Reach for the Skies

by Richard Branson

  Bond is a former British aircraft engineer who began his career with Rolls-Royce’s Rocket Division and led a team of scientists to draw up an interstellar spacecraft design called Daedalus; he is currently receiving European Space Agency funding to develop an engine to propel aircraft at five times the speed of sound and punch spacecraft into orbit—and to do both at no appreciable cost to the environment.

  Bond’s company, Reaction Engines, based in Oxfordshire, is designing an airliner called the A2. A typical A2 flight will have it leaving Brussels international airport and flying quietly and subsonically out into the North Atlantic at Mach 0.9 before it reaches Mach 5 across the North Pole and heads over the Pacific to Australia. The total journey time will be around four and a half hours. The same flight today takes about 22 hours.

  The A2’s secret is its engine: a ramjet with a fancy heat exchanger that transfers the heat from the incoming air to the hydrogen it uses as fuel. This means that the engine can run comfortably even when air is moving through it very fast. The faster the speed of the air through the engine, the cooler the engine. Reaction Engines believe that their ramjet, far from requiring exotic materials, could be made of light alloys.

  Then there’s Skylon. Skylon is Alan Bond’s rocket ship—a hydrogen-powered aircraft that takes off from a conventional runway, accelerates to five and a half times the speed of sound, and then—thanks again to that fancy heat exchanger—supercools the oxygen entering its engine intake for use later when the atmosphere gives out. At this point, Skylon mixes the liquid oxygen it’s collected on its way through the atmosphere with an onboard reserve of liquid hydrogen and becomes a pure rocket engine.

  “It’s a pretty unique concept,” says Mark Hempsell, Reaction Engines’ director of future programs. He can say that again!

  Alan Bond’s Skylon concept: a plane that thinks it’s a ramjet that thinks it’s a rocket!

  eight

  Above the Sky

  In Italy in 1670, a Jesuit priest, Father Francesco de Lana, published a scheme to create hollow spheres out of copper. The walls of the spheres were to be made thin, but strong enough not to crumple if you sucked all the air out of them. Once evacuated, de Lana reckoned, the spheres would become lighter than the air. They would float.

  More than 200 years later, in 1898, a 16-year-old boy from Worcester, Massachusetts, dreamed up much the same idea. He made his balloon out of aluminum and filled it with hydrogen. It didn’t work. But the boy, Robert Hutchings Goddard, was by then hooked on the mysteries of flight. In 1919, he wrote a brilliant and meticulous book about the future of rocketry called A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. In it, he mentioned the possibility of space travel. The idea was met with near-universal derision: he never lived it down.

  He carried on working, and on March 16, 1926, the tubercular, publicity-shy physics professor launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket from his aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn, Massachusetts. The rocket, christened Nell, rose 41 feet and landed in a cabbage field. The neighbors complained.

  Goddard plowed his own furrow his whole life, but he wasn’t quite the lone voice in the wilderness that people sometimes make him out to be. He was well liked and respected by his academic colleagues, even if they did smile at his crazy ideas. And a handful of influential people understood that his “crazy” ideas weren’t so very crazy after all. Chief among these was Charles Lindbergh, who put him in touch with the financier Daniel Guggenheim. In 1930, Guggenheim agreed to fund Goddard’s research for four years for a total of $100,000. After years struggling for funds, Goddard must have thought he’d died and gone to heaven.

  Heaven, for Goddard, was Roswell, New Mexico. He worked here with his team of technicians in secrecy and near isolation for a dozen years, launching solid-fuel rockets, liquid-fuel rockets, even multistage rockets, and some of them attained speeds of 550 miles per hour. (Theo Kamecke’s marvelous 1970 documentary Moonwalk One has thrilling footage of their experiments.) American academia and the American public weren’t ready for Goddard’s futuristic advances. But the Germans were.

  Robert Goddard’s idea of heaven: well-funded rocketry experiments in New Mexico.

