May 1963 - To Other Worlds

It is not always realized that the idea of space-travel is very old indeed, and dates back at least two thousand years. For the 1963 May programme, Dr Anthony R. Michaelis, the well-known science writer who is now science correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, joined me in discussing some of the old ideas - many of which seem far-fetched enough to-day, but some of which are nevertheless of the highest interest.

The science fiction of yesterday is changing rapidly into science fact. It is not many years since the idea of space-travel was regarded as a fantastic dream and even in the nineteen-forties and early nineteen-fifties there were various eminent scientists who were con­vinced that it would never be possible to send a vehicle to the Moon, to say nothing of Mars or Venus. Yet the dream itself is very old indeed, it goes back at least as far as the second century a.d., when the Greek satirist Lucian wrote a book about a lunar voyage, and probably it goes back even further.

This is not surprising. What is, perhaps, unexpected is that many of the old ideas contain suggestions which have proved to be extremely valuable. Therefore it is certainly not a waste of time to look back into the past, and see how the theme of inter­planetary travel has been gradually developed.

There was little science in the first 'space stories', at least with regard to the methods of travel, and yet they are still worth reading. One of the pleasantest, and most famous, was written by an English bishop, Francis Godwin, probably in the sixteen-thirties (it was published posthumously in 1638). The title was Man in the Moone; it appeared in many editions, and is certainly better remembered today than Godwin's vast catalogue of English bishops and his various theological works.

In the story, Godwin's hero, Domingo Gonzales, trains some gansas, or wild swans, to tow him through the air in a raft. It is only when he is thoroughly airborne that he realizes that the birds hibernate on the Moon, and are taking him there regardless of his personal wishes. When he arrives, he finds a highly advanced civilization. The people, some of whom are thirty feet tall, live a Utopian existence, and speak a language so musical that it can be written down only in note form. They abhor uncleanliness, and any children who show signs of latent wickedness are at once dis­patched to Earth, where there is so much wickedness already that a little more will not matter!

Another science-fiction writer of the same period was no less a person than Johann Kepler, the great mathematician and astronomer, who produced a strange story called the Somnium. Here there is a supernatural element, since the traveller, Duracotus, is carried to the Moon by demons, but at least Kepler made provision for the fact that most of the journey would have to be done in airless space, and he described how Duracotus was given special sponges, moistened and held to the nostrils, to help him to breathe.

Mention should also be made of the interplanetary adventures of the famous Baron Munchausen, written by R. E. Raspea serious scientist who has the dubious distinction of being one of the few men ever to have been expelled from the Royal Society (for embezzling the scientific medals in his charge). Then, too, there was Cyrano de Bergerac, who in one story made use of’ firecrackers' and therefore anticipated the idea of rocket propulsion, though probably without any idea of its significance. But the first serious suggestions for interplanetary flight were made by Jules Verne in his classic From the Earth to the Moon, published in 1865. We now know that Verne's scheme can never be put into practice; but it is only too easy to be wise after the lapse of almost a hundred years.

Verne planned to fire his adventurers to the Moon in a hollow bullet, or projectile. The cannon, known as the Columbiad, was built at Stone's Hill, in Florida, not far from the modern rocket ground at Cape Canaveral,* and the launching velocity was to be seven miles per second. Detailed calculations were given in the story, and these calculations were basically correct. Seven miles per second is the Earth's escape velocity, as Verne knew well. Fired at a lesser speed, the projectile would fall back to the Earth; if sent up at full escape velocity, it might well land upon the Moon. Since this would be a 'one-way’ journey only, Verne, in his sequel (Round the Moon, 1870) introduced a minor earth satellite, which perturbed the projectile and swung it right round the Moon, so that eventually it fell back on to the Earth - landing in the sea close to the point where at least two American astronauts have since been picked up.

Unfortunately, there were two facts which Verne ignored, probably because he did not realize their importance. First, a projectile starting off at seven miles per second through the dense lower layers of the Earth's atmosphere would set up so much friction that it would be destroyed immediately. Secondly, the shock of departure would certainly prove fatal to any occupants of the projectile. Yet Verne cannot be blamed - and it is worth noting that in our own century two of the rocket pioneers, Hermann Oberth and Guido von Pirquet, thought it worth while to investi­gate the possibilities of building a space-gun on top of a mountain and then evacuating the barrel of the cannon, each of which pre­cautions would reduce air-resistance. They concluded that, even so, the heat generated would be fatal; but if they were initially uncertain about it, it is not surprising that Verne fell into the same trap.

There is, however, one bad mistake in Round the Moon. This concerns the so-called 'neutral point', where the Earth's gravity balances that of the Moon. According to Verne, the travellers gradually lost 'weight' until by the time they reached the neutral point they no longer weighed anything at all: 'Their heads vacillated on their shoulders. Their feet no longer kept at the bottom of the projectile . . . Suddenly Michel, making a slight spring, left the floor and remained suspended in the air'. As they passed the neutral point, and fell toward the Moon, their weight returned.

This is quite wrong. Actually, the travellers would have been in free fall, and therefore weightless, from the moment of their launching, while the 'neutral point' is of no importance or signi­ficance whatsoever. All the same, Verne did at least take loss of weight into account, and his travellers found it no more unpleasant or uncomfortable than Shepard and Glenn, Gagarin and Nikolayev have done in recent years.

