion is seconded by a German-speaking U.S. Army officer who was sent to collapsing Germany in 1945 to gather technical information. He went into the fabulous underground factory at Nordhausen where the V-2s were assembled, and found the director still in his office.

The director broke down and wept when he talked of the V-2s. “For each V-2,” he said, “we could have built at least one jet fighter, and each jet fighter would have shot down at least one of your bombers, that have destroyed our country.” The feeling of many (though not all) practical missile men is that Von Braun’s satellite proposal would fail and would leave the U.S. without the new weapons it needs. These men think that the best way to achieve space flight, whether for military or peaceful reasons, is to continue with the present guided missile pro gram. Every success in this field, they say, will be a step toward space flight.

Von Braun has answers for all his critics. What the U.S. needs, he believes, is a daring, inspiring program that has a real chance of controlling the world. Atom bombs carried by airplanes are nearly worn out as war preventers. Guided mis siles are important weapons, but the Russians are working on them too. He thinks that a satellite station would put the U.S. far ahead in the race for power, and that no other program offers as much promise.

He hopes that the Russians will not be the first to garrison an orbit. (Last week the Russian magazine Ogonek predicted that the Soviet flag will be raised on the moon within 50 years.) Von Braun admits that his writings have been deliberate attempts to arouse popular enthusiasm and warm the cold feet of timid military planners. In writing for the public, he has had to omit convincing details that would have made his plan sound much more practical. During the last few years, he says, behind the wall of military secrecy there has been great progress. He believes that the guided missile men have moved much closer to space than many of them think.

He could (if permitted), Von Braun claims, tell about tested methods of overcoming the obstacles pointed out by his opponents. He is sure that many “terrors of space” will evaporate like the “sonic barrier,” which once was thought to limit the speed of airplanes.

American Star. The cost of the satellite station ($4 billion) Von Braun considers reasonable. The cost could be spread over ten years or more and would hardly be missed by a nation already spending $50 billion a year on its defense. Nor would it drain the U.S. of qualified technical men. There are plenty of them around, but they are “working on iceboxes.” He has letters from a number of topflight engineers and scientists who will work for the Government only if employed on something as exciting as rockets headed for space.

The march toward space can start, Von Braun suggests, without adopting the full space station program. Even slight extensions of present techniques could set a small, unmanned missile circling round an orbit just outside the atmosphere.

When working on rockets in Germany, Von Braun fired a V-2 on a clear day 15 minutes after the sun had set. The stars were already coming out, and as the great rocket climbed upward, the flame of its exhaust diminished to a shining pinpoint and disappeared. Then the rocket broke into the sunlight above the shadow of the earth and gleamed, brilliantly visible, against the darkening sky. He watched it through its full course, like a bright, climbing star, and followed it down again into the shadow.

Even a small satellite could be made to shine at dusk. It could inflate a plastic balloon which would gleam as brightly in the sunlight as a first-magnitude star. This “American star,” rising in the west, should make a powerful impression on the peoples of Asia.

On one important point Von Braun agrees with Rosen and his other critics: that the first step toward space should be to set up a special commission to study the entire matter. Its members should be scientists, engineers and economists of the highest type. They should be “cleared” to receive all the latest news of guided missile progress, and they should be above interservice rivalries and the self-seeking pressure of missile manufacturers. After making their decision on the feasibility and value of all types of space vehicles, they should lay down a practical program for the U.S. to follow.

The public will not be told the decision of such a commission. To announce even its yes or no would reveal the summation of many military secrets. If the decision is yes, the first news for the public may be an “American star,” rising in the west and sweeping swiftly across the sky.

*Among rocketeers, rockets are seldom called rockets. They are called “vehicles,” “birds” or “beasts.”