Asteroid Threat : Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-earth Objects (9781616149147)

by William E. Burrows

  “When man first takes up residence in space, it will be within the spinning hull of a wheel-shaped space station rotating around the earth much as the moon does,” science writer Willy Ley told the audience in a presentation on the space station. “Life will be cramped and complicated for space dwellers; they will exist under conditions comparable to those in a modern submarine.” Ley was another German-American, a historian of science, and a space advocate. He got the shape of the station wrong but was on the mark about the cramped living conditions. A crater is named after him on the far side of the Moon.3 Heinz Haber, a German physicist and science writer, delivered a presentation about survival in space that began by enumerating the many mortal dangers, including cosmic and ultraviolent rays and “ultra high-speed projectiles”—the meteors that can easily puncture any protective armor. He concluded his presentation, stating that, while spacefarers would never be completely safe against hazards such as meteors, they could be protected to the point where they “will probably be safer than pedestrians crossing a busy street at rush hour.”4 Joseph Kaplan, a leading geophysicist, described the space environment, while Oscar Schachter, an expert on international law, gave his talk, titled “Who Owns the Universe?” (Everyone and no one, as the master sleuth Sherlock Holmes would have put it.) And Fred L. Whipple, the chairman of the Department of Astronomy at Harvard, ended the session with a presentation called “The Heavens Open,” which was appropriately optimistic about humanity's place out there.

  Collier's magazine ran eight cover stories that greatly expanded on the meeting, collectively called “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!” as the first installment was named. All of them were illustrated with what was then exotic, futuristic space pictures by Chesley Bonestell, a noted commercial artist. The series ran from 1952 to 1954. The pictures included an astronaut in the “world's first space suit,” a spacecraft landing on the Moon (it bore no resemblance to the Eagle), and one of another spacecraft approaching Mars. All eight articles were published as three books: Across the Space Frontier in 1952, Conquest of the Moon in 1953, and The Exploration of Mars in 1956.

  The meeting at the planetarium and the articles and books that came from it, with their diverse subject matter, were about one overriding fact: humanity's future absolutely and irrevocably involved a permanent presence in space; that space, hostile though it may be, would become an integral extension of its home on Earth. Humanity was destined to “conquer” space, occupy it, and thrive in it indefinitely. It was the critical mass that became the American space program. It was widely accepted by that time that Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon were going to come true; that humankind was poised to take to space for both military and civilian reasons. The operative word for the US presence in space was control, meaning not that the United States would dictate everything that happened there but that nothing could be allowed to happen there that would endanger US national security.

  In May 1946, with the guns of the world war barely cooled, the RAND Corp., a California think tank, issued the first in a series of studies ordered by the US Army Air Forces on earth-circling satellites in general and then on reconnaissance “platforms” in particular. The advantages of aerial reconnaissance had been appreciated since Chinese soldiers on kites were used to locate Mongol invaders and follow their movement. And using aircraft to do the same thing—aerial reconnaissance—had played a decisive role in both world wars. As everyone who had ever surveyed a neighborhood from a rooftop knew, the higher the observer, the more could be seen. The fact that a satellite was going to be able to see a great deal more than anyone in an airplane was a given. The first report, Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship, was completed and submitted in 1948 and was followed by several more specific and detailed studies. It was understood that the unmanned “recce” satellites would be part of an armada of robots that would forever change humanity's relationship with the space around Earth. The reconnaissance and surveillance satellites, together with those that would handle long distance communication, meteorology, navigation, and other important assignments, were to be the unmanned part of the space program. The manned program would be the other part.