Verne did, moreover, use 'recoil rockets' at one point in his story, and it is also noteworthy that in another book, published in 1879, he described an artificial satellite. This particular novel, The Begum's Fortune, cannot rank with his lunar stories, but it contains at least one important idea. A German industrialist, Professor Schultz, decides to destroy the city of Frankville by means of a large projectile filled with poison gas. The projectile is duly fired - but it reaches orbital velocity, and passes harmlessly over Frankville, entering a closed path round the Earth and so becoming one of the first artificial satellites in literature.

Jules Verne died in 1905. Though he can hardly be termed a scientist, he was most certainly a pioneer, and it is significant that when the Russians photographed the reverse side of the Moon, in 1959, they named a large and important lunar crater in Verne's honour.

Even before Verne's death the idea of using rocket propulsion for space-travel had been put forward by an extraordinary man who was a dreamer as well as a scientist. This was Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovskii, half Polish and half Russian, who spent most of his life teaching mathematics in a Russian country school. Tsiolkovskii was purely a theorist, and never actually fired a rocket in his life, but in many ways he was decades ahead of his time. His first scientific papers on the subject date from 1895, and the most important article appeared in 1903 (it had actually been written four years earlier). It attracted little attention, since it came out in a small journal and was not translated into other languages until much later, but it contained many suggestions which have since been put into practice. For instance, he planned to use liquid-fuel rockets, and to make use of the step-launching principle.

Almost as interesting, in its way, is Tsiolkovskii's novel Beyond the Planet Earth, which was not published until 1920, but which had evidently been written before the turn of the century. As a story, little can be said in its favour, but as a forecast it was truly remarkable, and it contains notes on space-suits, rockets with a strangely modern look about them, zero gravity, and even inter­planetary navigation, together with problems of food and air supply. The scene is set in a.d. 2017; selected scientists from all nations have assembled at a base in the Himalayas to carry out space-research investigations. It may be worth commenting that we can only hope space-research will in fact become international long before a.d. 2017!

By the time Tsiolkovskii died, in 1935, he had become world- famous, but rocket research had shifted from Russia to Germany and the USA. In America, in 1926, R. H. Goddard fired the first successful liquid-fuel rocket; in Germany, members of the short lived but energetic 'Society for Space Travel' undertook launchings of their own. One of the German pioneers, Wernher von Braun, later played a major role in the development of the V-2 rocket, but by then the original Society had been disbanded, and in Nazi Germany the emphasis was wholly upon weapons of war. Yet it is extremely interesting to look back at some of the early space-ship patterns. For instance, the design produced by H. Oberth in 1928 is far closer to the modern rocket than the Wright Brothers' primitive Flyer could ever have been to a stratocruiser.

By the end of the war, it had become clear that the rocket had immense potentialities - and everyone is familiar with the rapid developments which have occurred since then. Of the two last- century 'dreams', therefore, the space-gun has proved to be impracticable, while rocket propulsion has more than fulfilled expectations. There remains another idea about which not a great deal can be said as yet: the principle of anti-gravity.

We have to admit that at the moment we know little about gravity, and we certainly have no idea of how it might be shielded, but among novelists the theme was already becoming popular by the end of the nineteenth century. First in the field seems to have been Robert Cromie, who wrote his book A Plunge into Space in 1891, and dedicated it to Jules Verne (who wrote a foreword to it). Here, a party of scientists travels to Mars and back in an anti- gravity 'steel globe', and it may be of interest to quote a few lines from this little-known book. They are spoken by the leader of the expedition, Henry Barnett:

The attraction of gravitation is but another phase of the force which compels a needle in Liverpool to answer the fluctuations of another in New York. Cut the intermediate wire by which the force is conveyed, or insulate one needle, and the other ceases to act. The space between the Earth and Mars is, as it were, one vast charged wire. Along that intangible line of communication you might send a telegram as easily as under the Atlantic Ocean. Nay, more, a body insulated from the Earth's attraction would by it pass almost instantaneously to Mars, for the attraction of gravity is inconceivably rapid.... My chief difficulty - indeed, my only difficulty worthy of the name - has been to regulate the speed at which we travel. .. . Tonight, simply by the turning of two screws, I shall insulate the Steel Globe from the Earth's attraction, and all who choose to journey by it will pass safely on to Mars.

The anti-gravity theme was also used by the German writer Kurd Lasswitz, in 1897, in his book On Two Planets (Auf Zwei Planeten), which, unfortunately, has never been translated into English. Lasswitz also described a sophisticated artificial satellite, built by the Martians and remaining stationary at a height of 6,356 kilometres above the Earth's North Pole. More famous is H. G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon, which appeared in 1901.

Here, the travellers reach the Moon in a sphere made from an anti-gravity substance, 'cavorite', and navigate themselves by judicious opening and shutting of the cavorite blinds.

Until fairly recently the idea of anti-gravity was regarded as scientifically absurd, but nowadays the situation is not so clear-cut. There have been suggestions that in some parts of the universe there may be 'anti-matter', also composed of fundamental particles, but with properties completely opposite to those of the matter of which we are composed. If this proves to be correct, there is presumably no reason to reject the whole idea of negative gravity. At any rate, research work into the question of anti-gravity is now being carried out in the United States, and presumably in the Soviet Union as well. It is impossible to tell whether anti-gravity techniques will be mastered in the foreseeable future, but the prospect is an in­triguing one.

Progress is now so rapid that it is dangerous to make predictions for more than a few months ahead, but at least it is clear that some of the devices now in regular use would have been regarded as fantastic science fiction in the days of Edward VII. The lesson is, surely, that the true scientist cannot afford to laugh at the proposals of the scientific dreamer.

* Now known as Gape Kennedy.