Elie Spruce’s calculations, established on that basis, had, in fact, demonstrated to him the necessity of using a colossal mass of explosive in order to detach from the Earth a vehicle provided with all the indispensable resources, ensure its return from the moon, and procure, in addition, the energy necessary to decelerate during its descents on the Moon and the Earth.
The great American constructor drew up the plans of a machine capable of undertaking the voyage, but illness had not left him the time to put his project into execution. Feeling that he was nearing his end, he had instituted a legacy of six million dollars destined to finance a mission to the Moon.
That was what René Brifaut, a young French reporter for a major scientific periodical, explained to his wife, with whom he had obtained a passage aboard the Montgomery, among other rare privileges.
“Old Spruce had no children who might have complained about his generosity in favor of science. He made a grand gesture in the hope of immortalizing his name.”
“You call that a grand gesture?” replied Madeleine Brifaut. “Personally, I think it’s more like the act of a madman. After all, what’s the purpose of such an enterprise?”
“It’s necessary to think that it might be useful for something, since the scientists of the entire world, united in conference, have decided to profit from the Spruce legacy to organize an international mission to the moon. Believe me, it won’t be uninteresting to go and see what’s happening on our satellite.”
“They’re doubtless proposing to colonize it,” retorted the young woman, ironically.
“It’s easy to mock, Madeleine, but suppose they find an abundance of some very precious substance on the Moon, such as radium, which might help to ameliorate the conditions of life on our planet.”
“It would be necessary to exploit it.”
“It would doubtless be possible to bring back appreciable quantities. A hundred kilos of radium would metamorphose humanity.”
“I’d rather leave the care of going to look for it to others.”
“Naturally, it’s no job for a woman, but I, for example, would be very glad to depart in the Selenit.”
“It’s got you too?”
“You didn’t reproach me or my exploratory voyages in Africa and Tibet.”
“Well, it’s not the same thing.”
“No…that was probably more dangerous.”
“René, you’re not being serious. I greatly admire the ten audacious men who are going to embark in the Selenit, but in much the same way that I admire Don Quixote when he charges at windmills.”
“Seriously, Madeleine, I think those men, far from being mad, are giving proof of the greatest wisdom. They’re going to accomplish a marvelous voyage, and for the price of their bravery, they’ll receive a fortune, because Elie Spruce’s legacy allows each of them a hundred thousand dollars. I sincerely regret not bring able to join them.”
“That’s all we need! I wouldn’t let you go.”
“There’s no longer any question of me going, since there are only ten places and they’re all taken. But you’ll admit that if I’d been able to earn more than three million francs in a month, it wouldn’t be a bad deal.”
“You really believe, then, that those poor devils will arrive safe and sound on the Moon?”
“Certainly.”
“And that, supposing they find the means of living there for a time, they’ll succeed in coming back?”
“Yes.”
“And that they won’t be killed when they fall to Earth?”
“Everything has been anticipated in order to avoid accidents, either going or returning.”
“Not everyone can be as convinced as you are, since it appears that they had considerable difficulty finding ten volunteers for the charming excursion in question.”
“That only proves that the majority of men have a wife or a mother who doesn’t want them to run the risk.”
The young people had remained until then slightly isolated at the extremity of the deck of the Montgomery, from which, leaning on the bulwark side by side, they were watching the crowd, and the Selenit, moored to the flank of the cargo-vessel. There were a hundred people on board, delegates of scientific societies and correspondents of major newspapers. The government of the United States and the diplomatic corps were represented.
There was a movement in the crowd, and the members of the mission were seen arriving, accompanied by a few important people. They were all young and robust men. In spite of what Madeleine Brifaut thought, the number of candidates had been relatively large, but the commission charged with the recruitment of the lunar explorer had proceeded with a severe selection process. The candidates had to satisfy various demands: to possess a physical resistance proof against anything; to be experienced in sports and mountaineering; to have taken part in as many major missions of exploration as possible. They were also required to have superior intellectual faculties and advanced scientific knowledge. In fact, the members that the commission had designated had been nominated by the major scientific institutions of various nations.
The leader of the mission was a Dane named Scherrebek, who had been made famous by several expeditions to the North Pole.
As it had been necessary not to neglect practical details, only English speakers had been accepted, for it was indispensable that all the members of the crew understood one another.
Brifaut identified the explorers to his wife.
“The one marching directly behind Scherrebek is Dessoye, the Frenchman; to his right is the Englishman Galston, and to his left the German Lang.6 Then comes the American, Garrick, between the Italian, Bojardo and the Spaniard, Espronceda. The dark fellow beside a naval officer in the Brazilian, Dr. Uberaba, Finally there’s the smallest of the party, the Japanese Kito, beside the Belgian Goffoël, who is, by contrast, a giant.”
Brifaut frayed a passage all the way to his compatriot, Dessoye, in order to congratulate him and introduce him to his young wife.
“I admire your valor, Monsieur,” Madeleine declared, “and I have no doubt that you’ll succeed in your audacious enterprise.”
“Yes, Madame, we’ll succeed. In a month, when we return to Earth, people will be able to say that humans have conquered the Moon.”
