Robots in Space

The Secret Lives of Our Planetary Explorers

Ezzy Pearson, Dr Ezzy Pearson

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780750990899
• eBook ISBN: 9780750996372
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Transportation Industry

Space sparks the imagination in fantastic ways, but nothing quite captures people's attention more than when we actually reach out and touch another world. Whether it's missions to the Moon, transporting rovers to Mars or landing Philae on a comet, the idea that we can not only picture these worlds from afar, but to touch them is wonderfully inspiring, and it is through cutting-edge robotic technology that it is made possible. In Robots in Space expert space journalist Dr Ezzy Pearson delves into the fascinating robotic history of space exploration, from distant times when stars were an unreachable godly mystery, through the intense Space Race following the Second World War to the Mars missions of the twenty-first century. As we find ourselves on the cusp of a new and exciting space age, Pearson explores how and why humanity turns its best minds to travelling to the stars, and exactly how far we could go.

1

DAWN OF THE SPACE RACE

Before Sputnik, the world’s dreams of spaceflight were confined to the pages of science fiction and the ambitions of a few rocket engineers. In the first half of the twentieth century, groups of enthusiasts around the world created rocketry clubs, attempting to build vehicles that could one day pierce the sky. Mostly, they only succeeded in creating a lot of smoke, noise and – in the case of the student group at the California Institute of Technology who would go on to form NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) – exploding one too many rockets on campus, resulting in them being banished to the nearby foothills of Pasadena.

Unfortunately, while these clubs sought to raise the human race up to the stars, the first real advancements in rocket technology would come from conflict. As Europe was gearing up for the Second World War, the work of young German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun caught the attention of Nazi military minds. Since childhood, von Braun had dreamed of exploring the stars, becoming obsessed with the rockets that might take us there. Joining the Nazi Party would allow von Braun to build his rockets, although they would be pointed at the Reich’s enemies instead of the heavens. It was a compromise von Braun was willing to make. He took an SS officer’s commission and set to work creating Germany’s first ballistic missiles.

Initially, von Braun’s efforts were condemned by Adolf Hitler as overpriced ordnance shells. Then, on 8 September 1944, the weapon’s true power became apparent when a rocket launched from the Hague in Nazi-occupied Holland dropped on Staveley Road in Chiswick, west London, over 300km away, tearing it apart. Nazi High Command called it the Vergeltungswaffe 2 (meaning retaliatory or retribution weapon). To the rest of the world, it was simply the V-2.

For months, over 3,000 V-2s pummelled Germany’s enemies. But the tide of the war had already turned in favour of the Allied forces, led by the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States. By the spring of 1945 the war was all but over at Mittelwerk, the underground factory built into a hill in central Germany, where the bombs were manufactured with slave labour from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. As the United States and Soviet forces closed in, the German engineers knew that their only chance to avoid being tried for their atrocities was by selling their knowledge of rocketry to the highest bidder.

Although the embers of one war were fading, the kindling of the next was already being laid down. Even though they were ostensibly allies, it was increasingly apparent that wildly differing world views would soon cause the United States and the Soviet Union to come to blows. The V-2 technology might not have been enough to save Germany, but it could shift the future balance of global military dominance.

The two powers raced each other to gather as many of the plans, hardware and personnel involved with the V-2 programme as possible. However, when forced to choose between toil in communist Russia and a comfortable life of material wealth in the United States, almost all the engineers, including von Braun, chose to go with the Americans. In return for their knowledge, the scientists would eventually be allowed US citizenship and a blind eye would be turned to their Nazi past.²

The United States had everything it needed to build an entire fleet of missiles and place itself firmly at the top of the arms race. But on 6 August 1945, the United States dropped atomic bomb ‘Little Boy’ on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Its destructive power stunned the world and made the V-2 look like a child’s toy. Why would the United States need the second-most terrible weapon to come out of the war when it already had the first? The German engineers were sequestered in Texas, where they taught the army to build copies of the now-redundant V-2 and were quickly forgotten.

With the Cold War now in full swing, the Soviet Union continued to pursue rocket technology in an effort to gain a military edge over the United States. Their efforts were led by the austere Sergei Korolev.

Korolev’s road to the top had been a hard one. Before the Second World War, he’d been one of the best engineers at the Russian Jet Propulsion Research Institute but fell victim to the Great Purge, a period of government-sanctioned paranoia that lasted from 1936 to 1938. Korolev spent years in prisons and the Gulag, before serving out most of the war building rockets in a sharashka, a labour camp where prisoners worked in secret laboratories for the state. He was finally set free in 1944 but continued his work on rocketry.

Korolev was a difficult man, possessing a sharp temper and belligerent attitude that meant many of his contemporaries refused to work for him more than once. Yet, he was undoubtably brilliant, and his time in the Gulag had left him with a fierce determination.

His goal, like von Braun, wasn’t to use rockets to blow up people but to send them into space. First, however, he would have to convince the Soviet governmental institution that oversaw many military matters, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, that his dreams were more than a childish fancy.

The Soviet leaders failed to share Korolev’s enthusiasm for space. Korolev hoped to change their minds by revealing a prototype he’d been working on in secret – an artificial satellite. It was the first of its kind and if they’d let him fly it, Korolev could ensure the first hands to reach out towards the heavens were Soviet ones, but the leaders remained unimpressed.

Thankfully, one of Korolev’s talents was playing the political game and he knew exactly how to get the Presidium on side – he told them the United States were not only building satellites, they were very close to launching one. This was, of course, a blatant ploy but it was effective. Now Korolev had not just his funding but the interest of his government.

