Nice fairy tale, but in reality America's space program sprang from the German WWII war effort, and the V2s of Dr. Werner von Braun.
3
I would welcome a global effort to go to Mars. It is too expensive an operation for any single country to take on. How about a four-party collaboration: USA, China, Russia, and Europe. All four have a lot of talent (and $$$) to contribute to such a plan. It would tend bring some of our natural adversaries together with and a common goal. (The USA/Russia collaboration in the Space Station is a good example.) The time is right: A major scientific undertaking, with well-defined goals and timing, is exactly what we need now.
4
Correct me if I'm wrong, but our situation on Earth as far as space travel goes seems pretty special. To reach escape velocity, so much of a chemical rocket has to be fuel there is barely anything left for payload, but we can still manage it. Escape velocity depends on the mass and radius of the planet. If the mass was much larger or the radius much smaller, it would be impossible to leave by chemical means, so even if there is intelligent life elsewhere, they might remain forever bound their planet's surface until they invented some technology which we obviously don't yet have or they'd have to wait for someone else to bring it.
1
Gravity has to be developed, somehow, for off planet travel. We should go back to the moon, I think Mars is too far, not that we can't get there. See my comment about gravity.
I'm all gung ho re going back to the moon, but there's gonna have to be some different travel plan for Mars.
Here's an analogy: you can take a kayak from Long Beach CA to Catalina Island, but you can't take the same kayak from Long Beach to Hawaii.
We can't have people riding in giant soda pop cans on a five month trip to Mars, expect them to land there and then have to go through their gravity adjustment rehab on Mars. Gravity rehab is much more of a bear than has really been talked about. Doesn't matter if Mars' gravity field is less than Earth's, it's still a big problem.
If we could get there faster, whittle it down to a three week trip, then yeah, okay. Even still, some pebble sized asteroid that no one sees coming hits the ship anywhere and it's all over.
1
The next obvious project would be Mars. As for the Moon, been there, done that.
TEST YOUR MOON-FICTION IQ with this trivia question!
In one of the Oz books (sequels to THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ) written by the original author (L. Frank Baum), a character tells how someone he knew went to the Moon, and liked it so much that he stayed there. What was the mode of transport to the Moon?
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In the third Oz book, which is called OZMA OF OZ (published 1907), Tiktok the clockwork man tells how one of his designers, an inventor named Tinker, made a ladder long enough to reach the Moon, and climbed up to the Moon, and found it such a lovely place that he pulled up his ladder and stayed there.
(Although Tiktok was not the first mechanical humanoid automaton in literature, he is generally recognized as the first INTELLIGENT mechanical humanoid automaton, the first one capable of ordinary conversation.)
2
It amazes me that Jules Verne’s “space gun” was located in central Florida. It demonstrates once again how prescient many science fiction writers have been over the years about future events.
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He also placed the headquarters of the US military in “The Polygon in Washington”
4
We need to come together and save our habitat or we all die.
4
"von Braun’s five-stage Saturn 5 moon rocket followed not long after, and in July 1969 it took astronauts to another world for the first time."
The rocket was called "Saturn V" not "Saturn 5", and it had three states, not five.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V
3
Out here in California we fly High Powered Rockets, some to near orbit as a hobby..
It sure beats Golf..
Please note that the US space effort, including the moon landing, was led by Wernher von Braun, a major in the SS who had led rocket development in Nazi Germany. Immediately after WW II von Braun and his merry band of a few hundred rocketeers were spirited out of Germany by US intelligence agents, brought to America and magically cleansed of their Nazi backgrounds.
Von Braun and his colleagues also shaped the development of the US ballistic missiles that carry nuclear weapons.
Ironically, the Russkies wanted von Braun and his key people as much as the US did, but ended up able to “recruit” only from the remaining second-tier German rocket scientists, who were taken to Russia, pumped for what information they had, and ultimately repatriated to Germany.
At least von Braun and his top colleagues ended up working for the US; how might things have turned out if the Russians had got hold of von Braun and his people before we did?
4
We need a transformative figure, another John Kennedy (despite all his personal flaws) to excite all of us to go to the stars. But when the current admn is so anti-science, and uses $$ for Defense Dept armaments we don't need and stupid walls, where will the dough come from?
See "Moonshot: JFK and the Race for the Moon." Not the usual Camelot drivel, but a political history of why and how Kennedy used the Moon race as a way to unify the country. Doesn't stint on Von Braun, admits that top German scientists were grabbed by the Americans to keep them from the Soviets.
And von Braun was no reluctant scientist, forced to work for Hitler. He joined the Party early, seeing his own future. Best song about him is Tom Lerher's "Werner von Braun"
I'll sing you a tale about Werner von Braun
A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown
"Ah, Nazi, Shcazi," says Werner von Braun.
Some have harsh words for this man of renown
But some say our attitude should be one of gratitude
Like the widows and cripples of old London town
Who owe their large large pensions to Werner von Braun
[goes on like this for several verses] final chorus:
"In German und English I know how to count down
Und I'm learning CHINESE," says Werner von Braun.
