Jusqu'au solstice d'été de en pratiquement aucun "name" astronomer had come out as an eye witness to flying saucers. Indeed such eminent astrophysicians as Dr. Donald Menzel of Harvard, Dr. Gerard P. Kuiper of Chicago, and Dr. Joseph A. Hynek of Ohio State all swore on their loyalty oaths that except for some crockery caught in a cyclone, flying saucers were nonsense. Here and there of course an astronomer gave a positive-maybe sort of testimonial, but most of them would as leave have been photographed as a man of distinction clinking glasses with Mae West or taking a Chesterfield from the proffered hand of a convicted spy as to have taken issue with the Air Force's unwritten law against the proximity of space ships.
But away from their observatories, their loyalty oaths filed away for the night, and protected by home ties, many of them confessed that space travel from elsewhere held "considerable possibility." This wasn't much, since anything which can be considered, a pin point for instance, is "considerable" and anything possible is a "possibility." Napoleon once said: "Impossible? Ce mot West pas francais!" It isn't English either.
Dr. Walter Lee Moore, astronomer of the University of Louisville, felt sure he had sighted a disk and watched it head toward Venus, and Professor George Adamski of Palomar once said he thought there was something to them. William Lamb, Wyoming's eminent astrotheologian, was as certain of them as he was of St. Michael's wings. Younger astronomers, amateurs like Stanley P. Higgins and Edward Coffman, had done a great deal of extracurricular activity in the field. Higgins retained an open mind, but Coffman insisted he had seen one over Van Nuys, California, and brought three witnesses who corroborated his findings.
But in the main astronomers of established rank and position followed the request to keep their traps shut please about any visitations from Mars, Venus, Russia, or anywhere else. True, few had seen behind the clouds that envelop Venus, so it was easy for them to declare that no life existed behind that inconvenient curtain. To expect them, therefore, to confirm that a space ship adequately propelled could hop from such a planet to this earth and back in an hour was equivalent to reversing the current of an electric shock treatment and splitting their previously disturbed personalities as wide open as a schizophrenic's.
To condition people into an acceptance of interplanetary travel, I can think of no better route than those blazed long ago by Oberth and Hohmann and their present-day disciples, Bonestell and Ley.
Before taking their trips to the moon, Venus, and Mars, perhaps it would help if we rounded up the currently accepted findings of astronomers concerning our solar system. As of 1950 the accepted planets revolving around our sun numbered nine; their satellites in turn, 31. Three planets presumably had no moons. Jupiter had 11; the Earth, one.
Only 14 astronomers were credited with the 31 satellitic discoveries. Of these discoveries, Galileo, Cassini, and Herschel were credited with four each. Kuiper, a latecomer, when pickings presumably were few, managed to get two as recently as 1948 and 1949. His telescope had to reach out 5,000,000 miles to get one of them. That is a long way from Chicago.
Of the moons, Jupiter's are the largest, those of Mars the smallest. In fact, Deimos of Mars, is supposed to be only five miles in diameter, as compared to our moon, which is 2,160 miles in diameter.
Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars seem a neighborly little group in the solar system (if you disregard the millions of miles as you would disregard millions in a national budget, and think of them instead as well within one hundred units of each other). Under such a simplification, Mercury is 36.0, Venus 67.2, Earth 93.0, and Mars 141.5, units from the sun. That way they all seem within a day's ride of each other, and the climatic changes do not seem much worse than sunshine in one town and rain in another in almost any county in America.
The time it takes them to complete an orbit is not too diverse either. Mercury and Venus takes little less, Mars a little longer than ours. The orbital velocities are pretty close too. We travel at 18.5 per second, Venus at 21.7, Mercury at 29.9, and Mars at 15.0. Their gravities are not too diverse. Taking the Earth as equal to one, Venus would be 0.85, Mars 0.38, and Mercury 0.27.
The period of their rotation is guesswork in the case of Venus, but Mars is known to rotate at 27 hours and 37 minutes as compared to the Earth which magnetically is 23 hours and 58 minutes.
