Beyond: Our Future in Space

by Chris Impey

  5. “The Arrival of Humans in Australia” by P. Hiscock 2012. Agora, vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 19–22.

  6. “How Babies Think” by A. Gopnik 2010. Scientific American, July, pp. 76–81. See also The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn by A. Gopnik, A. N. Meltzoff, and P. K. Kuhl 1999. New York: William Morrow and Company.

  7. The characterization of some DNA as junk is likely to reflect our ignorance in recognizing the way DNA triggers genes into expression in the organism. In 2008, a study led by James Noonan of Yale University found that a small region of noncoding or “junk” DNA was responsible for developments in the ankle, foot, thumb, and wrist that were key evolutionary changes, allowing us to walk upright and use tools.

  8. “Population Migration and the Variation of Dopamine D4 Receptor (DRD4) Allele Frequencies Around the Globe” by C. Chen, M. Burton, E. Greenberger, and J. Dmitrieva 1999. Evolution and Human Behavior, vol. 20, no. 5, pp. 309–24.

  9. “Cognitive and Emotional Processing in High Novelty Seeking Associated with the L-DRD4 Genotype” by P. Roussos, S. G. Giakoumaki, and P. Bitsios 2009. Neuropsychologia, vol. 47, no. 7, pp. 1654–59.

  10. “Learning about the Mind from Evidence: Children’s Development of Intuitive Theories of Perception and Personality” by A. N. Meltzoff and A. Gopnik 2013, in Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Developmental Social Neuroscience, ed. by S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, and M. Lombardo 2013. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 19–34.

  11. “Causality and Imagination” by C. M. Walker and A. Gopnik, in The Development of the Imagination, ed. by M. Taylor 2011. Oxford: Oxford University Press. See also “Mental Models and Human Reasoning” by P. N. Johnson-Laird 2010. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, doi/10.1073/pnas.1012933107.

  12. A Brief History of the Mind by William Calvin 2004. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  13. “The Cognitive Niche: Coevolution of Intelligence, Sociality, and Language” by S. Pinker 2010. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, doi/10.1073/pnas.0914630107.

  14. “The Human Socio-cognitive Niche and Its Evolutionary Origins” by A. Whiten and D. Erdal 2012. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B [Biological Sciences], vol. 367, pp. 2119–29.

  15. “Plurality of Worlds” by F. Bertola, in First Steps in the Origin of Life in the Universe, ed. by J. Chela-Flores et al. 2001. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 401–7.

  16. “Anaxagoras and the Atomists” by C. C. W. Taylor, in From the Beginning to Plato: Routledge History of Philosophy, Vol. 1, ed. by C. C. W. Taylor 1997. New York: Routledge, pp. 208–43. See also “The Postulates of Anaxagoras” by D. Graham 1994. Apeiron, vol. 27, pp. 77–121.

  17. On the Nature of Things by Lucretius Carus, trans. by F. O. Copley 1977. New York: W. W. Norton.

  18. For an overview of the conceptual leaps made by a small number of bold thinkers 2,500 years ago, see The Presocratic Philosophers by J. Barnes 1996. New York: Routledge.

  19. It would be inappropriate to infer a modern cosmological context from the pluralism of world religions. For example, the “many worlds” in Buddhist texts are part of a geocentric cosmology with Mount Mehru as the central feature, and no distances are assigned to these remote regions, which are constantly coming into and out of existence.

  20. “The True, the False, and the Truly False: Lucian’s Philosophical Science Fiction” by R. A. Swanson 1976. Science Fiction Studies, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 227–39.

  2: Rockets and Bombs

  1. Humans are built for throwing a projectile forward rather than upward, given our origins as hunters. The fastest pitch in baseball is around 105 mph. If directed upward, that would reach a height of 70 meters. The British javelin thrower Roald Bradstock holds many official and unofficial world records for throwing items as diverse as a dead fish and a kitchen sink. His horizontal record is 130 meters for a cricket ball and 160 meters for a golf ball; the latter would be equivalent to 80 meters if thrown vertically. If you want to try your hand at a vertical toss, you can use your smart phone, after you install an app called “Send Me to Heaven.”