1
' man is a fabulous nuisance in space... not worth all the cost of putting him up there '
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Van_Allen
==
3
I worked in the Apollo program, starting as a 25 year old in Jan. 1966. I got there by way of science fiction. I saw Destination Moon in 1950 when I was 10 years old. Produced by George Pal it was the brain child of American science fiction writer Robert Heinlein. Now days Destination Moon feels more like Popular Mechanics Science Fiction but the extrapolated engineering physics is exquisite. The artist Chesley Bonestell contributed to Destination Moon. Bonestell is also connected with another work of science fiction. Wernher von Braun conceived of the idea that the American public would become totally enthused for manned space flight by a very 'realistic science fiction novel about space flight. He got together a group of his engineers from Peenemünde (while waiting for assignment at White Sands Testing Ground in New Mexico) and worked out a mission to Mars. The novel by von Braun was called "Project MARS: A Technical Tale". No American publisher wanted it, with good reason the book is a fairly pedestrian story and writers like Heinlein, Asimov and A. C. Clarke were writing and had written much more entertaining and elegant tales already. However the technical appendix of the book was so unusual, details worked out down to the rivet head, that it got published in Germany first then in the USA by the University of Illinois as The Mars Project, 1953, which became the basis for a Collier's Magazine series , with gorgeous Bonestell paintings.
8
I'm guessing that an engineer trying to solve the launch survival problem in the 1950s, without help from the science fiction writings of the 1830s, would also have reached for chemical propellants & multi-stage rockets. Cheers,
Because light travels so slowly--and the universe comprises an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 billion galaxies each with about 100 billion stars, a total of about 1 X 10E23 stars--we should be investing in research to use an extra dimension, illustrated by quantum entanglement, for instant communications across the the 91 billion light years of the universe. See whether there are any other sentient beings in our cosmos.
A wide spectrum of individuals have commented on the existence of an extra dimension, even insisting you can see the extra dimension in gravity's causing star light to bend. See the comments excerpted in Rudy Rucker's, "The Fourth Dimension, Toward a Geometry of Higher Reality."
Indeed, capability to interact with an extra dimension might lead to communications of unlimited bandwidth, while allowing point-to-point communications between individuals--immune to censorship.
To interact with an extra dimension--a new medium for communications--all we need is a starting point.
2
Science Fiction continues to inspire in many different ways. Neuralink was a major part of the late Iain M. Bank's series of far future novels as much as the internet is today. The term was picked up by Musk and has become a household term. "Of Course I Still Love You" and "Just Read the Instructions" were two space ship "personalities" with massive computer "minds" that are treated the same as human beings in the Culture series by Banks and are the names of SpaceX's drone ships used to retrieve first stage rockets.
3
Whatever the contribution of science fiction to space exploration, it seems like the historical period commonly called "the age of exploration" that seems to inspire the foray into space. Not so much Jules Verne, but Christopher Columbus, Henry Hudson, Vasco da Gama, Jacques Cartier, Ferdinand Magellan, among others, who have inspired the exploration of space. The problem is the these people, against considerable odds, sailed across an ocean breathing a perfectly breathable atmosphere at temperatures that were consistent with human life. They went to places that were basically habitable -- e.g. North America -- and which were capable of supporting human life and, in particular, human agriculture. The uncomfortable truth of space travel is that none of this is true for either traveling in space or the destinations that are within reach. Antarctica has been explored, also, but no one lives there because it is basically uninhabitable. There are remote, barely habitable areas with a lot of mineral wealth -- the North Slope of Alaska comes to mind -- where people have adapted to reap the finial rewards, but for the most part, uninhabitable places on Earth remain largely uninhabited.
Science fiction, from Jules Verne to Star Trek, inspires by imagining a world where these problems are somehow dealt with ("warp drive"), but for now, space travel is a long risky journey to a basically uninhabitable place.
It is very inspiring, however.
1
The author likes to look at old things in his connection of science fiction to exploration of the moon. The most important influence was Arthur C. Clarke, author of "2001: A Space Odyssey."
NASA's cultural high point was at a conference held at its headquarters in 1968, which brought together visionaries like Clarke, Wernher von Braun, and Hermann Oberth. The meeting was a dream of the future, with a focus on the upcoming Space Shuttle program. The theme to "2001,"Thus Spoke Zarathustra" was played as the theme song to the major news networks' coverage of Apollo 11.
Nixon's winding down of the space program in 1973 dashed these dreams, ending the initial phase of the space program. NASA has never reached the heights of the imagination that it enjoyed prior to then; it became Nixonian itself, a hotbed of politics and personal ambition.
1
I agree. It gives me hope for two things.
First, we still dream of space. We will go on out into it. The small minded leadership since the Moon landing is an aberration.
Second, those same authors had other visions of the same sort that they shared in the same works. Those also inspired.
I'm thinking in particular of the great Robert Heinlein's imaginings of peoples' future work life and economic system. He saw everyone provided for. He saw much of the work as something done with only part of our lives, and the rest of the time used more productively to make life more worth living.
There were many other sci fi writers like him, who imagined much the same things. Those answers resonated with readers.
Much of Europe has gone part way there.
The US leadership has allowed us to go toward a more Russian solution, of lawless oligarchs and an aristocracy of extreme wealth. Born to it or killing and stealing to get it doesn't matter, only the money itself matters.