Their mass volume and density show not too great a discrepancy, and their diameters are even closer. The Earth is 7,900 miles wide, Venus 7,700 miles, Mars 4,200 miles, and Mercury 3,100. Their percentage of light shows the widest discrepancy. Mercury has only 7 per cent, to the Earth's 50 per cent, and Mars has only 15 per cent. Venus, however, has 59 per cent.
The size and position of these planets has not been upset by anybody in a long time. Pluto is the nearest to the Sun, and the others move outward in the following order: Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus, and Mercury. In size they range from Jupiter, which is the largest, through Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Earth, Venus, Pluto, Mars, and Mercury, which is the smallest.
Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto have all been discovered since Johannes Kepler's time. Nearly all the planets in our solar system are in the same plane, and they move in ellipses rather than circles around the Sun. That brings them sometimes nearer and sometimes farther away from not only the Sun, but each other. Their maximum orbits are called their apogee; their minimum, their perigee.
The Earth has one moon, Mars 2, Saturn 10, and Jupiter 11. Venus, Mercury, and Pluto do not seem to have any. Moons, however, have been discovered as early as Babylonian times and as late as 1949. So it is possible that other planets may have moons which no telescope or spectroscope has detected as yet. Venus in particular, because of the clouds surrounding it, may have a moon which defies detection. After all, Mars has a moon which is only 5,800 miles from its surface as opposed to one moon of Jupiter which is 14,880,000 miles from home. So there is no observable law saying a moon has to be any set distance from its planet.
As there are 23 solar systems which so far have been checked as having satellite planets, is it unreasonable to assume that given similar conditions in the universe no other sun would have a planet 90,000,000 miles away, and therefore, like ours, capable of supporting intelligent life. In fact many astronomers believe that in addition to our sun there must be at least one habitable planet for each of the other 22 stars.
In the Air Materiel Command Digest of April 27, 1949, there was reference that the nearest eligible star which might have a planet comparable to our Earth, was one called Wolf 359. But this is eight light years away from the Earth. Even if a space ship traveled at 18,000 miles per second, which is as fast as an Air Force mind could go in 1950, it would take such a space ship 80 years to travel from the earth of Wolf to the earth of the Sun. If nuclear material could be converted into jet energy, the time, the Air Force engineers believed, might be cut to 60, or, at the shortest, to 16 years.
With a sigh, their engineers and astronomers decided to let go of Wolf 359 and try their hand at Mars. Orson Welles tried his hand at bringing these people in, and Kenneth Arnold is still referred to by some people as "the man who saw the men from Mars." The general opinion of astronomers, however, is that Mars is even more desolate and inhospitable during its best moments than the middle of the Sahara during a sandstorm. Such people, the Air Force astronomers contend, would be more occupied with survival than with air travel. To survive against the loss of atmosphere of oxygen and water, they would have had to protect themselves by some scientific control of diminishing natural resources. By the construction of homes and cities underground they might reduce the arctic temperatures of their nights. It is possible, of course, that a race faced with diminishing assets might go out on the hunt for another place to live. Certainly on this earth when faced either with plows which have destroyed their plains, or atom bombs, people have either migrated by covered wagon, jalopy, or plane, or have gone underground.
Contrary to the Air Force astronomers, others do not believe that Mars is so much colder than our arctic areas, being nearer 50° F. at noon on their equator. The terrain being flat and featureless, there would certainly be plenty of landing fields, though all agree that even the snow at the polar ice caps can hardly be more than a foot deep, and water scarce at all times. There is a vegetation much like arctic moss. Certain types of plants grow on the windswept tundras. There is very little weather, as we know it, but dust storms are frequent.
Kuiper has detected no oxygen in the atmosphere. The density is very low. The canals or surface markings which have been estimated up to twenty miles wide and three thousand miles long, have been credited to everything from supermen to cracked telescopic lenses. As the ice caps shrink, the canals begin to become apparent. Shortly afterward, green vegetation develops.
Back in 1939, when Mars was close to us, various astronomers came in with various reports of what they had seen. Some saw as many as forty canals, some didn't see any. But the consensus remained, at least through the first phase of the flying saucer era, that the canals did exist, though the diggers of them didn't.
As we are between 35,000,000 and 63,000,000 miles away, it is hard for us to adjust our sights on those canals. They sometimes wriggle and sometimes seem straight. They interlace, and at intersections give the appearance of oases.