  2. “The History of Rocketry, Chapter 1” by C. Lethbridge, hosted by the History Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, online at http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/rocketry/.

  3. Throwing Fire: Projectile Technology Through History by A. W. Crosby 2002. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 100–103.

  4. Gunpowder has a rich and complex history. It’s characterized as a “low” explosive that deflagrates, as opposed to a “high” explosive like TNT that detonates. Gunpowder was invented by Chinese alchemists who were trying to create a potion for eternal life. Saltpeter or potassium nitrate had been used by the Chinese for medicine since the first century AD, and in gunpowder it acts as an oxidizer. Sulfur and charcoal act as fuel.

  5. Science and Civilization in China: Vol. 3, Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth by J. Needham 1986. Taipei: Cave Books Ltd., p. 104.

  6. The “bible” of rocketry for more than two hundred years, from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, was The Great Art of Artillery by Kazimierz Siemienowicz. It contained an array of designs, including multistage rockets and rockets with stabilizing delta wings.

  7. It was a brilliant realization of Isaac Newton that an object falling due to gravity is undergoing the same motion as an object in Earth orbit. He had formulated gravity as an inverse square law and the Moon is sixty times farther from the center of the Earth than someone standing on the Earth’s surface, so the gravitational acceleration will be 3,600 times smaller for the Moon than for a cannonball. The deviations of the Moon and the cannonball in their trajectories are related in exactly the way expected for an inverse square force law.

  8. It’s called the “ideal” rocket equation because it only holds true for reaction-engine vehicles where the exhaust velocity is constant or can be effectively averaged. No aerodynamic or gravitational effects are included, and it only applies under the assumption that propellant is discharged and the delta-v applied instantly. For a multistage rocket, the equation applies separately for each stage.

  9. Tsiolkovsky is rightly famous for his pivotal role in the theory of spaceflight. However, his equation was actually first derived and published in a pamphlet more than a century earlier by British mathematician William Moore, working at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich. See A Treatise on the Motion of Rockets by W. Moore 1813. London: G. and S. Robinson.

  10. The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857–1957 by A. A. Siddiqi 2010. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 62–69.

  11. Investigations of Outer Space by Rocket Devices by K. Tsiolkovsky 1911, quoted in Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by W. Ley 1968. New York: Signet/Viking.

  12. The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers by G. M. Young 2012. New York: Oxford University Press.

  13. As a young man, Oberth was a consultant on Woman in the Moon, the first film ever to have scenes set in outer space, directed and produced by the great Fritz Lang. Oberth built rocket models for the film and launched a rocket as a publicity stunt for the film’s opening. Decades later, he was given a nod in the Star Trek films and TV series, which named a class of starships after him.

  14. “Hermann Oberth: Father of Space Travel,” online at http://www.kiosek.com/oberth/.

  15. The Autobiography of Robert Hutchings Goddard, Father of the Space Age: Early Years to 1927 by R. H. Goddard 1966. Worcester, MA: A. J. St. Onge.

  16. Lindbergh and Goddard formed a lifelong alliance and friendship because they shared a dream of travel beyond the Earth. The famous aviator helped Goddard to get funding when no government agency would support him and few were taking his work seriously. He eventually received long-term support from the financier and philanthropist Daniel Guggenheim. After Goddard’s death, his estate and the Guggenheim Foundation successfully sued the US Gov
ernment for patent infringement. At the time, the award of $1 million was the largest settlement ever in a patent case.

  17. New York Times, “Topics of the Times,” January 13, 1920, p. 12.

  18. New York Times, “A Correction,” July 17, 1969, p. 43.

  19. Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age by D. A. Clary 2004. New York: Hyperion, p. 110.

  20. Quoted in “Rocket Man: The Life and Times of Dr. Wernher von Braun” by K. Baxter 2006. Boss magazine, Spring, pp. 18–21.