Let us dream together, and now do it too.
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"Destination Moon" 1950 film written by Robert A. Heinlein won an Oscar for special effects. Heinlein's story was one of the best, in terms of factual material, at that time.
He had written several short stories on the subject and included in each many realistic facts.
While he is one of the most honored of science fiction authors, his screenplay for this film was the first of the genre of modern films with realistic plot.
4
The purposes of a multinational space program need to be four-fold: 1) scientific discovery, 2) technical development, 3) the improvement of life on earth, and perhaps most importantly, 4) the detection and deflection of asteroids and comets that could collide catastrophically with the earth. You'll note that contesting a race is not among those purposes. We need to go to the Moon and Mars to invent the technologies we will need to save ourselves. We must stop acting as if space were an arena for national pride or war and instead cooperate to protect our planet, the only permanent home our species will ever know.
2
Great article that makes me dream... about building large spaceships to colonize the galaxy.
We need to start thinking of humanity as a multi-world species. We need to think about going to other solar systems. Assume it as a fact that there will be colonies on the Moon, Mars and one or two of Jupiter and Saturn’s moons.
We need to dream bigger so we can aim farther.
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I think science fiction can inspire future innovations. It can also comment and speculate on future probabilities. We made it to the moon because of that inspiration, and a very large and focused effort... now, when leaders try to inspire similar efforts, the phrase "moon shot" is used.
We have a similar situation facing humanity right now, similar to the challenge of reaching the moon, and with dire consequences for all of us if a "moon shot" effort is not made... the global climate change event.
It is very probably too late to completely mitigate the impacts; I suspect there are serious inputs to current events rooted in the changing global climate already. At this point, a "moon shot" effort might, only 'might', head off the worst of future impact. Instead we blindly stumble forward doing the same things that we know launched the problem.
I'm not certain we have the "moon shot" capability anymore, nor the social focus to do so. Fail, and there is plenty of a science fiction sub-genre speculating about the shape of future society. Check out 'post-apocalyptic science fiction for some possible futures our grandchildren may experience. I wonder if they will be capable of a "moon shot" when they really need it?
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Strangely, in the 1936 classic Sci-Fi film "Things to Come", with a screenplay by H.G. Wells, after the world is rebuilt along scientific lines following a 30 year world war that almost wipes out civilization entirely, he has a male and female couple being shot around the Moon in 2036 by a giant "space gun" - it even had a sight! Wells surely knew that this was absurd, but for some reason, perhaps symbolic, he scripted it that way.
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Star Trek inspired more kids to become astronauts, engineers, physicists, astronomers, doctors, and biologists than can be counted. I’m one of them.
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@Lisa
Whenever I hear someone these days lauded for their mediocre accomplishments in some field, something which is invariably equated with making vast amounts of money, I say to myself, "It's not like they invented Warp Drive". Jeff Bezos, who intends to spend his fortune on populating the solar system with trillions of bald clones of his perfect self, comes immediately to mind.
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If there is one person to cite as responsible for space travel it has to be Isaac Newton (1642-1726) who, in turn, credited Kepler and Galileo for his own achievements. Science fiction writers don't generally know beans about celestial mechanics, engineers and physicists do. It's wonderful to dream, but it is best not to stray too far from reality.
1
@Michael Bailey
I must disagree with you, sir. The sources you cite are the ones who can "get it done" but it is the imagination of writers and other social misfits who inspire the effort. The engineers are generally more interested in engineering problems than they are in wild possibilities. Nothing happens without first being imagined, projected.
I remember when I was a boy in elementary school. One of my best friends at the time was a person named Boyd Corbitt. We were swinging back and forth on a swing set during recess. Sometime between the high points of the swing, I said to him: "Some day soon, there are going to be astronauts up there." From the dreams and imaginations of both children and creative adults, new challenges arise. Without those dreams? Not much.
1
Yes, and science fiction (being the oxymoron that it is) may inspire more impressive feats of engineering and greater ranges of space travel ultimately leading...nowhere.
2
The 20th Century has been the most dynamic in all of history. Two great wars, fall and rise of empires and political ideas, and major scientific breakthroughs that culminated in Man on the Moon, etc. The 21st century so far has seen a reversal of those achievements and its one fifth over already, we better get moving.
4
@Hobo
The idea of "Progress" itself is only a few hundred years old, a result of the Enlightenment, and by no means guaranteed. Up until then, most of the problems humans had to contend with came from nature; since then, they've come in ever increasing frequency from man himself. Every technological advance brings its own set of problems, which then have to be dealt with, engendering a brand new set. We are in an arms race against ourselves and don't seem to care because there's money to be made by a handful of influential people who are insulated from any harm.
According to futurists in the 1960's, by now, we were all supposed to be "Athenians", freed from drudgery, and allowed to cultivate our highest aspirations. Instead we're grinding away at three jobs for peanuts, while we get to see how we'd look as a geezer on our marvelous cellphone. Seems like a worthwhile tradeoff to me!
3
@Hobo
Yeah, by the age of 19, the 20th century already had one World War under its belt, and was gearing up for another! The 21st is the Slacker Century by comparison.