  The epic meeting at the Hayden Planetarium and the Collier's series were extremely important for informing the public on what the budding aerospace community knew was coming. The community included members of the venerable National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which was formed in March 1915 as an emergency organization to promote and coordinate action by the aeroplane industry (the manufacturers of what were then called aeroplanes), academe, and government in fighting the war. But with space operations in the offing, an organization that handled only aviation would obviously be wholly inadequate. One that would oversee all aspects of the civilian space program was obviously going to be needed. It was eventually decided that a single federal entity that was responsible for both air and space operations—they were taken to be a continuum, as the X-15 high-altitude experimental aircraft's forays to the edge of space showed—would be optimally efficient. And that entity would run and coordinate both of them. Advising in that circumstance was clearly a non sequitur. The NACA lived on, but tenuously.

  Then there was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. While the Soviet military was taken with utmost seriousness, Russia as a whole was the subject of derision and ridicule by people who, hearing that Russians not only claimed to have flown the first airplane in St. Petersburg in the early 1880s but also claimed to have invented baseball, tended to think of them as stoic workers, peasants, and soldiers whose vaunted Red Army turned back Hitler's previously invincible Wehrmacht, but they also thought of Russians as rowdy buffoons; bearded Cossacks in fur hats who danced the kazatsky and whose veins contained equal parts of blood and vodka. So there were “Russian jokes.” “What did the Russian people light their homes with before they started using candles?” one apocryphal story asked. Answer: “Electricity.” Another had Stalin noticing that there were mice in his study, so he complained to Mikhail Kalinin, the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, who offered this advice: “Why don't you put up a sign saying Collective Farm? Half of the mice will die of hunger and the other half will run away.” Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, a widely read account of his and others’ experiences in Stalin's forced-labor camps (published in the West in 1973), confirmed the brutality of the Soviet system and, by implication, the country's barbaric backwardness. The Russians were a large, resolute, and potentially powerful people who had produced world-class writers and composers, to be sure. Everyone appreciated Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekov; Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin. But Russians were also thought by their very nature to be nowhere near as consequential in science and technology as the Americans, the British, and the Germans. Dmitry Ivanovsky, who discovered viruses; Ilya Mechnikov, who won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine as an immune system pioneer; Ivan Pavlov, who won the coveted prize for founding modern physiology; George Gamow, who came up with the big bang theory; Nikolay Basov, who won a Nobel Prize for inventing the laser and the maser; and Vitaly Ginzburg, who developed the Soviet hydrogen bomb, were among hundreds of Russians who showed their country's mettle in the entire array of sciences. (Ginzburg was not awarded a Nobel Prize for coming up with his nation's city-buster…) Most Westerners were unaware of Russian scientific and medical advances, however, and believed that the Russians were definitely underachievers in those areas.

  That abruptly changed on October 4, 1957, when a huge R-7 rocket lifted off the concrete launchpad at the new launch facility at the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the Kazakh Steppe and tossed an 83.6-kilogram, polished metal sphere called Sputnik into Earth orbit. It was part of the Soviet Union's previously announced contribution to the International Geophysical Year (IGY), which was the first major study of Earth by its leading scientists of several nationalities. Sputnik carried a radio transmitter, three large batteries, and two sets of antennas so it could broadcast its position t
o everyone with a radio. Its purpose was to send down information on the density of the extreme upper atmosphere and the ionosphere. More important, it was politically as well as scientifically important, since it required a substantial scientific and technological capability that surprised and impressed many Americans.

  C. Turner Catledge, the managing editor of the New York Times, and his colleagues, in common with their opposite number at the Washington Post and other good-morning newspapers, knew a very big story when they saw one and therefore ran a headline across the top of page one that proclaimed:

  SOVIET FIRES EARTH SATELLITE INTO SPACE;

  IT IS CIRCLING THE GLOBE AT 18,000 M.P.H.;

  SPHERE TRACKED IN 4 CROSSINGS OVER U.S.

