Beyond: Our Future in Space (7 page)

The men who strapped themselves into a small metal container on top of half a million gallons of kerosene and liquid oxygen were extraordinarily brave. People who witnessed a Saturn V launch recounted that even at a distance of two miles, its engines produced coruscating heat and waves of pressure that passed through the ribcage. The five massive engines gulped 15 tons of fuel each second and produced eight million pounds of thrust. The giant rocket was 60 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty (
Figure 10
). In July 1969, there were plenty of white knuckles at Mission Control in Houston when Neil Armstrong assumed manual control of the Apollo 11 landing module, after a series of technical glitches, and guided it over a field of rugged boulders to a soft landing on the Moon with less than a minute of fuel left. Back in Houston, Charles Duke radioed him: “You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again.”
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The Moon landings were and still are unprecedented. The twenty-four men who journeyed there are the only people ever to have left the Earth’s gravity, and the twelve who landed are the only people to have set foot on another world.

Despite this feat, and the ingenuity and heroism of the Apollo 13 crew, who in 1970 nursed their crippled spacecraft back to Earth following an oxygen explosion, public interest in the Moon landings waned. Through a misty lens of history, it seems the Apollo program had broad public support. But in fact a majority thought the government was spending too much on space. Both Kennedy and Johnson complained about the enormous cost of the Apollo program, and the final three planned Moon landings were canceled to allow NASA to start work on the Space Shuttle, which was intended to be a “space truck” that could routinely haul astronauts and cargo into low Earth orbit. In effect, it was a retreat from the grandiosity of the Apollo missions.

Yet something profound happened as a result of the Moon landings.

The astronauts were patriots, but they instinctively knew they were representing all of humanity. As they orbited the Earth, many commented on the seamlessness of a planet where no political or cultural boundaries were visible. The iconic image of the fragile Earth hanging in the blackness of space—a blue marble—helped spur the environmental movement in the late 1960s. It is indeed ironic that a supreme feat of the military-industrial complex was embraced by counterculture activists.
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When Frank Sinatra performed “Fly Me to the Moon” on his TV show in 1969, he dedicated it to the astronauts who had “made the impossible possible.” The song’s jaunty melody perfectly captured the lightness of the people who had slipped the bonds of Earth.

Of Mice and Men

The hardest part of space travel is getting there.

For the rocket, the key quantity is Max-Q—the maximum aerodynamic stress due to drag from the atmosphere as the rocket accelerates. The stress is small at low altitude because the speed is lower, and small at high altitude because the atmosphere is thin. Somewhere in between is Max-Q, the moment when engineers watching a launch hold their breaths. For both the Saturn V and the Space Shuttle, Max-Q occurred about a minute after launch, at an altitude of about 40,000 feet.

For any occupant of the rocket, there’s buffeting and vibration, but the maximum hazard is presented by g-forces. We spend our lives subject to a downward acceleration of 9.8 meters per second per second, or 1 g. As flexible, water-filled sacks, we’re fairly tolerant of acceleration, but it depends on the direction. Fighter aircraft pilots can handle a positive 8 or 9 g’s, where the blood is being forced to the feet, as long as it lasts no more than a few seconds. But minus 2 or 3 g’s, when blood is being forced into the head, can cause blackouts and even death. Air Force Colonel John Stapp, a flight surgeon, risked his life to test these limits in the 1950s. Stapp was repeatedly strapped into a rocket sled, and in one test he survived a momentary force forty-six times stronger than normal gravity. The colonel suffered broken limbs and permanent vision loss due to these experiments, but he still managed to die peacefully at home at the age of eighty-nine.

The Apollo astronauts felt a maximum of 4 g’s just before the huge main-stage engines shut off, and close to 7 g’s when they reentered the Earth’s atmosphere. Space Shuttle astronauts, on the other hand, pulled no more than 3 g’s on either ascent or descent, something you could experience on any decent roller coaster. But early in the Space Age, medical science was unsure if people could survive the rigors of space, so a lot of experiments were done using mammals as test cases. This continued a long tradition; in 1783, a sheep, a duck, and a rooster were sent up in the recently invented hot-air balloon.

Laika is one of the unsung heroes of spacefaring. She was a husky-terrier mix, a stray dog found wandering the streets of Moscow. Soviet scientists preferred strays because they thought life on the streets would have made them resilient. Laika was chosen from among ten dogs due to her phlegmatic temperament. After being subjected to centrifuges and noisy environments, she was conditioned for the tiny capsule by being confined in successively smaller spaces for periods of up to three weeks. Nikita Khrushchev put great pressure on mission designers, wanting a launch in time for the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. So Sputnik 2 was prepared in a hurry and launched, with Laika aboard, less than a month after Sputnik 1.

