Roger D. Launius
INTRODUCTION
Curiosity about the universe and other worlds has been one of the few constants in the history of humankind. Prior to the twentieth century, however, there was little opportunity to explore the universe except in fiction and through astronomical observations. These early explorations led to the compilation of a body of knowledge that inspired and, in some respects, informed the efforts of scientists and engineers who began to think about applying rocket technology to the challenge of spaceflight in the early part of the twentieth century. These individuals were essentially the first spaceflight pioneers, translating centuries of dreams into a reality that matched in some measure the expectations of the public that watched and the governments that supported their efforts. However, in the latter half of the twentieth century, humans had the opportunity to expand into space.
The US space program emerged in large part because of the pressures of national security during the Cold War with the Soviet Union (Burrows, 1998; Launius, 1998; McCurdy, 1997). From the latter 1940s, the Department of Defense had pursued research in rocketry and upper atmospheric sciences as a means of assuring American leadership in technology. The civilian side of the space effort began in 1952 when the International Council of Scientific Unions established a committee to arrange an International Geophysical Year for the period, July 1, 1957, to December 31, 1958. On July 29, 1955, the US scientific community persuaded President Dwight D. Eisenhower to approve a plan to orbit a scientific satellite as part of the International Geophysical Year effort. With the launch of Sputniks I and II by the Soviet Union in the fall of 1957 and the American orbiting of Explorer 1 in January 1958, the space race commenced and did not abate until the end of the Cold War – although there were lulls in the competition (Bulkeley, 1991; Dickson, 2001; Divine, 1993). The most visible part of this competition was the human spaceflight program – with the Moon landings by Apollo astronauts as de rigueur – but the effort also entailed robotic missions to several planets of the solar system, military and commercial satellite activities, and other scientific and technological labors (Chaikin, 1994; Logsdon, 2010; McDougall, 1985; Murray & Bly Cox, 1989; a good introduction to the history of planetary exploration is Schorn, 1998). In the post-Cold War era, the space exploration agenda underwent significant restructuring and led to such cooperative ventures as the International Space Station (ISS) and the development of launchers, science missions, and applications satellites through international consortia (Launius, 2003; on the Space Shuttle see Heppenheimer, 2002, 2004; Jenkins, 2017). This overview will examine the historical background of space exploration, focusing on the history of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the evolution of its activities in the last 50 years.
SPACEFLIGHT BEFORE AND AFTER THE SPACE AGE
Not until the twentieth century did technology develop to the extent that actual travel into the observable universe could take place, although many people had posited that it was theoretically possible and longed for the time when humanity could venture beyond the Earth. When Galileo first broadcast his findings of the solar system in 1610, he sparked a flood of speculation about the lunar flight. Johann Kepler (1571–1630), himself a pathbreaking astronomer, posthumously published a novel, Somnium (Dream), in 1634 that recounted a dream of a supernatural voyage to the Moon in which the visitors encountered serpentine creatures. He also included much scientific information in the book, speculating on the difficulties of overcoming the Earth’s gravitational field, the nature of the elliptical paths of planets, the problems of maintaining life in the vacuum of space, and the geographical features of the Moon (Dick, 1982, pp. 77–84; Rosen, 1967, pp. 17–22).
Other writings sparked by the invention of the telescope and the success of Somnium also described fictional trips into space. Cyrano de Bergerac (1610–1655), for example, wrote Voyage dans la Lune (The Voyage to the Moon, 1649), describing several attempts by the hero to travel to the Moon. First, he tied a string of bottles filled with dew around himself, so that when the heat of the Sun evaporated the dew he would be drawn upward, but the hero only made it as far as Canada on that attempt. Next, he tried to launch a vehicle from the top of a mountain by means of a spring-loaded catapult, “but because I had not taken my measures aright, I fell with a slosh on the Valley below.” Returning to his vehicle, Cyrano’s hero found some soldiers mischievously tying firecrackers to it. As they lit the fuse, he jumped into the craft and tier upon tier of explosives ignited like rockets and launched him to the Moon. Thus, Cyrano’s hero became the first flyer in fiction to reach the Moon by means of rocket thrust, a premonition of Newton’s third law of gravity about every action having an equal and opposite reaction. Once on the Moon, the character in this novel had several adventures, and later in the book, he journeyed also to the Sun (Emme, 1965, pp. 37–38).
Other writers picked up the science fiction format and used it to discuss the possibilities of space tour in the years that followed. For example, Edward Everett Hale, a New England writer and a social critic, published in 1869 a short story in the Atlantic Monthly entitled “The Brick Moon.” The first known proposal for an orbital satellite around the Earth, Hale described how a satellite in polar orbit could be used as a navigational aid to ocean-going vessels (Hale, 1869).