  Most everyone who was paying attention was impressed. Rear Admiral Rawson Bennett was a notable exception, or so he claimed in public. Bennett was the chief of naval operations and was therefore the nominal head of the Vanguard Program, which was supposed to orbit an American satellite in the IGY. He dismissed Sputnik as “a hunk of iron almost anybody could launch.”5 That was the kind of disingenuous statement that quickly gave rise to what was called the Sputnik cocktail: equal parts vodka and sour grapes. As the nominal head of the Vanguard Program, Bennett presided over eight launch failures and only three successes. From 1957 to 1959 evening television-news audiences grew accustomed to seeing the pencil-shaped rockets either blow up on the launchpad without moving or rise a few feet and then come slowly, agonizingly, down, their motors firing to no avail, and disappear in a growing black-and-white fireball.

  The Sputnik cocktail was savored by MIT undergraduates, too. The institute's humor magazine, Voo Doo, ran a cartoon in the November 1957 issue showing a dopey-looking Cossack huddled inside a cutaway Sputnik, microphone in hand, saying “…beep—beep—beep—beep—beep—beep—beep…”

  Sputnik's taking to space was broken in a routine Radio Moscow announcement three hours after its launch, when its achieving orbit was a certainty. It flew over the United States twice, racing smoothly past a starry background, before anyone realized it was there. But then, when it sank in that a Soviet spacecraft was flying imperviously over their country, there was a storm of self-flagellation and recrimination, much of it directed at President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was widely perceived as being an amiable man who was not intellectually up to serious statecraft; who was more interested in golf than in national security. That was manifestly wrong, as his advocacy of the Open Skies program and strong support of the nation's ballistic-missile program showed. His authorization of U-2 flights over the Soviet Union that began in 1956 and his approval of the Corona satellite reconnaissance program that immediately followed them showed that he was well aware of the Soviet threat and was acting aggressively to counter it. He gamely answered his critics by insisting—correctly—that the United States did not trail the Reds in science and technology. It was not Sputnik that troubled Ike, the National Security Council, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but the R-7 that sent it to orbit. They knew that a rocket that could send an 83.6-kilogram satellite all the way to space could also send a much heavier nuclear warhead to the United States over the Arctic at a much lower altitude.

  On October 1, 1958, almost a year to the day after Sputnik took to the sky and caused a lingering trauma, the NACA was transformed into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as a tacit acknowledgment that the Space Age had indeed dawned and that a permanent organization on the order of the Department of Defense and other federal departments was needed to run all US civilian space activities, manned and unmanned. (The armed services and the CIA would start their own, often competitive, space programs.) And in recognition of the air-space continuum, NASA was mandated to be responsible for both sectors. Less than three years later, the Russkies struck again.

  On April 12, 1961, an R-7 roared out of Baikonur, carrying Yuri Gagarin in Vostok 1 on a complete orbit around Earth, making him the first mortal to reach space. “Poyekhali!” (“Here we go!”) said the exhilarated cosmonaut as the modified R-7 lifted slowly off the launchpad and began its climb to orbit at a little after nine o'clock on the morning, as Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, the space program's ingenious chief designer (its Wernher von Braun, and the man who conceived Sputnik), and Valentin Glushko and Mstislav Keldysh (two colleagues), watched through periscopes in a nearby bunker. The twenty-seven-year-old test pilot made one complete orbit of the planet before climbing out of the capsule and parachuting separately to earth. To their other firsts, the Russians now added getting the first man to space.

  On April 13, under a “hed” that spanned four of the newspaper's eight columns—“RUSSIAN ORBITED THE EARTH ONCE, OBSERVING IT THROUGH PORTHOLES; SPACE FLIGHT LASTED 108 MINUTES”—the New York Times ran a photo of jubilant youngsters outside the Moscow Planetarium and another of their hero with the barest trace of a smile, like a cosmic Mona Lisa in a leather flight cap (he had worn a helmet to space).