Surely if there is any intelligence on Mars, and that intelligence observed the loss of humidity, it could not be a very high intelligence if it didn't look around for another planet, when life was found to be no longer supportable on its own.
Obviously, if such people hadn't been killing each other off through wars, they might have moved much farther ahead in their arts and sciences than the human race on this planet. But it would be only fair, if it were at all possible for us to do so, to tell them not to settle down here until we can stop intimidating each other with bigger and more horrible explosives. Surely as innocent bystanders they'd get the blast first.
If astronomers don't think much of life on Mars, they think even less of it on Venus. This despite the fact that Venus is nearer to the earth in its physical characteristics than any other planet. Barring the moon, it is our nearest neighbor; but because of its dense cloud formations, astronomers have succeeded in seeing Venus on only a few occasions, and even then, they were in such violent disagreements as to what they actually saw, whether mountain chains or volcanic eruptions, that the revelations so far have had practically no value.
The planet Venus at the present time revolves around the sun in 288 days, which is the sidereal year of the planet. However, seen from the earth it revolves around the sun on a longer orbit and at a lower speed.
Venus returns to the same position with respect to the earth, after 584 days, which is its synodical year. It rises before the sun, earlier every day for 71 days, until it reaches the western elongation, or its westernmost point away from the rising sun. Each morning thereafter this morning star rises lower and lower and for 221 days approaches the superior conjunction.
About a month before the end of this period, it is eclipsed by the rays of the sun, and for over 60 days it is not seen because
of the sun's rays. It is behind the sun, or in superior conjunction. Then it appears for a moment after the setting sun, being now the evening star, and east of the western sun.
For 221 nights, beginning with the evening on which it first appears as an evening star, it appears farther from the setting sun, until it reaches the eastern elongation. Then for 71 nights it approaches the sun. Finally it enters the inferior conjunction, when it is between the earth and the sun. It is usually invisible for one or two days, and thereafter appears west of the rising sun and is again the morning star.
These movements of Venus, and their exact duration, have been known to the people of the Orient and the Occident for more than two thousand years. Actually a Venus year, which follows the synodical revolution of Venus, was employed in calendars of the Old and New World alike. Five synodical years of Venus equals 2919 6/10 days, whereas eight years of 365 days equals 2,920 days, and eight Julian years of 365 1/4 days equals 2,922 days.
In other words, in four years there's a difference of approximately one day between the Venusean and the Julian calendars.
Since the latter part of the eighth century before the present era, Venus has followed an orbit between Mercury and Earth which it has maintained ever since. It became the morning and evening star seen from the earth. It is never removed more than 48 degrees, when at its eastern and western elongation, or three hours and a few minutes east or west of the sun.
All planets revolve in their orbits in the same direction, counterclockwise, if seen from the north, around the sun. Most of their moons revolve counterclockwise in direct motion, but there are a few that revolve in the opposite direction in retrograde motion. No orbit is an exact circle. There is no regularity in the eccentrical shapes of the planetary orbits. Each elliptical curve verges in a different direction. Information obtained by different methods of observation of Venus is contradictory. It is not known whether Venus rotates so slowly, that its day equals its year, or so rapidly that its nightside is never sufficiently cooled.
Air Force consultant astronomers, strangely, do not consider the possibility of intelligent life on Venus as completely unreasonable. No oxygen or water has been found as yet, though this does not mean there is none. It could mean that the water vapor has not reached the outer cloud banks where it could be detected by us.
There is a quaint astronomical opinion that a cloudy atmosphere around Venus would discourage astronomy and hence discourage space travel. Spectroscopic analyses have shown that there are large quantities of carbon dioxide on Venus.
Lee Bowman, who has made half a million dollars on patents, worked up a plane run on CO2 gas, which is way ahead of even the drawing boards of those engineers who weren't even beyond hydrogen, a highly inflammable gas, on paper by 1950.
The idea that people behind a cloud would not be curious to know what transpired on the other side of the cloud is the sort of thinking that went out with Columbus. Handicapped in his desire to reach India from Spain by travelling west, we had to overcome the ignorance of those who held that if he insisted on it his ships would fall off the flat earth beyond the horizon and disappear forever. But he took an egg and convinced certain backers at least that if he went on long enough he would come back to where he started from.