  21. “Recollections,” early experiences in rocketry as told by Wernher von Braun 1963, hosted by the History Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, online at http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/vonbraun/recollect-childhood.html.

  22. Von Braun admitted in 1952 that he “fared relatively rather well under totalitarianism.” This and further analysis of his ambiguous relationship to the Nazi regime and weapons of mass destruction are reviewed in “Space Superiority: Wernher von Braun’s Campaign for a Nuclear-Armed Space Station, 1946–1956” by M. J. Neufeld 2006. Space Policy, vol. 22, pp. 52–62.

  23. Wernher von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War by M. J. Neufeld 2007. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

  24. This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age by W. E. Burrows 1998. New York: Random House, p. 147.

  25. Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974 by A. A. Siddiqi 2000. Washington, DC: NASA.

  26. Johnson was a power player in the Senate and a vigorous proponent of the newly formed space agency. Of course, he also made sure that the biggest new NASA center was located in his home state. Johnson Space Center near Houston is the place where astronauts are trained; its moniker—Mission Control—alludes to its central role in space missions.

  27. NASA’s Origins and the Dawn of the Space Age by D. S. F. Portree 1998. Monographs in Aerospace History #10, NASA History Division, Washington, DC.

  28. The Space Act and its history of legislative amendments since 1958 can be found at the NASA History Office website, online at http://history.nasa.gov/spaceact-legishistory.pdf.

  3: Send In the Robots

  1. The Race: The Uncensored Story of How America Beat Russia to the Moon by J. Schefter 1999. New York: Doubleday. It was by no means smooth sailing initially. In the year after Sputnik, the Soviets successfully launched Sputnik 2 with the dog Laika aboard but failed twice to launch Sputnik 3, while the Americans launched their first satellite, Explorer 1, and also launched Vanguard 1, but they failed with five other Vanguard launches.

  2. The Rocket Men: Vostok and Voskhod, the First Soviet Manned Spaceflights by R. Hall and D. J. Shayler 2001. New York: Springer-Praxis Books, pp. 149–55.

  3. Gagarin attained worldwide celebrity after his feat, although he never flew in space again. With a warm personality and a megawatt smile, he attracted crowds wherever he went. But fame took its toll on him and he became an alcoholic. Conspiracy theories swirled around his death in a routine training flight in 1968, but it seems to have been caused when he was flying at low altitude and his fighter jet was caught in the wake of another fighter jet. “Yuri’s Night” is celebrated in hundreds of cities around the world every year on April 12, the anniversary of his flight and of the first Space Shuttle mission.

  4. “Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs,” a speech by President John F. Kennedy to a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, online at http://history.nasa.gov/moondec.html.

  5. Many books have been written about the Apollo program. Two of the best are: Apollo: The Race to the Moon by C. Murray and C. B. Cox 1999. New York: Simon & Schuster; and Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind’s Greatest Adventure by D. Parry 2009. Chatham, UK: Ebury Press. For two insider perspectives, see: Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by G. Kranz 2000. New York: Simon & Schuster; and In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965–1969 by F. French and C. Burgess 2007. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

  6. John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon by J. M. Logsdon 2010. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

  7. In the Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture by J. T. Andrews and A. A. Siddiqi 2011. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

  8. A Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974 by A. A. Siddiqi 2000. Special Publication NASA-SP-2000-4408, Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

  9. Apollo Expeditions to the Moon, ed. by E. M. Cortright 1975. Special Publication NASA-SP-350, online at http://history.nasa.gov/SP-350/ch-11-4.html.

  10. In particular, the public imagination was captured by “Earthrise,” the image of the Earth rising over the lunar landscape, taken by William Anders during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968. Nature photographer Galen Rowell called it “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.”

  11. “Animals as Cold Warriors: Missiles, Medicine, and Man’s Best Friend,” article at the US National Library of Medicine website, online at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/animals/laika.html.

  12. Quote from a news conference in Moscow, after his retirement in 1998, reported fourteen years later online at http://web.archive.org/web/20060108184335/http://www.dogsinthenews.com/issues/0211/articles/021103a.htm.