When he found himself alone with his wife again, Brifaut teased her ironically. “Rascal! You paid that fellow compliments of which you don’t believe a word.”
“Could I tell him that he won’t come back? If only I still had some hope of preventing him from running to his death! But I know full well that I wouldn’t be able to shake his confidence. Anyway, how could it be admissible that a Frenchman would pass for a coward by recoiling in circumstances where foreigners are marching without a tremor.”
The young woman had pronounced the final words with a patriotic pride that brought a smile of satisfaction to her husband’s lips.
The members of the mission had stopped, grouped around their leader. The delegate of the President of the Federal Republic, standing facing him with a piece of paper in his hand, was preparing to make a speech. The guests aboard the cargo ship formed a circle.
The officials had, at any rate, decided that the ceremony would be as brief and as simple as possible, for it was necessary to avoid weakening, and bidding the men departing for the Moon farewells like those of men condemned to death.
To tell the truth, apart from the members of the expedition and René Brifaut, no one aboard the Montgomery believed that the lunar explorers would ever come back. Even those who had participated in the organization of the mission, however, when they thought that they were sending ten men to their death, had calmed the revolts of their conscience by telling themselves that they were the faithful executors of the last will of Elie Spruce. If the expedition ended in catastrophe, the testator alone would bear the responsibility.
After the speech by the President’s delegate, they heard a statement from the director of Mount Wilson Observatory, who had been charged, with two ast
ronomers, to observe the departure of the Selenit.
Then, by virtue of a special derogation in favor of the ten heroes, who already no longer belonged to the Earth, bottles of champagne were uncorked and the fact that alcohol was banned in America was forgotten for a few minutes.
The important officials returned to the shore; all that remained aboard the Montgomery, with the members of the expedition, were a dozen newspaper correspondents, including Brifaut and his wife, and a small group of scientists.
The ship made ready to sail. The captain had displayed the flags of the ten nations represented in the mission.
The Montgomery moved off under the effort of her propellers, while the crowd cheered. Mariners climbing on to the Selenit busied themselves with putting it in a good position to be guided in the wake of the ship. A tug, which looked like a dwarf beside the Montgomery, had moored its prow to the rear end of the Selenit, and was also steering the machine, which, thus maintained at both ends, was running no risk of capsizing.
The banks of the Delaware began to file past before he eyes of the passengers.
“Where are we going, exactly?” Madeleine asked.
“Beyond the Bermudas to the mid-Atlantic Ocean, about the twenty-fifth degree of north latitude, in the abyssal zone were soundings reveal a depth of several thousand meters. It’s there that the Selenit will be immersed. Copiously ballasted by masses of lead, the apparatus, constructed to withstand enormous pressures, externally and internally, will descend to a great depth. Deballasted, by means of an unhooking mechanism, it will take up a vertical position and rise upwards at an increasing velocity. The reaction engines will be engaged and when the Selenit reaches the surface of the water, it will emerge at a speed of about fifty meters a second.”
“Is that all!” said Madeleine. “If it travels at that speed, it won’t get anywhere near the Moon.”
“So it will accelerate its velocity thereafter. But it can’t go faster than the figure I’ve indicated in the water without having to overcome an enormous resistance, which would require an exaggerated expenditure of energy.”
The Montgomery and the tug that was following her, with the Selenit between them, continued to excite the curiosity of the population. Groups of people were seen here and there, posted on the banks, and boats drew closer. Level with Greenwich Pier, at the point where the river broadens out to form Delaware Bay, a large dirigible of the Federal Army flew over the convoy and released banners that made a multicolored swarm in the sky. At the mouth of the estuary, when the Montgomery doubled Cape May, a cruiser saluted her departure with a twenty-one gun salvo.
Madeleine reflected on what her husband had said.
“The fashion in which the Selenit will be lifted into space is still an enigma to me,” she observed. “I don’t understand what force will impel it since it has no propellers and, in any case, won’t be able to make use of the terrestrial atmosphere once it’s outside it.”
“I’ll have the time to explain a great many things during the six-day cruise we’ll have to accomplish before reaching the Selenit’s immersion point. But here’s Dessoye coming toward us; we’ll ask him to give us a little talk on reaction motors.”
The French member of the expedition was, indeed, approaching, glad of the opportunity to talk to compatriots, and he had heard Brifaut’s last reflection.
“It’s with pleasure, Madame,” he said, “that I’ll satisfy your curiosity. I was able to remark just now that you’re not as convinced as you’d like to be of the success of our enterprise. I don’t despair of being able to communicate my confidence to you during the few days of the crossing….
“You were very young fifteen years ago. Perhaps, however you remember an acrobat who carried out some curious jumping exercises in that epoch. Equipped with two dumb-bells, he gathered himself, and leapt, for example, into the middle of a vat filled with water. The spectators had the impression that he was about to take a bath, but at the moment when his feet touched the surface, he threw the dumb-bells forcefully behind him, and was seen, animated by a new impetus, to rise up in order to come down further on, beyond the vat.