It is therefore possible that some early Venusians, having come on CO2 as a means of propulsion long before Lee Bowman, may have been outside those cloud formations for untold centuries. And it is the opinion of the best authorities on electromagnetic energy that some intelligent beings from somewhere have got far beyond CO2 as a means of propulsion, despite the bookies in the Air Force, who quote odds on such space travel at 1,000 to 1.
The best of our aerodynamicists can do to date is to think in terms of rocket ships from this earth to Mars or Venus along narrow Keplerian ellipses.
Willy Ley and Chesley Bonestell deserve no end of credit for softening us up so that we can believe in space travel and though I believe the time will come when their means of propulsion will
seem like selling us oxcarts in a day of hot rods, their travelogues will still be exciting reading when our day becomes known as the prehistoric period of space travel.
In The Conquest o f Space they use the homeopathic approach. They start us out with an actual, factual report of a rocket taking off at the White Sands Proving Ground. Next they talk us into a rocket trip from New York to California. Next they take us from Long Island to Europe and around the world.
Since we have weathered all those trips safely, they next take us to the moon. I have never been trapped more alluringly into a trip I never intended to take.
Bonestell's paintings and sketches look more real than color photographs or even black and white prints. On a transcontinental trip from a Long Island airport to California, he "photographs" (presumably from another rocket) a rocket which has climbed to ten miles above Manhattan. Tilted at a 45-degree angle, we see star-spangled Manhattan below and the next thing we know we are twenty-five miles above New Jersey where all of Long Island and Manhattan are visible behind us.
Next we are 125 miles above Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and in the distance we can see Lake Erie, Detroit, and Buffalo. It was dark when the rocket left Long Island, but our speed is fast overcoming that disadvantage. By the time Nebraska is reached the rocket is 500 miles up and everything as far north as Hudson Bay and the Aurora Borealis is visible.
That was its high point. The rocket started to slip after that and by the time it reached Nevada it was down to 250 miles above the earth's surface. From there to Baja, California, the descent was rapid-good thing, too, or all of us would have drowned in the Pacific Ocean.
Having made that trip with such ease, nobody unless he were a chicken-hearted Pentagonian would balk at a rocket trip from Long Island, across the Atlantic and around the world. He might have to climb 4,000 miles high to make it, but it would be a nice conditioning for that inevitable trip to the moon.
The moon by rocket, we are assured, as if it had already been tested (which of course it has as much as that rocket trip we
took from New York to Los Angeles), takes four days and nights. The moon is that little thing-253,000 miles away from us at its maximum (apogee) and 222,000 miles away at its minimum (perigee). Its average density is 3.3 to our 5.5 and its gravity a good deal less than ours, from one-fifth to one-sixth of 1.0, which is the unit used for gravity on this earth. Its albido, or whiteness, is only seven per cent as compared to our fifty per cent.
Assuming that the pilot of the moon ship has been conditioned to withstand acceleration up to 4 g., and assuming further that such a rocket would have to have a velocity of seven miles per second to get out of this atmosphere, it would take 300,000 seconds to reach zero velocity. By then nine-tenths of the distance between the earth and moon would have been covered. The main task at that point would be to get across the frontier because in interplanetary travel, as on this earth, there are customs problems and they involve adjustments and delays. Our rocket would have to be turned around so that it could back down to the moon.
Most interplanetary travelers shoot right by these difficulties, but there is a dividing line between the earth and its satellite, and how to get out of the gravitational grip of one and into another pulling in the opposite direction, is as difficult as swimming down with one tide, trying to cross over in midstream and swimming back on another. At one point you are likely to be pulled under and disappear.
If you overcome this, the next job is to see that the gravitational pull toward the moon doesn't increase your speed the nearer you get to the satellite. Without brakes you might hit your target at 7,200 m.p.h. It would take powerful rocket motors working in reverse and braking to bring that velocity down to zero.