Early data showed that Laika was agitated but eating her food. However, the temperature-control systems were inadequate, and she died from overheating and stress after seven hours in orbit. There was never any possibility of her surviving the flight; poisoned food had been prepared to euthanize her before the fiery reentry. At the time, it was reported that she died when her oxygen ran out on the sixth day of the flight. Animal rights groups protested at Soviet embassies around the world, and there was a demonstration at the United Nations in New York.
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Years later, when the Soviet Union fell and scientists could speak freely, some did express remorse. Laika’s trainer, Lieutenant General Oleg Gazenko, admitted, “Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it. . . . We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog.”
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While the Soviets used dogs, the Americans preferred monkeys due to their similarity to humans. The first monkey in space was Albert, launched on a V-2 rocket in 1948. Albert died of suffocation. For the first decade of such experiments, the fatality rate was very high. In 1959, Able and Baker became the first US animals to fly into space and return alive, withstanding 32 g’s along the way. Able was a rhesus monkey who died soon afterward during a surgical procedure, but “Miss Baker,” a squirrel monkey, survived another twenty-eight years (
Figure 11
). She got as many as 150 letters a day from children and was buried on the grounds of the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Three hundred people attended her funeral.

Fruit flies were the first animals of any kind sent into space, aboard a captured Nazi V-2 rocket in 1947. They were followed by mice, then monkeys, then men and women.

Since then, a menagerie of animals has made the trip. By the early 1960s, both the Americans and the Soviets had launched mice into space, and the Soviets added frogs and guinea pigs to the launch personnel. France got into the act with rats, and in 1963 they planned to launch Felix the cat, but Felix had other plans and he escaped, so they sent up Félicette instead. In 1968, two tortoises became the first animals to go to the Moon, aboard Zond 5. They were accompanied by wine flies, mealworms, and other biological specimens. A few years later, America sent mice and nematodes to the Moon on Apollo 16 and Apollo 17. The Space Shuttle facilitated animal space travel, and now spiders, bees, ants, silkworms, butterflies, newts, sea urchins, and jellyfish have all been in orbit. Astronauts have had reason to be wary of some of their passengers, especially Madagascar hissing cockroaches and South African rock scorpions.

Most of these hazardous trips were to low Earth orbit, a few hundred miles, or just an afternoon’s drive straight up. Even the round trip to the Moon is less than half a million miles, a distance many business people rack up every few years on atmospheric jet travel.

By contrast, the planets seem far beyond reach.

Exploring the Planets

NASA’s budget never again reached the giddy heights of the mid-1960s. As a percentage of the federal budget, NASA soared from its inception to a peak of 5.5 percent in 1967 and then fell just as rapidly down to 1 percent in 1973. It has bumbled along below 1 percent ever since.
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In the 1970s, the agency embraced a different challenge, albeit not one as grand and dramatic as having astronauts cavort and drive on the Moon.

A critical transition in the history of ideas is the shift from an Earth-centric worldview, where our planet is seen as special and unique, to a “many worlds” concept, where objects in space are physically and geologically familiar. Space travel brings those worlds into view in a way that can’t be approached by telescopic observation.

Before 1610, the planets were just nontwinkling dots that drifted across a celestial backdrop. The Moon had craters and dark “seas” that the eye could interpret as imaginary figures. When Galileo pointed a telescope at the Moon, he observed a surface that, “. . . just like the face of the Earth itself, is everywhere full of vast protuberances, deep chasms, and sinuosities.”
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But this paled when compared with what we learned when Apollo astronauts went there, walked over the rugged terrain, and returned with 842 pounds of rocks. Now we know the Moon’s age to within an accuracy of a percent, we know its geological history, and we know it formed out of debris from an impact on the infant Earth.

Several hundred years of observations with telescopes uncovered a handful of additional planets but revealed almost nothing about their true nature. They remained small, blurry disks of light. The exception was Mars, which had pale poles and a network of features that, in the wishful thinking of amateur astronomer Percival Lowell, represented an irrigation system of a Martian civilization. Even a nearby planet like Mars is so far away that telescopes reveal little of its physical reality. As recently as 1966, scientists still argued over whether or not Mars was covered with vegetation.

The context for understanding planetary exploration is the vastness of space. When we progressed from orbiting the Earth to landing on the Moon, it was like leaving our backyard to explore another city. Earth orbit is a few hundred miles up, while the Moon is a quarter of a million miles away. That increase of a factor of a thousand severely taxed our ingenuity. Compared to the Earth–Moon distance, the distance to Mars at its closest approach is 200 times greater, and the distance to Jupiter at its closest approach is 1,600 times greater. Jumping to the edge of the Solar System is another factor of a thousand.

While sending men to the Moon was the Space Race’s big prize, the Americans and the Soviets could test their technology and expand their knowledge of the Solar System by guiding robotic spacecraft to targets hundreds of millions of miles from Earth. Failures were common. In 1958, the Army and the Air Force saw four failed launches of the Pioneer series of probes. Meanwhile, the first three launches of the Luna program also failed, and the Soviets got in the habit of not disclosing launches that failed to reach orbit and not even assigning them a Luna number. But with persistence came success. In January 1959, less than two years after Sputnik shocked the world, Luna 1 was the first manmade object to leave Earth’s gravity. By the end of 1959, its successors Luna 2 and Luna 3 had crashed into the Moon’s surface and taken photos of its crater-pitted dark side. The scientific payoff from these probes was substantial, yielding information on the chemical composition, gravity, and radiation environment of the Moon.