Under the Sea to the North Pole (28 page)

In 1889 a three-volume set of novels,
Aventures extraordinaires d’un savant Russe
(The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist) by G. Le Faure and H. de Graffigny, was published. It is a veritable catalog of imaginative spacecraft, ranging from Vernian projectiles to rockets to solar sails. The three books dealt with adventures on the Moon, the inner planets, comets, asteroids and the giant outer planets. A fourth volume,
Les mondes stellaires,
was published but immediately withdrawn and destroyed with the result that only a handful of copies are reported to have survived.

Perhaps the most astonishing, if not most imaginative, method of travelling to the Moon was described in Andre Laurie’s 1887 novel,
Conquest of the Moon*
. An entire iron ore-rich mountain is turned into a titanic electromagnetic by means of electricity generated by batteries of solar-powered generators. The plan is to draw the Moon down to the surface of the Earth. The plan backfires when, just as the Moon is about to make contact with the surface of our planet, the mountain—inhabitants and all—is ripped bodily from the Earth and lands on the Moon.

By the end of the nineteenth century science had made amazing strides and atomic-powered spacecraft were now being described. Garrett Serviss’
A Columbus of Space
* (1909) was one of the first novels to include a spacecraft explicitly powered by nuclear energy, even if the details were a little vague. This can’t be said of the Flying Ring in
The Moon-Maker
, a novel published in 1915 by Robert Wood and Arthur Train. It is propelled on a mission to intercept an asteroid by a beam of alpha particles produced by the disintegration of uranium. (Not only were the authors the first ever to suggest the potential danger of an asteroid collision with the Earth, and to suggest a solution identical to those being proposed today, they included one of the first female astronauts in literature, the amazing Rhoda Gibbs.)

With the dawn of the new century, the spaceship as we know it today had been fully developed in the fiction of the age.

IV The Experimenters

The problem of spaceflight gradually evolved away from the purely speculative and theoretical. A more or less developmental approach was undertaken by those interested in the possibilities of spaceflight, though this approach was in many ways dictated as much by necessity as by intent. It was far simpler, cheaper and safer to experiment with small-scale rockets than with full-size spaceships; it was realized very early on that the exploration of space would be a fabulously expensive and difficult proposition.

In 1903 Tsiolkovsky published the first of his spacecraft designs; it employed liquid fuel and gyroscopic stabilization. In outward appearance his spaceship laid the groundwork for the modern spaceship to come.

Between 1913 and 1916, Andre Mas, Drouet and Henri de Graffigny devised schemes for centrifugally launched spacecraft, thrown from the rims of rapidly-spinning flywheels. Arthur Train and Robert Wood described the Flying Ring, a 66-foot-diameter torus propelled by an atomic motor suspended in gimbals from the apex of a tripod over the center of the doughnut-shaped ship. The fuel was uranium, producing a beam of alpha particles as it disintegrated.

The year 1923 saw the publication of Hermann Oberth’s seminal
Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen
(The Rocket in Planetary Space), one of the theoreticial cornerstones of modern spaceflight. In it he first proposed his “Model E,” an enormous manned rocket that finally settled the outward form of the classic spaceship. It was an artillery-shell-shaped hull 100 feet tall and 30 feet in diameter that stood erect on the tips of four big fins. Oberth later elaborated upon the design in the 1929 revised edition of his book,
Wege zur Raumschiffahrt
(Ways to Spaceflight). In it he described a fictional circumlunar flight by the Model E spaceship
Luna
(on June 14, 1932). It was a three-stage rocket launched from the Indian Ocean. The pilots were ensconced in a small cabin shaped like an oblate spheroid, contained in the nose of the third stage. This was equipped with a parachute for the final descent to the Earth. Oberth, with his typical meticulous care, considered every detail: how his crew were to eat in free fall, waste disposal, heating and cooling, etc.

Oberth’s Model E formed the basis for the design of the spaceship
Friede,
which he provided for Fritz Lang’s 1929 motion picture
Frau im Mond,
the first realistic spaceship in movie history.