As for that little matter of turning the ship around when between the earth's pull and the moon's, so that the rocket can back down to the moon, the rocket engineers have this all worked out, and since you've already traveled from New York to Los Angeles and from Long Island around the world, why should you doubt that they would be stumped in getting from neutral into reverse? Fifteen years ago you surely would have believed that a
trip to the moon was more feasible than the atomic bomb, and since you've accepted that there is such a thing as atomic energy, why doubt that such masters in the field of industrial science would be stumped by the problem of getting you over the frontier, from the earth's gravitational pull to the moon's?
The job of getting you back from the moon, of course, would be easier than leaving this earth, provided (1) you had fuel and (2) you had oxygen. Astronomers say that there is practically no air on the moon, and nobody has ever claimed they had filling stations. But it would be easier than leaving here, say the rocket engineers, because of the fact that the moon's gravitational pulls is about 16 per cent of what the earth's is.
Then, too, once you passed that frontier again on the way home, you'd be in the earth's gravitational field for the next 215,000 miles. In the last eight minutes coming down I suppose you would have to decelerate at about the same speed you accelerated on the way up-so by the time you reached the earth's surface the pull would be zero on the ship and no more than 4 g. on you. Otherwise you would be hitting the earth at 7,200 miles per hour, which would be a mess.
But just as Ley and Bonestell convinced you it was easy to travel around the world, they present a series of color and black and white "photographs" of a trip to the moon on weekly schedule. Actually it would be eight days without even stopover privileges, but thanks to the realistic paintings of Bonestell, there will be few surprises for tourists there. The various craters, promontories, and dried-out bays will also be there for those who would step on them, and thanks to the reduced gravitational pull they would enjoy a spring in their step such as has never been experienced on this earth.
Thermal erosions which have filled up valleys, including the great valley of the Alps, will be there to be studied by earth-light as well as sun-light, for just as the moon reflects its light on our planet, so we reflect ours on our satellite.
While the trip to the moon (now that it's over) was comparatively easy, one to Mars or Venus would require much wider
ellipses. The longest one to Venus might be the easier because it would be more economical in the use of fuel. A ship to Venus would start out counterclockwise moving as our earth does.
Like the trip to the moon the Venus-bound ship would have to drift outward into the solar system and of course into the orbit of the planet. If that were Venus the orbital velocity would be about 21.7 miles per second. If everything were timed right, the space ship would meet the planet at the right point at the right moment. If they missed it would be a case of "whoops!" like the man on the flying trapeze whose timing was off.
But assuming everything were mathematically correct it would be easier to go to Venus than to Mars because of fuel requirement. In fact in one of these trips it was worked out that the easiest drain on gas and oil would be to Venus, then to Mars, and then back to Earth from Mars. But either direct trip or a round trip seemed well within the textbook skills of contemporary rocket engineering.
All this is based on the theory or error (vote for one) that the only way to conquer gravity is by superior force. The idea of harnessing magnetic lines of force and riding on them as one would on a scenic railway has not occurred as yet to the rocketeers.
Ley in Rockets, The Future of Travel Beyond the Stratosphere gives an excellent example of the difference between flying in this atmosphere and another. Traveling in a rocket in this atmosphere is liking moving from one seat to another in the same car of a train. Flying to the moon is like moving from one car to another car of the same train. Flying to Venus is like moving from one train to another on an adjoining track moving in the same direction. If you miss it you may fall flat on your face on the tracks and may never be heard of again.
A trip to Venus, according to partisans of the rocket propulsion, would take two years, one month, and three days. (According to those on the side of magnetic propulsion it would be about half an hour.)
Willy Ley used as his authorities for the rocket trip Oberth and Hohmann. Dr. Walter Hohmann, who wrote The Attainability of the Celestial Bodies, was the city architect of Essen-on the-Ruhr. His book dealt with departure from this earth, return to this earth, free coasting in space, circular orbits around other celestial bodies, and landing on other celestial bodies.
Professor Hermann Oberth was a mathematician who published a book in Munich in 1923 on the theoretical possibility of space travel. He believed that technological knowledge was sufficient to build machines that could rise beyond the limits of the atmosphere of this earth, and that further development would give them sufficient velocity so they could continue in space and not fall back to earth, that they could be built to carry men and that within a few decades they could be manufactured on a profitable basis.
The earth's atmosphere is variously argued to extend from 40 to 500 miles but most scientists agree that after 40 miles the density is nearer a vacuum and the gravitational pull pretty nearly academic.