1
In the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s there was a lot more utopianism in science fiction. People used to believe that the concepts and technologies explored in sci-fi were going to solve mankind's problems and help us overcome the limitations we face on Earth.
Humankind no longer has this sort of sense of hope for the future. Many of the technological achievements forecasted in science fiction have become reality, and they haven't made the world a better place. If anything, they've made us more aware of our failings and limitations. Space is an empty void, and if there's anything out there we'll never be able to reach it.
We should also consider the immense military incentive behind the Apollo Program. If we could use a rocket to hit a moving target hundreds of thousand of miles away, we could send a message to the Soviets that we could nuke them at any time from any location we pleased. After all the fuss about Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba, we developed a way to ensure that missile range was no longer a factor to consider.
Mankind's paranoia and drive to guarantee survival in conflict is a far greater motivator in technological progress than sci-fi utopianism and the nebulous "search for the unknown." But rocketry and space exploration are no longer the military's foremost concerns. Now the technological battlegrounds are computers, AI and robotics.
3
Science fiction made a lot of predictions about reaching the moon: it was hollow, really made of cheese, the US was first, Denmark was first, it was an advertising stunt etc. What no one predicted, since it seemed so outrageous, is that; having succeeded, we turned around and didn’t proceed any further.
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It’s sorta like Dorothy learned in her big dream - there’s no place like home. Space exploration is important and achievements from the science are great, but the flaw in the moon race was its geopolitical genesis. Rather than seeking knowledge, the manned space program was a Cold War proxy.
Interestingly, Eisenhower’s concept of using space as a military surveillance / communications platform led to the satellite program which may still have more influence on our daily life than actual manned space flight.
3
@MACT
True that..
Unless we ordered off the Moon by someone ??
It's pretty plain that 'we' won't get much past Mars, nor should we even try. Intelligent robotic space-probes are the future of space exploration; powerful devices launched far beyond our solar system to view and sense. Unless physics works differently than we think it does that's about all we'll be able to do for a long time to come. Forget about space mining or colonies, that's comic book stuff. Hollywood is the true capital of space exploration, and that isn't really meant as joke; they give visual form to the latest ideas about, and possibilities of, space exploration so people can think about them, however unrealizable they may be for now.
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@Ronald B. Duke Right, but we could travel further if we developed technology as seen in Planet of the Apes and Alien (speaking of movie influences).
Have people noticed that spell check is off? It's off on the Globe and Mail too.
As someone who started reading science fiction back in 1934 I’m well aware of much of how imaginative fiction showed us how wonderful and dangerous technological progress could be . I find it rather sad more attention has not been paid to the two novels 1984 and Brave New World as cautions to the world we live in today. We are approaching one of the really early ones, Frankenstein, in a world that is revamping this planet to become another Venus and current civilization is hardly doing anything sufficient to avoid that.
8
Verne deserves more credit. The selection of Florida as the launching site of his Moon ship was not a lucky guess. He asked himself what country was most likely to attempt a trip to the Moon. His answer - the innovative and industrializing U.S. Then he asked himself what site in the U.S. would be most suitable for the project. His answer - the southern most point in the U.S. so the ship would take advantage of the earth's spin. Two more bulls eyes across the distance of 100 years. Verne's ship was crewed by three men (the optimal number for difficult mountain ascents in Verne's day) and his ship landed in the Pacific ocean (the largest and easiest target).
Space exploration should be primarily robotic until more effective methods of propulsion, anti-matter or fusion, are developed. Chemical rockets are little better than a Kon Tiki raft in terms of speed and payload. A constant thrust anti-matter or fusion rocket would allow us to visit the most distant point in the solar system in months rather than decades.
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Where should we go next? The critical time for drastic changes, when our species could have accept the warnings that overpopulation and pollution were destroying planet A , was 50 years ago. Nothing [positive] has happened in those 50 years. There is no Planet B within light years. The priority needs to be saving what's left of A, then exploration for B.
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@Le Jeune - Nothing positive in 50 years? How about population growth rate peaked about 50 or 60 years ago. Improvements in healthcare and standards of living in nation after nation has resulted in stabilization of growth rates. Follow this link and scroll to "How has the world population growth rate been changing?"
https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth
Extreme poverty has been reduced, too, quite substantially.
"In fact, the big success over the last generation was that the world made rapid progress against the very worst poverty. The number of people in extreme poverty has fallen from nearly 1.9 billion in 1990 to about 650 million in 2018.
https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty
I also think the loss of the Soviet Union was a positive development. Europe, Japan, United States have been getting less carbon intensive, as China and India have also been switching more and more to renewables, to deal with their massive air pollution problems. We had similar problems, but our air and water is much cleaner than 50 years ago.
Good news isn't as exciting as bad news, largely because it's slow. There's a lot that needs fixing, always will be, but there's been progress too.
Oh, and the nuclear holocaust hasn't happened yet. I think that's also good.
@b fagan
Yes, the percentage of growth has leveled off, but the global population is still increasing and expected to reach 10 billion in 30 years from the present 7 billion. Overpopulation is when the number of people exceed the capacity of resources.