Perhaps, the most important development in the literary consideration of space tourism came following the publication of work by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877 concerning the possibility of canals on Mars. He, and especially others, concluded that the features that he saw on Mars and called canals were the work of intelligent life. This was a startling observation because it meant that science had now validated the speculations of some fiction writers, lending credibility to their claims. Moreover, other scientists sought to explore these ideas, and in the United States, Percival Lowell built what became the Lowell Observatory near Flagstaff, Arizona, to study the planets. In 1906, he published Mars and its Canals, which argued that Mars had once been a watery planet and that the topographical features known as canals had been built by intelligent beings. Over the course of the next forty years, a steady stream of other works was based upon Lowell’s theories about the red planet (Ezel & Neuman Ezel, 1984, pp. 61–114).
While many of these fiction writings were not scientifically valid, that became less true as time passed and more modern science fiction writers such as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells appeared. Both were aware of the scientific underpinnings of space flight, and their speculations reflected reasonably well what was known at the time about its problems and the nature of other worlds. Both Wells and Verne incorporated into their novels a much more sophisticated understanding of the realities of space than had been seen before. Their space vehicles became enclosed capsules powered by electricity, and they possessed some aerodynamic soundness. Most of Wells’ and Verne’s concepts stood up under some, although not all, scientific scrutiny. For example, the scientific principles informing Verne’s De la Terre a la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon, 1865) were very accurate for the period. It described the problems of building a vehicle and launch mechanism to visit the Moon. At the end of the book, Verne’s characters were shot into space by a 900-foot-long cannon. Verne picked up the story in a second novel, Autour de la Lune (Around the Moon), describing a lunar orbital flight, but he did not allow his characters to land. Wells published War of the Worlds in 1897 and The First Men in the Moon immediately thereafter. Both used sound scientific principles to describe space tourism and encounters with aliens.
War of the Worlds, furthermore, played upon a theme in space exploration that had been present for many centuries and would continue to appear throughout the twentieth century: humanity’s fascination and terror about contact with alien species. Excitement about the prospect that humanity is not alone in the universe, that contact is possible, and that both cultures might be made richer through interaction has been a persistent theme for advocates of the exploration of space. Some science fiction positively expressed this image of contact with aliens – for example, three novels by C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), and That Hideous Strength (1945). At the same time, there has long been a fear that an alien civilization might attack the Earth and either enslave or destroy humanity. In War of the Worlds the Earth was attacked by invaders from Mars, and eventually only defeated by terrestrial bacteria harmless to humans but deadly to an alien without generations of built-up immunity. These stories, both positive and negative examples of contact, provided some of the inspiration for many scientists and engineers who developed modern rocketry (Michaud, 2007).
In the post-World War II era, a wide range of science fiction writers broke the boundaries of the genre and contributed significantly to public perceptions of space tourism. Perhaps, the three most significant authors in this category were Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke, all of whom took pains to make their science fiction novels and short stories both believable as reality and exciting as works of literature. They found a ready audience in the environment of the Cold War, as growing numbers of Americans could both envision and understand the advance of technology and technocracy, the merger of bureaucratic and technical expertise in government. Asimov, for one, featured robots in his writings, something more and more Americans could understand as machines of all types took over an ever-increasing part of the workload. Both Asimov and Heinlein played out their stories within the context of complex galactic politics not unlike those perceived by Americans in the world situation (Moskowitz, 2007).
Asimov and Clarke also bridged the gap between science fiction and science fact in some very fundamental ways. They each wrote both fiction and popular scientific studies relative to space flight, physics, and astronomy. They also identified some interesting potential uses for space technology. For example, in February 1945, Clarke described the use of the German V-2 as a launcher for ionospheric research, even as the war was going on. He specifically suggested that by putting a second stage on a V-2 the rocket could generate enough velocity to launch a small satellite into orbit. “Both of these developments demand nothing in the way of technical resources,” he wrote, adding that they “should come within the next five or ten years.” He later described the possibility of placing three satellites in geosynchronous orbit 120 degrees apart to “give television and microwave coverage to the entire planet” (Clarke, 1945a). Later, the same year, Clarke elaborated on the communications and implications of satellites and set in motion the ideas that eventually led to the global communications system first put in place during the 1960s (Clarke, 1945b).