  Rocket fever seized the German public imagination back in the 1920s, fueling all manner of avant-garde films, novels, and artworks. The idea of space travel was so popular that moon rockets became a regular item in carnival parades, and rocket pioneers like Maximilian Valier, Fritz von Opel, and Rudolf Nebel all achieved celebrity status from staging spectacular public experiments.

  During the 1920s, physicists like Hermann Oberth served as godfathers to the most important rocketry club of the day, the Verein fur Raumschiffarht (Rocket Society), or VfR. They personally encouraged and developed the country’s most exciting young rocket talents: men like Willy Ley and Wernher von Braun.

  Fritz Lang captured the feverish mood of the time with The Woman in the Moon (Frau im Mond, 1928). The screenplay was written by his wife, Thea von Harbou, who would go on to write Lang’s masterpiece Metropolis; Herr Lang knew he would be addressing a well-informed audience and did everything he could to get the science right. He approached the VfR, who directed him to their most valued scientific adviser, the Austro-Hungarian physicist Hermann Oberth, and a remarkable collaboration began.

  Oberth’s interest in rocketry had been sparked at the age of 11, when his mother gave him a copy of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, a book that he read “at least five or six times and, finally, knew by heart.” When Oberth discovered that Verne’s calculations were not simply fiction, the course of his career was set.

  At the University of Heidelberg, Oberth caught wind of Goddard’s A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. When he couldn’t get ahold of a copy, he wrote to the author. Goddard sent him a treatise and a friendly letter explaining his experiments in liquid-fuel rocketry. Oberth, staggered by Goddard’s advanced knowledge, became his prophet in Germany. In 1923, he wrote Die Rakete zu den Planetenraeumen (The Rocket into Interplanetary Space), which set out the basic principles of space flight. While technically accurate, Oberth’s writings went much further than Goddard’s. His proposals included space stations, immense orbiting mirrors, explorations to the dark side of the moon, and using detachable fuel capsules in orbit to power flights to the nearer planets!

  The university rejected the treatise for being “too speculative.” Still, Oberth’s work never generated the kind of incredulity that Goddard’s did. The rejected treatise, rewritten by German spaceflight enthusiast Max Valier, became Ways to Spaceflight (1929) and inspired new rocket clubs to spring up all over Germany.

  Oberth not only advised Fritz Lang on Frau im Mond; he persuaded the director to bankroll a rocket! The liquid-fueled rocket, nearly six feet tall, was to have been launched from the movie-house roof during the film’s premiere. Oberth expected it to reach an altitude of 40 miles over the Baltic Sea. Sadly, technical difficulties overcame the project, and the German studio Ufa took ownership of the equipment.

  Among the fans of Frau im Mond were a circle of young rocket enthusiasts at the VfR headed by Willy Ley and a young aristocrat called Wernher von Braun, best known in those days for a boyhood prank. When he was 12, he’d attempted to power his toy go-cart with fireworks: it blew up, scaring the life out of the Berlin police.

  When, years later, in October 1942, von Braun’s ghastly wartime masterpiece, the V-2 rocket, first rose into the skies above Peenemünde, on the Baltic coast, it had the Frau im Mond logo painted on its base.

  Long before I knew of his wartime work, his Nazi Party membership, his Waffen-SS rank, or his likely knowledge of conditions in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where his V-2 rockets were constructed—and where 20,000 died from illness, beatings, hangings, and exhaustion—I thought of Wernher von Braun as a pal of Walt Disney.

  Von Braun’s ghastly V-2 missile was the first man-made object to reach space.

  Each Saturday for three weeks, von Braun—accompanied by various cartoon c
haracters—showed me and my school friends how rockets would one day fly us all into space. The shows were a British cinema favorite during the 1950s; American kids got to watch the shows on television. After a lifetime closeted away in the service of military power, they were von Braun’s chance to relive the enthusiasms of his boyhood and to remember, in public, why he had fallen in love with rocketry in the first place.

  Von Braun’s V-2 was the world’s first ballistic missile and the first human artifact to achieve suborbital spaceflight. It was a terror weapon, deployed in the face of Allied advances against the German Reich, and while many rockets were misdirected and did little or no damage, their potential was terrifying: the V-2’s speed and angle of attack made it invulnerable to antiaircraft guns and fighters as it dropped from space (it could reach a height of 68 miles) at up to four times the speed of sound.

