by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 10 p.m. I watched the latest episode in the
PBS-TV series Breakthrough, dealing with
the history of rocketry — which began, according to this show, with the Chinese
monk who invented fireworks after he figured out how to derive gunpowder from
guano (a.k.a. bat shit) with a few other chemicals, including sulfur, and how
gunpowder quickly became a weapon of war (apparently rockets were used as a
weapon before anyone figured out how to use gunpowder to propel small
projectiles and thereby invented firearms). The show was a bit heavier on what
I call “first-itis” — the tendency of biographers in all media to assume and
assert that the person they’re biographing was the first to do a particular
thing when there are readily available earlier historical examples — than other
episodes in this series, and less committed to the idea that inventors tend to
build on each other’s work.
The program argued that the potential of rocketry
as a way of reaching worlds beyond earth had to wait for the discovery of
worlds beyond earth — and in particular the realization (attributed here to a
British polymath who apparently turned a telescope on the moon a few years
before Galileo did) that the moon was a ball of rock in space, just like earth,
and not the “lesser light to rule the night” of the book of Genesis. The
program also discussed the history of science fiction, pointing out that in
addition to being an astronomer Johannes Kepler had also written a fantasy
novel about humans flying to the moon by supernatural means — it called
Kepler’s book the first science-fiction novel even though most histories of
science fiction attribute that much
farther back, to the Atlantis references in two of Plato’s dialogues. It then
mentioned Jules Verne and in particular his book From the Earth to
the Moon (even though, both in it and in
his sequel, Around the Moon, his
astronauts only achieve lunar orbit and don’t actually land on the moon’s
surface), which fascinated a Russian named Konstantin Tsilokovsky at the end of
the 19th century. He’s the author of the now-famous quote, “The
Earth is the cradle of mankind, but man does not live in the cradle forever,”
and it was apparently he who proved mathematically that the giant cannon with
which Verne’s astronauts had hurled themselves towards the moon wouldn’t have
worked and rocket power would provide the only practicable way for humans to
escape earth’s gravity and venture into space. The show then cut to Robert Goddard,
the American rocket experimenter who invented the liquid-fuel rocket and used a
turbine originally invented for an automatic butter churn to compress the fuel
to get added thrust and range. The basic principle of rocket travel had been
worked out by Sir Isaac Newton in his third law — that every action has an
equal and opposite reaction — but it took a lot of hard research to figure out a way to get a rocket
off the ground long enough, accurately enough and with enough thrust to lift a
payload off the earth and send it into space.
The show then profiled Wernher
von Braun and his researches at Pëenemunde, Germany during World War II that
developed first the V-1 “buzz bomb,” an unmanned aircraft (today it would be
called a drone), and then the V-2 rocket, introduced in 1944, which was
successful enough as a weapon it killed 7,200 British people (along with the
20,000 European slave laborers who died manufacturing it) — which made me
wonder how the history of the world would be infinitely different (and considerably
worse) if von Braun had perfected it just two years earlier, in 1942, when the
German industrial base was still sufficiently intact that they could have
produced far more of them, decimated Britain and won the war. The next person
profiled on the show was Sergei Korolev, who in 1938 was languishing in
Stalin’s gulag until Stalin
realized he needed him to start a Soviet rocket program to compete with the
German one — and Korolev remained in charge of the Soviet space program until
the 1960’s, designing the first intercontinental ballistic missile, the launch
vehicle that orbited Sputnik-1 (the first artificial satellite) in 1957, and
made cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the first person to orbit space in 1961. The show
attributes the idea of a multi-stage rocket to Korolev, but well before he
developed his first one in the Soviet Union in the late 1940’s (originally as a
way to deliver the big, massive, bulky nuclear weapons of the time into space)
German scientists Hermann Oberth and Willy Ley had worked out at least the
concept of a multi-stage rocket. We know that because they were both technical
advisers to Fritz Lang on his 1928 science-fiction film Woman on the
Moon (though Oberth was credited, Ley
wasn’t) and the astronauts in Lang’s film go to the moon on a multi-stage
rocket. (Indeed, the film is not only a great movie, it’s astoundingly accurate
as a prediction of how humans would
get to the moon 41 years later — though writer Thea von Harbou’s prediction
that there’d be pockets of earth-like atmosphere on the moon was one of her
biggest scientific boners.)
The rest of the story is familiar, though the show
takes the typically triumphalist air of a lot of modern-day rocket stories in
arguing that the governments of the world have definitively dropped the mantle
of space exploration and it’s going to be taken over by the private sector,
including developing reusable rockets (and as much as I loathe Elon Musk I’ll
have to give him credit for that one) and a new generation of rockets to be
powered by plasma. This edition of Breakthrough wasn’t as compelling as the previous ones had been,
but it was still interesting and a lot of fun even though it’s still hard to understand why human exploration of space
came to a dead stop after the last Apollo mission in 1973 (one trenchant line
in the film Apollo 13 sums it up;
asked why they’re not covering the Apollo 13 mission until it goes terribly
wrong and the astronauts’ lives are in danger, a NASA official is told, “You’ve
made going to the moon seem about as exciting as going to Pittsburgh”) and so
far, at least, has never recovered; the now-retired space shuttle became
basically an earth-orbit delivery truck, putting satellites in space more
cheaply than one-time rockets, and for someone like me who grew up during the
Cold War it’s astonishing that modern-day U.S. astronauts have to rely on the
Soviet Soyuz rocket to get them into space!