The US is less than 4% of the planets' population, yet consumes 24-27% of world fossil fuel resources, and now the rest of the world want a place at the trough.
When a species has the growth philosophy of a cancer cell ,it does not need to be concerned with space travel .
2
Of course science fiction helped put us on the moon. You have to imagine something before you can do it.
Where next? No point in going anywhere that isn't nominally habitable. We'd better get moving, too. The current planet's in big trouble.
Read Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem novels, if you want to understand a bit about China’s long-term ambition. Though on its surface they are alien-invasion novels, they really speak as much about superpower rivalry.
Amazing to see our species in a new space race again. This time I actually think I will live to see humanity living and working on other worlds. It has been “The Dream” of Apollo fans since the landings. If we begin moving off world I will die contented, though I would also want us to reverse global warming, the greatest challenge we face today. Space technology is going to help, since we may not manage it without geoengineering.
3
You forgot to mention Hergé's two-volume Tintin opus "Objectif Lune" and "On a marché sur la Lune" (both translated in multiple languages). Millions of readers from all over the world first "traveled" to the moon with Tintin, Captain Haddock, professor Calculus and a few others. The cultural impact of these two books on the youth of the second half of the 20th century was huge and deep.
8
@Denis Pelletier - Nice addition to this article's literary history. For seminal works of imagination about the moon and how to reach it, I would go back much further to the marvelous satirical novel "L'Autre Monde: ou les États et Empires de la Lune" (1657) by French writer Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655; the real one, not the Rostand character). The "Cyrano" narrator travels to the moon by military rockets and discusses the moon people's alien ways as a means to satirize humans on earth. He even suggests that the creatures view Earth as THEIR moon. A thoughtful, hilarious fantasia that inspired readers for centuries after, including Jonathan Swift and Arthur C. Clarke.
4
Wonderful weaving of art, science and history. I read many a book back in the day and my mother woke me up in the late fireflies to witness history and some of the launches and attempts. One note though, you wrote..”The mighty Saturn remains the only rocket to have transported human beings beyond Earth orbit, ..”
The moon orbits the earth. Gravity at work. The two men who stood upright on the moon still orbited our planet. No human has ever gone beyond the reach of earth’s gravity.
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@David Stocking - if you want to split hairs about it I will, too. When they stood on the moon, they were orbiting the gravitational center of the Earth-Moon system, not the Earth. Someone else can clarify what I've left out.
3
Rather than compete in a zero-sum game, nations should work together on making fusion a viable source of energy. It would help us avoid the worst of climate change, as well as provide a safe alternative to rocket power in our quest to explore beyond our planet.
1
America put men on the moon when the American economy was so dominant (in the twenty years after WWII decimated most of Europe and Asia) that we had excess fiscal capacity for a "great leap" such as Apollo 11.
Now we are a nation with a $22 trillion debt - with most of our citizens living hand-to-mouth. Now we don't have the luxury of turning our science fiction fantasies into reality.
But we do have two urgent tasks right in our faces that demand the same single-mindedness that drove the Manhattan Project and the Space Race, to wit:
1. Climate change. All our available scientific, technological and industrial resources need to be focused on weaning the world off of fossil fuels. This is a Manhattan Project to literally save humanity. Much of the rest of the world is already embarked on this mission - while Trump thrusts our heads into the sand.
2. Killer asteroids. OK, rocket fans, this is your mission. We know with certainty (just like we know that the Big One will eventually devastate San Francisco or LA) that a rogue asteroid will impact our planet with catastrophic global devastation. Depending on the size of the asteroid, we'll either loose hundreds of millions or suffer total extinction.
It might happen next year or ten thousand years from now. But every year that goes by that we don't develop and perfect the technology to detect and then deflect or destroy such asteroids - we're living on borrowed time.
Save humanity first. THEN we can travel to Mars and beyond.
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@Dave It's not a random event like an earthquake. It won't sneak up on you.
1
I enjoyed this one, Mr. Benson.
I believe I would have liked it as history alone even without the heavy dose of nostalgia that welled up in me as I read it.
As a space buff in my early teens in the late 50's and early 60's, (I still have a scrapbook of news stories and pictures I collected of some of those early launches) much of this history was already familiar to me, and I still have the seminal account of that era written by another member of the German Society for Space Travel, Willy Ley, who unlike Werner von Braun whose politics he did not share, fled Germany and moved to the United States before WWII and popularized the emerging field of rocketry with his writings, primarily in"Rocket, Missiles and Space Travel."
That book remains one of the best introductions to the era and some of the people Mr. Benson writes about. I would still recommend it.
I mentioned Tom Lehrer the other day in another connection (the piece on MAD magazine) and now can't help but recall Lehrer's lyrics about the "widows and orphans in old London Town, who owe their large pensions to Werner von Braun."
A devastatingly perfect way to say in other words what Mr. Benson quoted from the philospher Walter Benjamin.
I always knew Lehrer was as much philosopher as mathematician.
15
They were PART of the story.
However, people like da Vinci, Galileo and Newton and Einstein, actually should receive most of the credit.
And "2001: A Space Odyssey" is not only the great space movie of all time, but it's probably in the top ten list for ALL movies.