  Recruited by America after the war by Operation Paperclip, Braun defended his wartime achievement, claiming he was a good man caught up in a bad situation. Bad it certainly was: many more slaves died building his rockets than died in the rocket attacks. Was Braun responsible for the horrors surrounding the manufacture of the V-2s? Or was he simply less brave than we would wish him to be? Braun claimed that he turned a blind eye to the horrors around him for fear that, were he to say anything, the SS would put a bullet in his brain. It is true that he hankered after more innocent employment. Among friends, he once expressed regret that they were not working on a spaceship. That naive remark was enough to get him arrested: in 1944, the SS imprisoned him for two weeks without charge.

  In April 1945, as Allied forces pushed deep into Germany, the Peenemünde team was escorted to the town of Oberammergau, in the Bavarian Alps. Their SS guards had orders to shoot them if approached by the enemy. Von Braun’s quick thinking may well have saved them: he persuaded the major in charge of the guard that they were an easy target for U.S. bombers and should be dispersed to outlying villages. This bought them all a little time as the U.S. 44th Infantry Division rolled into town. Wernher’s kid brother Magnus—himself a rocket physicist—set off on his bike to orchestrate his brother’s surrender. “My name is Magnus von Braun,” he called out to an American soldier. “My brother invented the V-2!”

  Von Braun lived long enough to become a different, perhaps better person. In America, he enthused about the peaceful uses of rocketry and joined Disney in inspiring a generation of children with a hankering for outer space. Braun’s work for Disney went far beyond his minutes on screen. Man in Space and two other Disney space films were largely his creation; they, in turn, were drawn from articles in the general-interest magazine Collier’s, a hugely successful series that lifted the title’s circulation to a staggering four million and—30 years later—triggered rocket fever across the United States.

  By the time he was filming television programs for Disney in the mid-1950s, von Braun was well on the way to finishing the U.S. Army’s Redstone rocket, which was used for America’s first live nuclear ballistic-missile tests. Still he had his heart set on space travel—and in 1957 he got his chance.

  On October 4 of that year, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the earth’s first artificial satellite, or, as Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce put it, “an intercontinental outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions that the American way of life was a gilt-edged guarantee of our national superiority.”

  In other words, the United States was rattled. For all their prescient recruitment of Germany’s finest rocket scientists, they were falling far behind the Soviet Union in the conquest of space. Something had to be done—and Wernher von Braun knew what.

  NASA was established on July 29, 1958. On October 7 it formally announced Project Mercury: a scheme to place a manned space capsule in orbital flight around the earth. It set about building the new Marshall Space Flight Center at Redstone Arsenal, in Huntsville, Alabama. Von Braun was appointed the center’s director.

  On January 31, 1961 a Redstone rocket lifted a Mercury capsule carrying Ham, a chimpanzee, into space. On May 5, another Redstone raised another capsule; only this time, Ham’s place was taken by a human being: Alan Shepard, the first American in space. Von Braun would go on to lead the design effort that birthed the Saturn V rocket, powerful and reliable enough to send men to the moon.

  The year was 1998. Per and Rory McCarthy and I were in Morocco, waiting for the weather to improve so that we could launch one of our first attempts at circumnavigating the earth in a balloon. While we waited, we had nothing to do but talk.

  It turned into quite a gathering: Per Lindstrand, Will Whitehorn, and I were joined one evening by Buzz Aldrin, the former NASA astronaut whose missions included three spacewalks, orbiting the earth in Gemini 12, and piloting the lunar module on Apollo 11—the first manned landing on the moon. Buzz is notorious for not suffering fools gladly—after the life he’s led, why would he?—but there was no doubting his enthusiasm for our ballooning project (and others’: that year, two other very well-prepared teams were challenging us to be first around the world). As we talked, it became obvious that Buzz understood better than we did what was really at stake, as we prepared to spend weeks at high altitude in a balloon. As far as Buzz was concerned, ballooning was a good way—a very good way—to get into space. He told us some stories.