“That exploit, which seemed enigmatic to many people, was an application of an elementary principle of mechanics: action is equal to reaction.”
“I know that.”
“Good. Knowing, on the other hand, that the acceleration imparted by the same force on different masses is inversely proportional to the masses….”
“Wait—I’m no longer following.”
“An example will illustrate it more clearly to your imagination. Let’s suppose that by deploying a certain effort, I throw a weight of five kilos at a velocity of four meters a second. If, deploying exactly the same force, I then throw a weight of ten kilos, I can only impart a velocity of two meters per second to it. The force remaining the same, and the mass doubled, the initial velocity is reduced by half. Well, when our jumper threw behind him a weight of ten kilos, at a velocity of seven meters a second, for example, his body, which weighed seventy kilos, was, by reaction, propelled forwards with a speed of one meter per second, which permitted him to lift himself up and overshoot the obstacle into which he had been on the point of falling.”
“I understand that,” said Madeleine, “but it doesn’t appear to me to have any connection with your reaction engine.”
“You’ll see that it does. The recoil of a firearm is a phenomenon of exactly the same order as that of the acrobatic feat of which I’ve just reminded you. The rifle that launches a ten-gram bullet at an initial velocity of three hundred meters a second is impelled in the opposite direction at a speed that is reduced by as much as its weight is more considerable. If, for example, it weights fifteen kilos, a mass fifteen hundred times that of a ten-gram bullet, the initial velocity of the recoil will be the fifteen-hundredth part of three hundred meters a second—which is to say, twenty centimeters a second.
“Now imagine a vehicle stationary on a road or a railway track, on which a cannon has been mounted, pointing along the road or track. If the cannon is fired, the vehicle, obedient to the effect of the recoil, will be set in motion in a direction opposite to that of the projectiles.”
“Is that how you intend to launch the Selenit?”
“Exactly.”
“In that case, I think the condition of spectator will be singularly dangerous. You’re going to bombard us copiously when you set off for the Moon.”
“Don’t worry! The tubes of our reaction engine—or, if you prefer, our cannons—don’t launch solid projectiles. They only expel the gases of the explosions.”
“There won’t be any more recoil, then?”
“Yes there will, because it’s only the mass of the material that’s important. A hundred kilos of gas have exactly the same effect as a hundred kilos of cast iron. Thus, artificial rockets rise into space without ejecting any solid particles. The Selenit behaves like an enormous rocket.”
“But why so many complications? Why not simply have the Selenit launched by a monstrous cannon, as Jules Verne imagined?”
“It’s true that the construction of a cannon like Jules Verne’s Columbiad, able to fire a projectile with an initial velocity between twelve and fifteen thousand meters a second, would be relatively easy to build with the means of modern industry, but Jules Verne had forgotten one thing, which is that the human organism isn’t solid enough to resist an acceleration of more than ten meters a second. A man who was forced to pass abruptly from immobility to a velocity of twelve meters a second would be killed as surely as if a weight of a hundred tons were to be dropped on his head. In reality, Michel Ardan, Barbicane and Nicholl would have been flattened like pancakes on the bottom of their bullet.”
“But couldn’t one imagine a very long cannon, which would launch the projectile progressively by successive deflagrations?”7
“Impracticable, my dear Madame. Do you know how long such a cannon would have to be in order always to remain within that uncrossable limit of ten
meters of acceleration per second?”
“Several kilometers no doubt.”
“More than seven thousand kilometers8—about a sixtieth of the Earth’s circumference.”
“How has that been calculated?” asked Madeleine, amazed.
“The problem is extremely simple,” Dessoye replied, taking a notebook from his pocket. He stated to set out figures in pencil.
“The projectile has to travel ten meters in the first second, twenty in the second, thirty in the third, and so on, increasing by ten meters a second every time until it reaches a velocity of twelve thousand meters a second. It must, therefore, travel in the cannon a number of meters represented by the following sum….”
Dessoye put his notebook before the eyes of the young woman, who read the formula:
10 + 20 + 30 + etc…. + 12,000.
“I’ve only written the first three terms of the sum and the last,” he continued, because there are twelve hundred of them. But you can easily imagine those that I’ve replaced by the dots, since it’s sufficient to increased each on by ten in passing on to the next. Such a sum is what mathematicians call an arithmetical progression—or, at least, the sequence of terms without the plus signs constitutes such a progression. Now, nothing is easier than to calculate the sum of the terms of an arithmetical progression, and, in the particular case in point, the sum of our twelve hundred numbers is given by this formula….”
Dessoye had inscribed new figures, which he showed to Madeleine.
S + (10 + 12,000) x 1,200
2
“That makes exactly 7,206,000 meters. And the circumference of the Earth is, as you know, forty million meters. You understand now why one has to renounce constructing a cannon or a launch-path.”
“But hasn’t it been proposed,” said René Brifaut, “to launch a hollow projectile to the Moon by means of a huge wheels whose movement is gradually accelerated, and which will act in the fashion of a sling?9 The projectile would be detached automatically when it had acquired sufficient velocity.”
An International Mission to the Moon Page 2