National Affairs: RACE INTO SPACE

The Russians Are Running Hard And Rewards of Victory Are Great

BEFORE the U.S. can get going at top speed on a full-scale space program, it must cope with two big problems. It must clear the lines of bureaucratic responsibility and see that the space program is directed with determined authority; last month the President made a start on this problem, but only a start, when he transferred the Army’s space team to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (TIME, Nov. 2). The second and overriding problem: the U.S. must develop an official understanding of the need for urgency in getting into space—or what Washington might call “the scientific and military requirement for space.”

The steady progression of Russian experiments—from Sputnik to hitting the moon to photographing the moon’s far side, to extensive space tests with animals—indicates a Soviet determination to get man into space, and get him there as fast as possible. It also indicates that the moon is the Russians’ first space objective.

LIFE ON THE MOON

There is little question that man will get to the moon. In first landings he will have to bring his own food, water, shelter and tools. But once established, there is ample reason, within the achievements already reached or within sight, to be sure that he can learn to live there. Compared with the planets and stars, the moon probably has a mineralogical composition much like the earth’s. In this recognizable state, man could live by means of today’s technology, crude as it is. He could, suggests Air Force Lieut. Colonel S. E. Singer in the Air University Quarterly Review, store the sun’s abundant heat energy (daytime heat 248° F.) with inertial flywheels (which are inefficient on earth because of atmospheric friction), and control his heating during the −200° F. cold lunar nights. He could, adds Physicist Singer, extract water from rock; then from the water, by means of electrolysis, could come oxygen to sustain him, and hydrogen for fuels and chemical synthesis, and for growing food by hydroponics.

In military terms, control of the moon represents the classical concept of the “high ground.” Thus the lunar military potential takes on a new urgency in terms of observation and missilery. Says Air Force Brigadier General Homer Boushey: with moderate-sized telescopes, lunar observers could daily “monitor the positions of all ships at sea, all major surface construction, all above-ground missile sites” on the earth. The growing sciences of optics and radar observation already promise the tools to assure continuous observation of the turning earth and the pinpointing of objects as small as 100 ft. across.

TIME & ACCURACY

If man can get to the moon, he can eventually transport missiles. Missile sites located underground, or planted in craters on the far side of the moon (never seen from earth), would be beyond observation, and thus beyond target spotting, of earth-based attackers. Even if there were a missile exchange between earth and moon forces, lunar missiles would have the advantage of time and accuracy, and of direct guidance systems that are already in existence.

Since the moon’s escape velocity is lower than the earth’s, a lunar-based missile would spend less fuel in blastoff, could use it to increase speed of travel. Even with today’s rocket engines, says the Air Force’s Singer, a moon-based team could send a missile from moon to earth in considerably less than two days. “The improvements in space and missile technology that will be required actually to put a man on the moon will perforce include the means for reducing moon-to-earth transit times to the order of hours [and perhaps] minutes.”

PRIDE & PROMISE

The moon’s key to the future offers possibilities for mankind far beyond military protection. In the scientific sense, Singer writes, “man can only approach the future rationally in terms of the present and the past. Even so, it is well to recognize that progress is not always attained in terms of today’s conventions and reasonings. Man first tried to fly by flapping birdlike wings, but modern aircraft do not use this principle; nor do modern railroad cars bear much resemblance to the horse-drawn carriage prototypes. There must be a somewhat visionary or even fanciful approach to the future as well as a conventional one.” New approaches to knowledge are as out of this world as the moon itself. Its airless environment and its fantastic temperature range make an ideal laboratory for high-vacuum and cryogenic (refrigerants) research; the vast amounts of solar energy, if properly harnessed on the moon, might be used to affect or control the earth’s weather.

To date, the Administration has tended to rationalize its space program as part of a prestige battle with no driving belief in the necessity of securing space objectives—or so its erratic progress on the space program indicates. Gimmicks, as the President’s “voice rocket” proved last year, are shortlived and ineffectual. Prestige for unnumbered years will go automatically to the nation that is successful in reaching the moon and making it a steppingstone to further space exploration. And the nation that first lands men and instruments on the moon will be the one whose political and economic outlook becomes the dominant force on earth, whether it tells its story through a horde of propagandists or lets its accomplishments speak for themselves.

Compelled by the Soviet’s purposeful drive for the moon, stirred by the American tradition and man’s limitless yearning to challenge the unknown, the U.S. has a new adventure in store, an old promise to keep—to its own pride, to progress, and perhaps to survival.