  The “newspaper of record” ran a hastily assembled spate of sidebars that described the flight with maps and diagrams, provided background on the preparations for the mission, and even included a transcript of some of the hero's radio chatter with his controllers at the space facility at Kaliningrad. It also carried congratulations from President John F. Kennedy. NASA's chief designer, Wernher von Braun, also offered congratulations. The Times ran man-in-the-news profiles that were supposed to provide depth—the human “angle”—about newsmakers. Gagarin's showed a photograph of him beside his wife, Valentina, who was reading to their two-year-old daughter. In a reference that was to too good to ignore, the writer of the piece noted that “Gagarin” derived from “wild duck.” And there was a cartoon from the Baltimore Sun that showed Premier Nikita Khrushchev holding a red star in space with one hand and, in the other, a shoe, with which he was banging a likeness of Kennedy over the head.6 (The shoe banging was a reference to Khrushchev's banging his shoe on his desk at a UN General Assembly meeting in the autumn of 1960 to protest the Philippine delegate's public reference to Eastern Europeans and others as having been deprived of their civil and political rights and “swallowed up” by the Soviet Union. It was widely used to portray Khrushchev as an obstreperous Slavic lout who lacked the poise that was necessary to be a statesman.)

  “Bourgeois statesmen used to poke fun at us, saying that we Russians were running around in bark sandals and lapping up cabbage soup with those sandals,” Khrushchev told a Polish audience two years after Gagarin's flight. “They used to make fun of our culture, the culture of people considered, so to say, to be the last among the civilized Western countries. Then suddenly, you understand, those who they thought lapped up the cabbage soup with bark sandals got into outer space earlier than the so-called civilized ones.” 7

  Gagarin's feat, like Sputnik, made page-one headlines around the world. The hero was duly photographed in uniform with Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and other dignitaries on Lenin's Tomb two days after his flight and separately with an obviously respectful Korolev. The Motherland was so proud of Korolev that it turned his home into a museum, and so proud was it of the other designers and cosmonauts—and the fact that their nation had started the Space Age—that the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics was opened at the intersection of Mir Avenue and Academician S. P. Korolev Street in Moscow on April 10, 1981, two days short of the twentieth anniversary of Gagarin's flight. Mir, which means “peace,” was the name of the Soviet space station. The large museum was filled with artifacts from that glorious time, including a Sputnik, complete with antennas; large models of the giant rockets that launched the manned and unmanned spacecraft; the Vostok spacecraft in which Gagarin made his epic flight; Veneras and other deep-space probes that represented the missions to Venus; spacesuits and other clothing; and art that depicted Sputnik, Gagarin in an orange flight suit surrounded by fluttering white doves, and cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov floating over the Black Sea; commemorative coins and pennants; tubes of space food; and posters that paid clear
tribute to the space program. A typical poster by cosmonaut-artist Alexei Sokolov, titled Glory to the Conquerors of Space, showed Alexei Leonov, the first man to float outside a spacecraft (and the eventual vice president of Alpha Bank) heading for the Mir space station in a Soyuz capsule.

  On August 6, 1961, Gherman Titov flew in Vostok 2, accomplishing the first manned mission that lasted a full day. Almost exactly a year later, Andriyan Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich became the first to fly in formation in Vostoks 3 and 4. On June 14, 1963, cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky made the longest solo orbital flight in Vostok 5, and, two days later, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman and the first civilian to get to space when she was carried there in Vostok 6. She not only orbited the world forty-eight times, which was more than the total for Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, and Scott Carpenter, America's first four Mercury astronauts, combined, but she and Bykovsky were connected by radio and flew in a virtual formation, which was planned to be as impressive as it was. Airplanes flew in formation and now, thanks to Soviet innovative leadership, so did spacecraft. And to make matters slightly worse for the Americans, the fact that Tereshkova was a woman subtly suggested—however incorrectly—that the social as well as economic equality that Marxism-Leninism promised was obviously true in “the people's paradise.” Sally Ride, America's first woman astronaut—and the holder of a doctorate in physics from Stanford University—got to space on the shuttle Challenger on June 18, 1983, almost exactly two decades later.