8
I would like to see a concerted effort to produce the materials for our extended presence in space outside the deep gravity well of the earth. The moon, asteroids and other potential sources of these materials come to mind.
As long as we depend upon lifting huge rockets into space for relatively small pay loads we will be bound to the earth. Water which seems abundant around the solar system and is needed to support our life and can be made into fuel is a valuable goal.
It would be great to see a colony on Saturn's moon Titan which in many ways is earth like and could be used to mine the atmosphere of its planet. We have found potential for life almost every where we look, even in the the high atmosphere of the red hot planet Venus.
The solar system is open to us right now if we only had a plan and resources to make the commitment. Before Steven Hawking died he and others talked about small exploratory payloads that could be propelled to a good percentage of the speed of light with the help of lasers.
We can dream can't we? I at my age will never see it, but eventually I dream that we will do more than just dream.
2
We are all the adults we shall become from an early age. I remember, at six or seven, watching a Disney animation of a spaceship taking off for the moon, and thinking to myself, "Humph!, how do they plan to get outside the earth?".
@Ronald B. Duke
When I was in Grade 1 we were all tasked with drawing a picture of a mode of transportation. I drew a picture of a space ship. Thanks to my father's collection of science fiction paperbacks, I had no idea we weren't already in space!
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@LauraF
I remember back in the early Fifties reading a comic book with a space story, and a page of news from the Solar System with space pirates. I had to ask my father if it was really true, because I half believed it.
1
"Outer space is great for robot life. I hope they remember us."
Doing things in order is important. There is water on the moon. Water is for the radiation shield.
Go to the Moon & set up a base for Earth Defense & water collections for radiation shields. (Deflector rail guns for asteroids and comets & whatnot. We do not see all that is on its way.)
Then Mars, & Venus.
I work on a nation of airports and spaceports (Transcendia) so my modeling is concerned with best practices in governance.
1
Where do we go next? If you mean "with robots" then certainly more asteroids, more Mars, even moons of the gas giants.
"With people", though, that's tough. I'd just like to see a lot more done in earth orbit - those wonderful Willy Ley space stations that rotate for gravity. The problem with humans in space is the radiation; its so hard to bring up enough shielding to go outside the Van Allen belts for more than a few weeks.
It would also be cool to watch teleoperated devices on the Moon, the only place close enough for teleoperation; if they could dig us out an underground Moonbase that's affordable to heat and cool and safe from radiation, we could find out if long stays at 1/6th g are as debilitating to the body as long stays in microgravity. If they aren't, many interesting possibilities would be presented.
And also: can we scrape up Helium-3 on the Moon with remote operation? That one could pay serious returns.
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@roy brander - "The problem with humans in space is the radiation; its so hard to bring up enough shielding to go outside the Van Allen belts for more than a few weeks."
So we send robots to fetch asteroids-worth of shielding, metals, and other materials. Send a ship out, tip an asteroid (very carefully!) to come into orbit around the earth and start working it. Most of the energy needed to get the asteroid is just getting the ship to it, then perturbing it, after that it's downhill all the way. Of course, sending significant mass towards our home planet while missing our home planet will be kind of important.
The other problem with the moon besides radiation is an entire surface covered with microscopically-fine, sharp-edged regolith. Bad for human's insides, hard on machinery.
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@roy brander - there is plenty of 'stuff' already up there to build things with. The problem is being able to get up there long enough to bring it together and then build something out of it.
Getting some robots moving a small asteroid nearby, 'capturing' it to NEO, would be a start. Mine it full of holes, seal them up, pump in air, cover the surface with solar cells, set up some gardens (hydroponic or 'dirt'), add in all the needed recycling, and build on that start.
Maybe we could fund this if we promise to put "TRUMP" on the front in big gold-lighted letters...
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@Jim Brokaw:
You two make me feel like Nancy Pelosi. As in "I've had that 'mine the asteroids' sign in my basement since I was reading too many Jerry Pournelle columns in the late 70s"
All that stuff is going to be really hard, guys; as we celebrate Apollo, remember they devoted whole Gemini missions to very simple things like proving two spacecraft can dock, part, dock again.
"Moving a small asteroid" is going to be a project larger than the Panama Canal, with dozens of multi-billion-dollar missions to get that much fuel and engine mass to it. "Perturbing" it means "changing its velocity by kilometres per second", probably by about the speed of a rifle bullet.
Yes, it's "uphill" from us in the Sun's gravity well, but we are similarly "uphill" from Venus, and you might hesitate to claim our next thing is to move a billion tonnes to Venus.
I'm for all of this, but the question is "what do we do next", not "what do we do after the next next next next next thing". We just reached Plymouth Rock. The "Next Thing" is Jamestown, not Los Vegas.
But I love to hear that the enthusiasm is propagating down through the generations.
PS: You're completely right if the USA exchanges its military and space budgets. Don't hold your breath.
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Get to the moon and establish a permanent base. Then build an orbital station around the moon, or perhaps in a Lagrangian point to launch a Mars Mission from.
From the moon-base build a rail gun to launch material to the orbital station. Build the Mars vehicle from there, Bradbury 1.
