Chasing the Moon: The Story of the Space Race - from Arthur C. Clarke to the Apollo landings. Robert Stone
evening.
David Lasser had concluded that there was a need for a book written for curious readers that explained in realistic, accurate, but understandable scientific terms the fundamentals of rocket science, why constructing an operational vehicle should be attempted, and what piloted space travel would mean to humanity. Lasser believed that once humans departed their home planet, a philosophical and political shift would occur throughout the world as people began to perceive the Earth as a small, fragile, isolated sphere in the emptiness of space. This change in thought, he concluded, would lead to the erosion of the dangerous nationalistic and tribal divisions that had brought about the recent carnage of the First World War. He wanted his book to provide the fundamental scientific concepts while forgoing the higher mathematics that might intimidate some readers.
Researching the book, Lasser gathered recently published technical papers from leading scientific journals and corresponded with rocketry activists around the world. He wrote it during the immediate aftermath of the Wall Street Crash, a time when he and many other Americans hoped for a better future. Lasser’s optimism colors his imaginary account of the moment when news from the first lunar space travelers is received on Earth: “We learn that wild excitement prevails all over the globe…. We cannot but feel now that this journey has served its purpose in the breaking down of racial jealousies.” Elsewhere he writes that space travel will result in a new planetary outlook, the realization that “the whole Earth is our home.”
Unfortunately, the early years of the Great Depression were not a good time to publish such a book. Lasser and members of the American Interplanetary Society financed the publication of The Conquest of Space, but sales were modest. The British rights were sold to a small but venerable publisher, which issued a few thousand copies. Serendipitously, one crucial copy found its way into the hands of teenage Arthur C. Clarke after being displayed in the bookshop window in southwest England.
WHEN HE READ Lasser’s book, Archie Clarke was already familiar with the world of American science-fiction magazines. Unsold copies returned from newsstands and drugstores were used as ballast in the holds of the great transatlantic liners sailing between New York and Great Britain. Once they arrived in England, the magazines were sold in shops for a few pence each, including the Woolworth’s store across the street from Archie’s grammar school, where he often searched through piles of American detective, Western, and romance pulps for the newest science-fiction issues. He soon amassed a substantial collection and compiled a catalog of his reading, scoring stories with a grade ranging from F (fair) to VVG (very, very good).
But when he read The Conquest of Space he realized for the first time that “space travel was not merely fiction. One day it could really happen.” Shortly before reading Lasser’s book, Archie had been fascinated by Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, an ambitious philosophical novel contemplating the evolutionary fate of the human race hundreds of thousands of years hence. Lasser’s suggestion that space exploration would signal the transformation of the human species was a provocative idea, and Clarke yearned to see it happen in his lifetime. He wanted to meet and exchange ideas with others who also shared these dreams of space and adventure.
A small, unelectrified, three-hundred-year-old stone farmhouse in a southwestern English village was the unlikely home where one of the twentieth century’s most visionary minds began dreaming about humanity’s destiny in the stars. Archie Clarke’s parents had both been telegraph operators at different branches of the General Post Office, where, prior to the First World War, they had conducted a covert courtship via Morse code when not under the gaze of their supervisors. Archie had been born while his father, a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, was stationed in France, later to return badly disabled.
Like many other curious boys, Archie had gone through an early fascination with dinosaurs, an interest sparked at age five when his father casually handed him a cigarette card illustrated with a picture of a stegosaurus. Clarke later attributed his passion for scientific subjects to that moment with his father. An intense interest in electronics, chemistry, and astronomy soon followed, and with the aid of an inexpensive telescope he began mapping the features of the Moon in a composition book. A private grammar school in a neighboring town awarded him a full scholarship, and although he was socially at ease with these more privileged classmates, he was aware he was different. In appearance and background, Archie’s modest bucolic home life set him apart. He usually arrived at school wearing unfashionable short pants and large farm boots, which often carried the lingering odor of the barnyard.
Despite his excellent grades, he knew there was little likelihood he could obtain a university education, due to his family’s financial circumstances. He loved reading stories in the American magazines that asked “What if?” and subtly questioned conventionally accepted assumptions and rules—both scientific and cultural. In particular, he was immensely impressed by one short story that sympathetically attempted to portray a truly alien “other” and prompted the reader to try to understand distinctly non-human motivations and thought processes. Clarke found within the pages of the science-fiction magazines an invigorating American sense of optimism and intimations of a future with greater opportunities. And before long they also provided a pathway to a community of like minds.
BY THE TIME Clarke read The Conquest of Space, almost all publicly sanctioned rocket activity in Germany was nearing an end. Max Valier, world-famous for his rocket-car exploits, was killed during a test of an experimental liquid-fuel rocket engine in 1930—the first human casualty of the space age. A rift had also developed among the Verein für Raumschiffahrt’s officers. One faction thought rockets should be used for scientific exploration, not as weapons, while others urged the society to partner with the German military.
© NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center
Members of the German rocket society Verein für Raumschiffahrt. Hermann Oberth stands to the right of the large experimental rocket, wearing a dark coat, while teenage Wernher von Braun appears behind him, second from the right.
As Europe entered the Great Depression, the society’s officers who favored ties with the military exerted greater control and obtained the use of an abandoned German army garrison near Berlin in which to conduct their experiments. Headquartered in an old barracks building, a dedicated corps of unemployed engineers built a launch area and a test stand—a stationary structure on which a liquid-fuel rocket engine could be tested under controlled conditions. All of the serious, highly dedicated engineers were unmarried young men who chose to live with military-like discipline. None either smoked or drank.
Among the most active of the young engineers, one man stood out. An intelligent, blue-eyed, bright-blond-haired eighteen-year-old aristocrat, Wernher von Braun had chosen to dedicate his life to making space travel to other planets a reality. At the old army barracks and rocket testing ground, he acquired valuable hands-on experience designing and launching prototype liquid-fuel rockets in collaboration with Oberth and the other engineers. Von Braun’s dedication and ambition soon caught the attention of a group of men who had arrived one morning to observe a test of one of the new rockets. Though dressed as civilians, they were officers from the German Army’s ordnance ballistics-and-munitions section, quietly conducting research into future weapons. The Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, had imposed restrictions on German military rearmament. However, since rocketry was a new technology not specified in the treaty, rocket-weapons development fell outside its constraints.
In all, the small group of young engineers conducted nearly one hundred rocket launches before the site was finally closed down due to police-imposed safety restrictions and the society’s own unpaid bills. But by the time the garrison was shuttered, von Braun had disappeared. Among his former colleagues, it was assumed that he was conducting research elsewhere, though occasional rumors suggested he might be involved in something highly secretive. The extent of the mystery did not become known to the world for another fifteen years.
In debt and its reputation in disarray, the Verein für Raumschiffahrt suffered further derision when some members attempted to use the society to promote pseudoscience and nationalist politics. Before his untimely death, Max Valier had endorsed theories about Atlantis, Lemuria, and other popular occultist