Chasing the Moon: The Story of the Space Race - from Arthur C. Clarke to the Apollo landings. Robert Stone
fascination with the promise of space travel would motivate and determine the direction of his life following that chance encounter with The Conquest of Space. He joined a small cadre of visionaries, theorists, and space-travel advocates whose youthful dreams, curiosity, and determination led directly to humanity’s first steps on an alien world only three decades later.
The theoretical mathematics upon which all rocket science was based had begun to circulate in prominent scientific journals only a decade before the publication of The Conquest of Space. In the early twentieth century, three independent-minded theorists, intrigued by the idea of space travel after reading works of science fiction as adolescents, attempted to solve the theoretical physics necessary to carry out an actual escape from Earth’s gravity. Working autonomously, Russia’s Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, American professor Robert Goddard, and physicist Hermann Oberth in Germany conducted their research and study in each of the three countries that would later witness the most decisive events of the early space age. All three theorists were social outsiders intrigued by utopian ideals, and each harbored a personal belief that space travel would inevitably transform human destiny.
The first stirrings of the modern space age arose not in a wealthy industrial nation but in agrarian czarist Russia. At the turn of the century, a popular spiritual philosophy called cosmism—a mixture of elements from Eastern and Western thought, animism, theosophy, and mystical aspects of the Russian Orthodox Church—had influenced a new generation of writers, scientists, and intellectuals. For Russian cosmists, space travel would be the ultimate liberation; once the shackles of the Earth’s gravity had been removed and humans inhabited space, the souls of the dead would be resurrected and all humanity would partake in cosmic immortality.
The founding philosopher of Russian cosmism, Nikolai Fedorov, a noted librarian and scholar, chose to personally tutor a bright but impoverished teenager who had been prohibited from attending school due to severe deafness. The student, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, had an eccentric and strikingly independent intellect and within a few years was hired as a small-town schoolmaster, despite his disability. In his spare time, Tsiolkovsky conducted independent research on many scientific subjects, including space travel. He had read Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon during his adolescence, and later he even tried his hand at writing his own fictional scientific romances.
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Russia’s Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a rural Russian schoolteacher whose 1905 paper first introduced the mathematical equation on which all rocket science is founded. A utopian, Tsiolkovsky believed that human space flight would lead to universal happiness. In a letter he wrote, “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.”
In 1903 Tsiolkovsky published a scientific paper that contained the first appearance of what came to be known as the “rocket equation,” a mathematical formula comparing a rocket’s mass ratio to its velocity, the essential calculation necessary to determine how to escape a planet’s gravity. Unfortunately, the importance of his publication went unnoticed; the Russian scientific community ignored his work, dismissing it as the musings of an amateur. His paper would remain unread for another twenty years. Undaunted, Tsiolkovsky continued his studies, going on to publish nearly four hundred scientific papers on such matters as space-vehicle weightlessness, the operation of multi-staged launch vehicles, the orbital dynamics of differing rocket burns, and the scientific advantages of polar orbits.
A full decade after Tsiolkovsky’s groundbreaking paper, in 1913, a French aircraft designer named Robert Esnault-Pelterie independently published his own version of the rocket equation. But once again few took notice. In the United States, Robert Goddard, the second of the three pioneers of rocketry and a part-time instructor and research fellow at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, was quietly conducting his own rocket research. Entirely unaware of Tsiolkovsky or Esnault-Pelterie, he submitted patent applications for both a liquid-fueled rocket and a multi-stage vehicle.
Like Tsiolkovsky, Goddard had also experienced social isolation during his formative years. A frail only child, he was kept out of school for extended periods due to ill health. As a result, he didn’t graduate from high school until age twenty-one. During his solitary time at home he read stacks of books from the local library, particularly volumes from the science and technology shelves. He also read H. G. Wells’s science-fiction classic The War of the Worlds, which made a lasting impression. At age seventeen in 1899, while aloft in the branches of a cherry tree on his family’s New England farm, Goddard experienced an epiphany that moved him so deeply that he noted the date on which it occurred. “As I looked towards the fields at the east, I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars. I was a different boy when I descended the tree from when I ascended for existence at last seemed very purposive.”
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Clark University professor Robert Goddard, who in 1926 launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket from a farm in Auburn, Massachusetts. Throughout most of his career he revealed few details about the progress of his research. However, spies in the United States working at the behest of the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany attempted to breach Goddard’s wall of secrecy.
During World War I, while teaching at Clark University, Goddard obtained research funding from the War Department for an experimental tube-launched solid-fuel rocket rifle, an early version of what would become the bazooka. He also proposed a rocket that could ascend seventy miles into the atmosphere and carry high explosives or poison gas at least two hundred miles. But after the Armistice, no American military officials thought long-range missiles a subject worthy of further research, so Goddard sought to find support elsewhere.
It was a technical paper funded and published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1920 that suddenly placed Goddard’s name on newspaper front pages around the world. “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes” proposed that a rocket could be used for the scientific exploration of the atmosphere, placing artificial satellites into orbit, aiding weather forecasting, and physically hitting the Moon. His paper made no mention of human space travel to the Moon; however, many newspaper reports heralded his study with dramatic headlines implying Goddard was working on a moon rocket that would transport human passengers.
Within weeks, The New York Times announced that a twenty-four-year-old pilot of the New York City Air Police had willingly volunteered to be the first person to fly to Mars. Concerned that the United States must maintain its position with other nations in the air, Captain Claude Collins said he would ride the world’s first interplanetary rocket, provided a ten-thousand-dollar life-insurance policy was part of the arrangement. The Times treated Goddard somewhat less admiringly than it did Captain Collins when it published a scathing editorial taking the college professor to task for believing that a rocket would function in the vacuum of space. The Times slammed Goddard, claiming he was unfamiliar with basic Newtonian physics and showed a “lack of knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.” His pride wounded, Goddard soon grew wary of the popular press. Sensational stories about the American professor’s forthcoming moon-rocket flight continued to appear in publications around the globe throughout the early 1920s. And occasionally Goddard was complicit, supplying dramatic quotations apparently intended to entice potential investors, such as his plan for a giant passenger rocket capable of crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a few minutes.
However, when Goddard actually made history with the world’s first successful launch of a liquid-fueled rocket on March 16, 1926, in Auburn, Massachusetts, no journalists were present, and no account appeared in contemporary newspapers. The date is now celebrated as the dawn of the space age, but for most of his career Goddard carefully guarded information about his research, afraid that others might steal his secrets and profit from his work.
THE SENSATIONAL ATTENTION accorded Goddard’s Smithsonian paper appeared in the European press just as the third of the trio of rocketry pioneers, a former medical student from Austro-Hungaria named Hermann Oberth, was readying his work for academic review. Born in 1894, Oberth was a brilliant student of mathematics