As our armed forces have admitted propelling rockets 70 miles in atmosphere (which is about 40 miles this side of what some rockets have actually done unofficially), it does seem that in the "classified" information on file in the Pentagon somebody somewhere already knows whether there is any gravitational pull above 40 miles.
Of course the speed of rockets is not the problem. The human body is the thing that has limitations. It is supposed not to be able to travel at a velocity in excess of four to six gravities which is far in excess of what it normally has to withstand on this earth. Actually the human body is traveling at 72,000 miles per hour without even knowing it, because that's the speed which the earth has to maintain to complete its orbit around the sun on time. What the human body can't stand, apparently, is the sudden change of pace, though in May, 1950, a pilot at Edwards Air Force base riding down a track at 150 m.p.h. and strapped in a seat had his speed cut in half in .2 seconds, the equivalent of 35 gravities, and lived to say it blurred his vision, but didn't black him out.
The questions asked about rocket-propelled space ships are equally applicable to flying saucers.
How are you going to land? How are you going to return? What are you going to use for fuel? How do you expect passengers, pilots, and co-pilots to stand the strain? What about food, water, oxygen for breathing, fuel for heating the cabin?
In Consider the Heavens Forest Ray Moulton said that there was not the slightest possibility of such a journey, that there is no way of getting off this planet and no way to guide us through interplanetary space to another world if we could propel our departure from this. Moreover, no ship could carry the large amount of oxygen, water, and food for such a long voyage and there was no known way of easing an ether ship down on the surface of another world if we could get there.
Willy Ley, fortified by Oberth and Hohmann, thought Moulton had more fears than intelligence and recent disclosures of submarines traveling 5,000 miles without surfacing, manufacturing their own oxygen en route and eating food concentrates, tends to support Ley and dismiss Moulton.
When I was young and twenty there was a song entitled, "The Longest Way Round Is The Sweetest Way Home." It must have given Dr. Hohmann an idea, for he worked out ingenious trips from this planet to some others and finally ended with a triple-play from the earth to Mars to Venus and back to earth as a faster trip than to any one planet alone. To Venus alone he figured it would take two years and one month; to Mars, two years and eight months, and from the earth to Mars, to Venus and back to this earth, he figured could be done in eighteen months!
There were five possible orbits to travel on. But two crossed orbits and therefore had to be ruled out, because that involved a change in direction. That would be contrary to the general rotation of the solar system. Space ships have to float with the currents, not fight them.
A trip to Venus could be made in 146 days, but since Venus travels faster than the earth that would involve a stopover on
Venus till the earth was again in position for the return trip. That would mean a stopover of 470 days on Venus. Another 146 days to get back and 762 days would have passed before the traveler would be returned home with his version of Two Years Before The Mast.
Mars moves at a slower pace than the earth. But a trip to Mars and back could not be made without a stopover any more than it could to Venus, for the simple reason that the earth would not be where we left it and we would have to wait until it came around again. That would mean 455 days waiting and another 258 days to get home. This, with the 258 days needed to get to Mars, would make a grand total of 971 days for the round trip.
But the most exciting of Hohmannic maneuvers was a nonstop flight from the earth to Mars where the pilot would not land. Instead he would drift around on the orbit that touches the earth and Venus until he found the orbit of Venus. In doing so he would have passed the earth's orbit en route but the earth would have been nowhere in sight.
He'd find Venus where he expected and would circle around Venus for a while until he was caught in the orbit of the earth. That would draw him home in less time than if he had taken stopover privileges on either of the alien planets. He wouldn't have had much to report about life on Venus or Mars, but he would have passed their way and got home in eighteen months, and as all fast travelers will tell if you save time you save money.
The whole trip would prove a little confusing to clock watchers because the planets all travel counterclockwise.
The fuel expenditure for such a trip is already solved but other factors are far from solved. In fact even under the rocket ship method of travel, moonships are considered twenty-five years in the future and those to neighboring planets much farther away. It comes as a shock therefore to hear that while we are dithering around with nuclear fission, jet propulsion, cosmic rays, and rockets, trippers riding the magnetic wave bands on disks may have been looking us over for centuries and not sure even yet if they should shake hands with us.