There should be a moon-base dead center on the Earth side (great monitoring spot).
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@Charles -- there should be a moon base dead center on the back side, too. Great place to watch the neighborhood... and, who knows, the neighbors.
This is an amazing little history of rockets. Thank you for it. I remember launching rockets in the Boy Scouts. I like science fiction a lot because my Dad is a big sci-fi reader. I mostly see science fiction movies.
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Science fiction pushed the men to go to the Moon, but the technology was the "instrument" to travel. And we need more technology to go farther…
We landed some men on the Moon and they left. We are not on the Moon.
As a fan of science fact and fiction since I was a kid, I am disappointed and shocked that we haven't been back to the Moon and don't have a permanent presence there.
I am disappointed and shocked that the International Space Station is the only international manned space affair.
I am disappointed that the American Space Shuttle program never proved to be as regular, routine and safe as promised.
I am very pleased that unmanned exploration of our Solar System has yielded so much information about the planets, comets, moons and asteroids.
I am pleased that space based telescopes have yielded so much information about the history and nature of the universe including stars, galaxies, space and time. But so many mysteries remain origins, end, dark matter, dark energy, life, supermassive black holes, etc.
Because of our evolutionary fit biological DNA genetic origins need for gravity, liquid water, oxygen and protection from radiation human space exploration outside of Earth orbit is going to be inherently dangerous to our health.
Mars seems like the obvious next major destination. But it will clearly likely take an international private and public effort for such an endeavor.
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Thank you, Michael Benson & the NYT for publishing this very informative article. It leaves out a lot, so I hope that this might be the precursor to a book on the same topic.
As to the questions posed by the NYT, we should continue sending robotic probes to study the solar system. These are much cheaper & safer than manned space flight.
Once we get a handle on the Climate Crisis, universal health care, rebuilding the middle class, undoing the damage we've done abroad, then the U.S. should work with other nations in sending astronauts back to the moon & to Mars to answer questions that robotic probes have not yet been able to definitively answer (e.g., did Mars ever support life; is there life in some form there now?).
Then we should establish bases on the Moon & Mars. These will be enormously expensive & challenging to make safe, so they are far in the future.
As for the next space race, it's the current space race: the U.S., China, & Russia turning space (earth orbit, to be more precise) into a war zone. This is a race that needs to be halted through diplomatic means. The U.N. needs to create an international treaty to stop using space as a battleground.
Space is the final frontier, but it's far more dangerous & expensive to settle than any previous frontier. We as a country & as a species should aspire to explore space, & at some point to live off planet (for science purposes, not to escape an uninhabitable earth).
Live long & prosper, & may the Force be with you!
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Many thanks to Michael Benson for including cinema great Fritz Lang and his influential early sci-fi epic "Woman in the Moon."
A restored version is now available on DVD. It's quite good, very much worth seeing, with classic Langian intrigues and machinations woven through its speculative near-futurism and obligatory romance.
I'd previously read Lang's recollection of how he invented the launch countdown as a suspense-building mechanism. But not his investment in actual rocket research! I'm glad that "Woman in the Moon" achieved successful heights even if Oberth's device was a disaster.
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Science Fiction is easily the most enriching of all literary and movie genre's going these days. I just wish it got a great deal more respect from Hollywood, and this is a legitimate fear. If the occasional sci-fi with a large budget matching its ambition is poorly received in part due to critics not properly heeled in the genre, it dissuades others from bothering to fund such endeavors. What other genre carries the mandate to provide an upward trajectory to which man can pursue for the growth of all humanity?
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@David
Computer-generated graphics have turned serious sci-fi into special effects monstrosities.
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NASA should be exploring the potential of building dedicated space laboratories, rather than just trying to travel somewhere else, or see how humans fare when they're away from Earth.
The null-G environment is unique for biological study. Many chemical compounds and crystals can't grow in full gravity, because their atomic structures are too delicate; the potential in space to isolate fluids, elements, and particles could yield exciting innovations for treatment of diseases; plant research could show us new paths in agriculture and conservation. Science itself could take a giant leap with rotating teams of scientists visiting orbiting labs specifically for null-G chemical and bio-med study.
Space is limitless- so is our ability to explore its potential, not just its inhabitants.
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As an engineer and long time space advocate, it is quite obvious what we need to do next. We need to get out of our tech funk and get on with seriously putting our space program back on a permanent track.
It would help if we would stop this silly pretense that social media is ‘high tech’. It’s not. The same with cell phones and other gadgets of that ilk.
The current push to use commercial space companies is a good step forward, but we also need a serious national program again to develop a permanent presence on the moon and then on Mars. Going straight to Mars is foolhardy. China is slowly moving towards a moon base presence. The US needs to maintain its pre eminence in space for strategic security reasons and not fall back as we did when we shut down the Apollo program. Anyone who thinks China is going to the moon simply for national pride and scientific reasons is incredibly naive.
A national strategic manned space program pushes the development of the highest technology plus generates much needed aspirational goals for future generations of engineers and scientists. These long term benefits far outweigh the costs.
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To be a scientist and invent, you need to be creative. Creativity is an essential element of science. Without creativity there would be no inventions and progress.