  13. It’s reasonable to question how much money is spent on something as seemingly esoteric as the space program, but NASA is almost literally a drop in the federal bucket. NASA’s budget is close to $18 billion, or 15 cents a day for every American. That’s forty times less than annual military spending. In terms of other things on which Americans spend money, it’s thirty times less than gambling, three times less than spending on pets, and two times less than spending on pizza. If everyone would hold the pepperoni, we could send out more space missions.

  14. The Sidereal Messenger by G. Galilei 1610 is a short pamphlet containing his observations of the Moon, the moons of Jupiter, and the Milky Way. The original is a very rare book, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but a commentary was published in 2010 in Isis, vol. 101, no. 3, pp. 644–45.

  15. The learning curve is apparent in the success rate of missions to the inner Solar System: the Moon, Mars, and Venus. Using tabulations on Wikipedia (NASA information is too chaotically organized to do it using their websites), the success rate of space probes went from 65 percent in the 1960s to 73 percent in the 1970s to 87 percent in the 1980s. It took a downtick to 72 percent in the 1990s and then improved again to 91 percent in the 2000s.

  16. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by C. Sagan 1994. New York: Random House, pp. xv–xvi.

  17. By the time of its final flight in 2011, the Space Shuttle had served fifteen years longer than the time for which it had been designed. After a call for proposals from museums and public institutions, NASA distributed the four remaining orbiters: original Shuttles Atlantis and Discovery, Challenger’s replacement Endeavor, and an atmospheric test orbiter named Enterprise. Kennedy Space Center, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the California Science Center, and the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum in New York City were the lucky recipients.

  18. After the Challenger disaster, President Reagan formed the Rogers Commission to investigate. In their televised hearings, physicist Richard Feynman had a memorable moment when he dipped an O-ring into a cup of ice water to show how it became less resilient at the low temperatures at the time of launch. He was scathing about the wildly unrealistic estimates of reliability from NASA engineers and the stark failures of NASA management: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” Rogers Commission Report 1986, Appendix F.

  4: Revolution Is Coming

  1. NASA still attracts talented scientists and engineers. I’ve taught more than 800 engineers at six NASA centers, and most of them feel zeal and passion for their work. But the agency’s ability to attract the best and the brightest peaked during the Apollo era. In the 1970s and 1980s, th
e lure of Silicon Valley proved stronger; in the 1990s and 2000s, the rise of the Internet and the “dot-com boom” offered a new frontier with no apparent limits. Like any government agency, NASA has layers of bureaucracy and the culture can often be far from entrepreneurial.

  2. NASA’s Efforts to Reduce Unneeded Infrastructure and Facilities 2013, Report Number IG-13-008, Office of the Inspector General, Washington, DC.

  3. Final Countdown: NASA and the End of the Space Shuttle Program by P. Duggins 2007. Tampa: University of Florida Press.

  4. As we’ve seen, Russia had more than its fair share of space pioneers and visionaries. The technical education provided by major Russian universities was unparalleled, even as the country limped along with decrepit infrastructure and uncompetitive industries. Russian scientists and engineers were treated well and provided with perks that made life tolerable. But all that changed with the chaos that followed the 1989 fall of the Soviet Union. Since then, universities have been starved of resources and Russia has been suffering a severe brain drain that has sent much of its technical talent to the United States and Western Europe.

  5. As reported by National Public Radio in a 2012 story on mounting problems in the Soviet space program, online at http://www.npr.org/2012/03/12/148247197/for-russias-troubled-space-program-mishaps-mount.

  6. NASA’s budget hovers around $18 billion, and it hasn’t changed much in real terms in more than a decade. At the moment, the pie is roughly divided into 28 percent for Earth and space science and astrophysics, 22 percent for the development of rockets and propulsion systems, and 22 percent for the International Space Station, with the rest for aeronautics and other technology development.

  7. “The Interplanetary Internet” by J. Jackson 2005, published by the online magazine of the IEEE, at http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/the-interplanetary-internet.