At about this same time rocketry pioneer Max Valier was actively publishing his own designs for spacecraft. A hyperactive proselytizer of space flight, he lectured all over Europe while his magazine articles were republished in every language all over the world. His influence over the popular conception of space travel was equaled only by that of Wernher von Braun in the 1950s.

Although Valier evolved his spaceship from existing aircraft—they even took off more or less horizontally from inclined ramps—the final design was aesthetically more pleasing than Oberth’s rather ultrafunctional rockets. Valier’s final design was a chunky streamlined spindle with curved fins at the rear and two outrigger nacelles containing the rocket motors near the front of the craft. A similar design, but with the rockets in the rear, would have been launched from the back of an enormous rocket-powered flying wing. This version was elaborated upon in Otto Willi Gail’s novel
Hans Hardt’s Mondfahrt
(Rocket to the Moon) (1930)*.

Gail, combining the ideas of Valier and Oberth, described the spaceship
Geryon
in
Der Schuss ins All
(A Shot Into Infinity) (1925)*—a three-stage rocket with folding wings (a feature of which Oberth disapproved). It reappeared in
Der Stein vom Mond
(The Stone From the Moon) (1926)*, along with the space station
Astropol.
In this novel—which mixed space travel with the bizarre “Cosmic Ice Theory” of Hörbiger then popular in Germany—the spaceship
Ikaros
made a voyage to Venus (where it remained in orbit while a small lander made the actual descent).

R. H. Romans’ novel
The Moon Conquerors
(1930)* described the 1945 flight of the spaceship
Astronaut.
The rocket was the result of an international competition for the best scheme for reaching space (152 of the submitted plans “were for a Goddard rocket”). It was a slender torpedo with narrow fins running its length. Romans described the rocket in some detail. It was launched horizontally, its initial velocity provided by an electromagnetic cannon. For propulsion between the Earth and the Moon, it used the pressure of light on special black vanes.

(The electromagnetic cannon itself—aka the “mass driver” —was invented by engineer E.F. Northrup. He built numerous working models and eventually described his work in the strange novel
Zero to Eighty*
(1937), in which he developed the idea as applied to the launching of spacecraft.)

Most of these concepts were illustrated by Frank R. Paul, who was almost solely responsible for a great majority of the artwork in Hugo Gernsback’s large stable of magazines. Trained as an architect and engineer, Paul’s vaguely baroque spacecraft had an unprecedented aura of believability.

Many other fictional rockets continued to contribute to the collective and cumulative design of the spaceship. The 1922 animated film
All Aboard for the Moon
featured a streamlined rocket launched from a rooftop, carrying tourists to the Moon. Miral-Vigee’s 1922 novel
L’Anneau des Feu
(Ring of Fire) based its atomic-powered spaceship on the theories of Robert Esnault-Pelterie, the French aviation and space pioneer. The 1930 Hollywood musical
Just Imagine
featured the ultimate Art Deco spaceship. It became the representative prewar spaceship after it was recycled in the immensely popular Flash Gordon serials.

By this time—in the “real world”—Tsiolkovsky had published extensively and his plans included not only large manned rockets but lunar rovers and self-contained space colonies.

The Russian Fridrikh A. Tsander designed enormous biplane spaceships that fed upon their own structure for fuel, and Franz Ulinski published his schemes for electrically propelled spacecraft. In 1925, Walter Hohmann not only designed his “powder tower” spaceship, an enormous cone-shaped rocket with an egg-shaped manned capsule at its apex, but his work on interplanetary orbits became so fundamental that these energy-saving orbits have been named for him.

Franz von Hoefft proposed an evolutionary spaceship design, employing the lifting body concept. Using standardized units spaceships could be customized for particular missions. He laid out a systematic and progressively more ambitious scenario for the exploration of outer space, employing a series of eight spacecraft, designated RH I-VIII. Hoefft’s unique design resembled the blade of a shovel with a pair of slender pontoons beneath, since the larger ones were to be launched from water.