  You know those clear plastic packets you get in health-food stores, which split the moment you try to open them, spilling their contents everywhere? They’re made of cellophane. They are really fragile and really annoying. Would you be prepared to fly into the stratosphere in a balloon made of cellophane? Professor Auguste Piccard did. On May 27, 1931, the professor and his colleague Paul Kipfer lifted off from Augsburg, Germany, beneath a hydrogen-filled cellophane balloon, wearing crash helmets of their own design—inverted wicker chicken baskets stuffed with pillows.

  Piccard was no dummy. He understood that cellophane, for all its brittleness, is light and airtight. Equally important, he understood the mortal dangers of a low-pressure environment: “We must,” he said, “have a hermetically sealed cabin, carrying breathable air at ordinary pressure.” Piccard’s closed-capsule system was the world’s first. Carbon dioxide was scrubbed from the air by a Draeger apparatus—a piece of gear originally designed for tap beer that was now finding applications on early submarines and in mine rescue.

  Some of Piccard and Kipfer’s emergency gear lacked sophistication.

  Piccard and Kipfer rose to 48,000 feet—that’s more than nine miles up—and entered the stratosphere for the first time. Piccard predicted that a closed-capsule system similar to his own would one day carry a human being all the way to the moon—and he was right. Piccard died in 1962. Three years later, his widow was photographed, beaming with pride, beside a mock-up of the Apollo Command Module.

  Before Apollo, before Mercury, even before NASA, men were building and testing space capsules and achieving altitude records on the edge of space. And unlike the rocket-plane pilots made famous in Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff, these pioneers weren’t just leaving the earth’s atmosphere for a couple of minutes. They were floating above the sky for hours, even days, at a time. America’s high-altitude ballooning programs gathered information about conditions at high altitudes that fed directly into Mercury’s preparations to put a man into space. They also amassed a wealth of experience in how to design space capsules.

  The earliest and most important of these projects were the product of a rare meeting of minds. Four men—Otto Winzen, Paul Stapp, David Simons, and Joe Kittinger—held Manhigh I and Manhigh II together through sheer enthusiasm and sacrifice.

  The chemist Otto Winzen emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1937. He spent the war in a series of internment camps and later returned to his work on plastics. His special love was a new synthetic called polyethylene resin, which was being used to insulate the electrical wiring on submarines.

  Winzen produced polyethylene films thinner than a human hair and set up his own company, Winzen Resea
rch, to develop applications for them. He made weather balloons and surveillance balloons, and dreamed up schemes for the U.S. Navy and, later, for NASA. His wife, Vera (to whom he was introduced by Piccard), became the finest balloon designer of her day and a world-record holder in her own right: in 1979, she set a new overland distance record of 2,003 miles in a floating art installation called Da Vinci Transamerica.

  John Paul Stapp, the son of Baptist missionaries, was born in 1910 and grew up in the jungles of Brazil. It showed: poverty didn’t trouble him at all. He studied zoology and chemistry at Baylor University, in Waco, Texas, and whenever he ran out of money he dined off guinea pigs and pigeons from the school’s stock of lab animals. Stapp wanted to be an Army doctor, but he kept spraining his ankle and was “dumped” (his word) in the Army Air Corps. It was there that Stapp mastered “bootleg research”: “unofficial projects funded on the sly at a low level of the bureaucracy.” If you could only conceal it from the “men at the mahogany desks,” you could research pretty much whatever you wanted. If it worked, you took it to your bosses, who would take the credit and turn a blind eye to whatever crazy scheme you cooked up next. If it failed, they court-martialed you.

  Stapp’s chief interest was high-altitude medicine. The best test pilots, flying the most expensive machines in the military’s arsenal, were exposing themselves to risks that were very poorly understood. The supersonic X-Planes flying out of Edwards Air Force Base kept a pilot at altitude for a couple of minutes at most, and at great cost, so there was no space or time or money on that program for a doctor to undertake medical research. Stapp realized he would have to create his own program: a high-altitude platform that could stay at extreme altitude for long periods, at very little cost.