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@CK - I couldn't agree more. Future generations won't be taking humanity anywhere, inventing anything, or designing anything new if we continue to eliminate the study of literature and art in our schools (in the United States, at least).
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Correct - just like science fiction has predicted modern technology.
And something else to ponder on and write an article on, is all those people who were labelled paranoid or psycho for saying someone was watching them through their televisions, have been proven to be true, in some cases, as predators and hackers have been caught viewing babies in their rooms on baby monitors, etc.
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With all the factual departures and the extraordinary loose allusions this author makes, it is very difficult to read and appreciate the point of view he is trying to make.
To pick these very few (and Goddard is really the only one who had much to do with it until he gets to von Braun) means that the real driving forces behind this incredible achievement of human kind is at most, pedestrian.
Maybe he felt that too much time had already been given to Arthur Clarke, or the works of so many others who's stores won the Hugo Award or Nebula awards, preceding Clarke.
Yes, the field of science fiction captures the imagination in ways that other genres does not, and with physics getting in the way, we will never be able to achieve. But it does spark the imagination, drive those who know and do real science to continue to improve and further our knowledge of this world.
Those heady times of the space race (whether driven by nationalism, fear of domination, military needs of more money to do the basic research or whatever) has not been seen since then. The great age of science, exploration and inspiration of upcoming youth to enjoy discovery and learning about wonders of the world rather than target clothing fads, movies and music, is gone. I'm not sure what will be able to spark that again, but here's hoping it will come back to be a driving force in going forward.
Only three stages in the Saturn V that I see. Not five as Mr. Benson states. I remember watching them launch as a child, never saw five.
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@Whine Boy I suspect the five stages Mr. Benson refers to are the three main stages of the Saturn 5 itself, plus the two associated with the Lunar Lander (landing and takeoff).
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@James Simpson: If you're going there, then the Command Module was also a stage, so there's six.
I think the author just glitched on writing "five" right after writing "Saturn 5", because neither the Command Module, nor the Lunar Module were really part of the Saturn 5, they were its payload.
The last Saturn was used to launch Skylab. The thing about the Saturn system was that the bottom two stages both had to go at once, but they could then lift stage #3, and anything else attached to it, into orbit as their payload.
On the moon missions, that meant that the whole 3rd stage and the various modules on top could circle the Earth a few times as the astronauts set up their 3rd stage burn to send the 3 modules (Command, Service and Lunar) into a lunar trajectory. On the Skylab mission, Stage #3 was not a rocket at all, but Skylab.
If they'd kept punching out Saturns (they, no kidding, *burned* the plans) they could have sent up all kinds of interesting things, like a telescope to make the Hubble look like binoculars. Or, more Skylabs, configured to join up into an ISS forty years ago.
Or an automated Moon rover the size of an RV.
But there were F-22's to build and pay for, and twelve carriers, and all that competed for the same pool of engineers, and aerospace factories, and, of course, money.
The military budget is why you can't have these nice things.
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@James Simpson
I see your point, you may be right. But NASA itself says "The Saturn V rockets used for the Apollo missions had three stages" - https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/5-8/features/nasa-knows/what-was-the-saturn-v-58.html
Science fiction certainly inspired and motivated the people involved, but in the end, if all we had was science fiction, nobody would have reached the Moon.
People must invest time and energy in understanding and performing science and engineering to make projects actually succeed in fact and not fiction.
Odd how as a culture we appreciate the intense training that athletes and performers undertake... but when it comes to science and engineering, somehow, we often want to consign the hard work to something only peculiar nerds are suited for.
CP Snow once commented that if you mentioned the beauty and scope of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, most educated people in Britain's eyes would role back in their head.
As to what to do next: 1)never give up on teaching the best science and engineering in high school and college... in my lifetime there has in practice been a marked decline in quality of teaching, in favor of multiple choice, fragile knowledge. 2)support the learned science and engineering societies when they take the time and effort to issue studies of what to do in the future. Really, really, support, don't treat those studies like a proposal for a freeway overpass.
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Whenever I see so-called subway acrobats doing spins a foot from my face (if I am lucky enough to have a seat), I think that if only these young men practiced their math the way they practice their flips, we'd have a smarter world.
I think that in the 1960s, when astronauts were exploring space and Americans were cheering them on, you had a lot of people who had some layman's engineering in that they had pretty much, except for the younger ones, been in the service, were trained and also learned on the job, and went to college and graduate school afterwards on the GI bill.
And some stayed in the service and became test pilots.
We then had a population whose lives or those of their loved ones were saved by sonar and radar, by planes and the newest tanks, by code-breaking that relied on native cleverness and sophisticated machines. And, for that matter, by the atom bomb. My father's destroyer escort would have been among the first to invade Japan. No doubt he and his shipmates and their families were glad not to have had to do that.
Dad became a tooling engineer whose company did subcontracting for NASA. He loved his job.
I find it sad that so many Americans shrug at science. That means they shrug at the environment, at research in genetics, at medical advances but not -- clearly -- at the giant flatscreen TVs and cellphones they are glued to.
Without brilliant innovators, they'd have to remember how to read and write.
What a dreary world they must live in.
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