In the late 1920s, Eugen Sänger began his researches into spaceflight, basing his hopes on the development of an “aerospaceplane” This eventually resulted, a decade later, in his famous “silver bird” antipodal bomber concept, the immediate precursor of today’s Space Shuttle and modern aerospace planes.

By the time Goddard and the VfR flew their first liquid-fueled rockets, these dreamers and theorists—and scores of others—had not only established that space travel would ultimately take place, but had anticipated virtually every step on the road to achieving it.

During the 1920s and 1930s three highly influential organizations were formed: the Verein für Raumschiffarht (or VfR, the German Society for Spaceship Travel), the American Interplanetary Society (later the American Rocket Society) and the British Interplanetary Society (the only one of the three to exist in more or less its original form today). The first two of these three groups performed many of the earliest serious and controlled liquid fuel rocket experiments. Robert Goddard, who had made the first liquid fueled rocket flight, was working in strict secrecy, allowing little if any news of his work to be available to other researchers. The societies, however, were entirely open and freely shared the results of their experiments. Much of the development of modern rocketry, at least up until the 1960s, can be traced directly to the experiments of the VfR and ARS. Meanwhile, the BIS, prevented by law from experimenting with rockets, devoted itself to the theory and promotion of spaceflight, a service it still performs to this day. For example, in 1939 the BIS published the results of the first-ever detailed scientific and engineering study for a manned lunar rocket and lander.

With the advent of hostilities in Europe at the end of the 1930s, the work of the VfR, as well as many of its most brilliant members, was usurped by the German military machine, disappearing into well-kept secrecy, a secrecy broken only by the first V2 missiles dropping onto London. At the same time, ex-members of the ARS formed the private companies that produced wartime rockets and JATO units for the United States military and, later, the propulsion systems for the first American rocket-propelled aircraft. High-altitude balloonists were taking their “spaceships” to the limits of the Earth’s atmosphere (by the mid-1930s altitudes of 12 miles or more were being reached), and rocket-powered gliders and aircraft were being flown—great advances being made in this area by the Germans and Russians.

V The End of an Era

Rocket research and development progressed dramatically during World War II...with no greater example of this than the spectacular V-2, a rocket that—in spite of the intervening 70 years of advancing technology—has become the iconic symbol for “spaceship.” It was by far the largest rocket ever launched. The fournteen ton missile was 46 feet tall and five feet six inches in diameter. Its fins spanned eleven feet nine inches. It could carry a payload of one ton of high explosives. On its first flight, the giant rocket reached an altitude of 53 miles and a range of 118 miles.

General Walter Dornberger, who was in charge of developing the V-2, exclaimed: “Do you realize what we accomplished today? Today the spaceship was born!”

But at the same time an era died. Before that day in October, 1942, the spaceship had been a device of the imagination. Traveling in space would surely come about some day. . .but a day that was in the far distant future. Now that a man-made device had reached the very fringes of space, travel to the stars seemed less of a remote possibility. It was clear that it was only a matter of time, money. . . and will.

While there were many imaginative spaceships yet to come— both in and out of fiction—such as those of the fabulous “Collier’s Space Program” devised by Wernher von Braun and his colleagues—spaceships now had a reality they’d never before possessed. There was little question in anyone’s mind that the conquest of space was just around the corner. So the cut-off date imposed on my series by copyright restrictions (with a few happy exceptions), seems less arbitrary and more appropriate.

VI Finding the Books

The first hurdle in creating the series was finding the books in the first place.

I already had an extensive collection of literature devoted to spaceflight and rocketry. This was the result of, first, a life-long interest in the subjects. I have been accumulating such books since I was a little kid. I had never been an especially serious collector, however, until I began working on a book called
The Dream Machines
(Kreiger, 1993). This was a massive chronological history of the evolution of the spaceship that required research into literally thousands of vintage books and magazines, ranging from the present to several hundred years in the past. I haunted bookstores, both real and online, eBay, and fellow collectors. Someone who was both an inspiration and an invaluable source was Fred Ordway, whose collection of science fiction and space-related material was second to none. His collection of 900 SF pulp magazines now resides in the Harvard Library and his books at the Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville. His encouragement and generous access to his collection were invaluable.