Meanwhile, von Braun had moved to Huntsville in northern Alabama to work for the US Army and was having similar problems getting their support, while also fighting off competition from a rival rocket project being conducted by the navy. Von Braun was rapidly realising that he couldn’t change military minds, but perhaps he could change civilian ones.

The science fiction of the first half of the decade had been filled with buccaneer space heroes such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom novels, which transported American Civil War veteran John Carter to the Red Planet to repeatedly save the day while falling in love with Martian princesses. These works showed the public’s hunger for space travel. Von Braun played on this, writing articles for magazines, using the imagery of these fictional worlds to enthuse people about spaceflight, before realising there was a better way to capture people’s attention – television.

One man who was a master at using television to both entertain and inform was the animator extraordinaire, Walt Disney. At the time, he was in the process of creating several television shows to promote his new amusement park in California. Von Braun first acted as a technical consultant for several shows about space exploration but his charismatic personality and ability to simply explain complicated concepts soon put him in front of the camera. On 9 March 1955, von Braun stepped onto the screen in the first episode of Tomorrowland, showcasing the latest scientific advancements that could, with the right support, send people into space. Watched by 42 million people, Tomorrowland fuelled a new obsession with all things futuristic amongst the American public.

The final push towards space came from outside either nation, when the International Geophysical Year, a sort of scientific Olympics, laid down a challenge to the world’s scientific institutions to send a spacecraft into orbit before the end of 1958. The Soviet Academy of Sciences announced its intention to join the race, despite not technically having the backing of the government that would fund it at the time.

The United States threw its hat into the ring too, but much to von Braun’s consternation the government was backing the navy project, Vanguard. Although von Braun was now a celebrity and a US citizen, his project was based on stolen German technology; Vanguard had the advantage of being all-American. The army, by contrast, had been ordered to destroy all its remaining space rockets, an order the agency head, Colonel John Medaris, chose to ignore.

The Geophysical Year’s challenge was won on 4 October 1957, when Korolev finally launched his satellite, now named Sputnik, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in modern-day Kazakhstan. Mankind had made its first venture beyond the confines of Earth.

At first, neither the Soviet nor US leaders realised the momentous nature of the event, and the following day the Soviet state newspaper Pravda ran only a small article about the launch. However, the US media had a very different take. The ‘Reds’ had placed a satellite into orbit; how long before they used it to launch a bomb? Was there one already up there, waiting to turn the temperature of the war from cold to thermonuclear?

The Russian Government realised what Sputnik really was: a symbol of their prowess. Perceptions had shifted overnight from a world order in which the US military reigned, to one where Russia was the technological superpower. The Americans could no longer let this threat go unmet. The Space Race had begun.

Wanting to one-up themselves on the next space mission a month later, the Soviets hastily reworked Sputnik 2 to accommodate the first ever living creature to venture into space, a stray dog named Laika. But there was no time to work out how to safely return the poor animal. She died from overheating while still in orbit, the first casualty of the Space Race.

The mission showed that while sending a human, or indeed any living creature, into space was entirely possible, bringing them back alive was quite another thing. It would take time before the Soviets could reliably launch a human into orbit. In the meantime, the nation needed to cement its glory. They needed another headline-grabbing mission.

The most obvious target was the Moon. Even then, the Soviets realised the key to capturing the human imagination was tangibility. If they could make contact with the Moon, then they would forever be remembered as the first nation that had the audacity not just to reach the heavens but to touch them.

Touching was pretty much all the mission hoped to achieve as even a crash landing would be difficult enough. The first Luna probes were little more than balls of steel with a radio and a few instruments strapped to them. The only method of steering came from the rocket that launched them. If that rocket’s aim was off during take-off, then the spacecraft would miss, which is precisely what happened to Luna 1.³ Instead of crashing into the surface, it sailed past almost 6,000km away.

Rather than admit that Luna 1 hadn’t gone to plan, the Soviets claimed they had intended a flyby all along, the start of a long Soviet tradition of hiding failed space missions. The Soviet Union refused to announce exactly what a mission was before they flew. If a spacecraft failed to get out of Earth orbit, then it would be given the designation Kosmos, while the propaganda arm of the Soviet Union declared it was never meant to go any further anyway (although the West was rarely fooled). Only once a mission was officially under way would it receive its official name and number designation. If it went wrong on the way, well then, that had always been the plan.

While this helped to give the impression that the Soviet space programme was doing far better than it was, it sometimes backfired. Instead of Luna 1 being praised, the mission was met with intense scepticism. No one knew that a lunar mission was about to take place and the probe was foolishly sent on its way on a Friday night. The majority of the mission happened over the weekend, when the telescopes that could bear witness to its flight weren’t in operation.

‘Everything I had seen and heard in Russia argued against the alleged fact of Lunik,’ said Lloyd Mallan in Russia and the Big Red Lie, a book published in 1959 that was dedicated to defaming the Soviet space programme. ‘The scientific community which I had studied in that enigmatic land was not capable – simply not capable – of producing any such thing… The Lunik in short, was a coolly insolent, magnificent, international hoax.’

The Soviet Union wouldn’t make the same mistake with Luna 2. The moment they were sure that Luna 2 was on its way to the Moon, the Soviets made sure everyone knew where it was. The spacecraft released a cloud of sodium vapour, making it easy for telescopes to spot, but to really quiet the naysayers they would need a more accurate measurement.

One facility that c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Moon
• Part 2: Venus
• Part 3: Mars
• Part 4: The Solar System’s Other Siblings
• Part 5: Forward to the Future
• Acknowledgements
• Select Bibliography and Sources
• Picture Section