Another important way in which the US public became aware that flight into space was a possibility was the rise of films depicting space tourism that were firmly rooted in scientific reality. One of the keys in this process was the work of film producer–director George Pal, a master of special effects, who made several space-oriented movies in the 1950s (Heinlein, 1950, p. 6). Especially memorable were two films, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1950), directed by Robert Wise, in which the benevolent alien Klaatu warns the Earth to shape up and control its aggressiveness by disarming, and Forbidden Planet (1956), about the extinct Krell super intelligent society and the Monster from the Id (Stuart, 1956). These films excited the public with ideas of space flight, exploration, and contact with alien civilizations. It is often easy to forget that these sophisticated visions of space tour occurred before Sputnik.
Progenitors of the Space Age
Envisioning rocketry as a means of realizing the aspirations of spaceflight, three great pioneering figures pursued the effort. Collectively, they were the progenitors of the modern space age. The earliest was the Russian theoretician Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovskiy. An obscure schoolteacher in a remote part of Tsarist Russia in 1898, he submitted for publication to the Russian journal, Nauchnoye Obozreniye (Science Review), a work based upon years of calculations that laid out many of the principles of modern space flight. His article was not published until 1903, but it opened the door to future writings on the subject. In it, Tsiolkovsky described in depth the use of rockets for launching orbital spaceships. He continued to theorize about spaceflight until his death, describing in detail both methods of flight and the technical requirements of space stations. Significantly, he never had the resources – nor perhaps the inclination – to experiment with rockets himself. His theoretical work, however, influenced later rocketeers both in his native land and abroad, and served as the foundation of the Soviet space program.
A second rocketry pioneer was Hermann Oberth (1894–1989), by birth a Transylvanian but by nationality a German. Oberth began studying the nature of space flight at the time of World War I and published his classic study, Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (Rockets into Planetary Space) in 1923. It was a thorough discussion of almost every phase of rocket travel. He posited that a rocket could travel in the void of space and that it could move faster than the velocity of its own exhaust gases. He noted that with the proper velocity a rocket could launch a payload into orbit around the Earth, and to accomplish this goal, he reviewed several propellant mixtures to increase the speed. He also designed a rocket that he believed had the capability to reach the upper atmosphere by using a combination of alcohol and hydrogen as fuel. Oberth followed this up with a long series of publications on rocketry and the prospects of space tourism. He became the father of German rocketry. Among his protégés was Wernher von Braun (1912–1977), the senior member of the rocket team that built NASA’s Saturn launch vehicle for the trip to the Moon in the 1960s.
Finally, the American Robert H. Goddard (1882–1945) pioneered the use of rockets for spaceflight (a standard but outdated biography of Goddard is Lehman, 1963). Motivated by reading science fiction as a boy, Goddard became excited by the possibility of exploring space. In 1901 he wrote a short chapter “The Navigation of Space” arguing that movement could take place by firing several cannons, “arranged like a ‘nest’ of beakers.” He tried unsuccessfully to publish this article in Popular Science News. At his high school oration in 1904, he summarized his future life’s work, “It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow”. In 1907, he wrote another chapter on the possibility of using radioactive materials to propel a rocket through interplanetary space. He sent this article to several magazines, and all rejected it. Still not dissuaded, as a young physics graduate student he worked on rocket propulsion and received two patents in 1914. One was the first for a rocket using solid and liquid fuel and the other for a multi-stage rocket.
After a stint with the military in World War I, where he worked on solid rocket technology for use in combat, Goddard became a Professor of Physics at Clark College (later University) in Worcester, Massachusetts. There he turned his attention to liquid rocket propulsion, theorizing that liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen were the best fuels, but learning that oxygen and gasoline were less volatile and therefore more practical. To support his investigations, Goddard applied to the Smithsonian Institution for assistance in 1916 and received a US $5000 grant from its Hodgkins Fund. His research was ultimately published by the Smithsonian as the classic study, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes in 1919. Goddard argued in it from a firm theoretical base that rockets could be used to explore the upper atmosphere. Moreover, he suggested that with a velocity of 6.95 miles/second, without air resistance, an object could escape the Earth’s gravity and head into infinity, or to other celestial bodies. This became known as the Earth’s “escape velocity.”
It also became a great joke for those who believed spaceflight either impossible or impractical. Some ridiculed Goddard’s ideas in the popular press, much to the consternation of the already shy Goddard. Soon after the appearance of his publication, he commented that he had been “interviewed a number of times, and on each occasion have been as uncommunicative as possible.” (Goddard, 1970e, pp. 109–110). The New York Times was especially harsh in its criticisms, referring to him as a dreamer whose ideas had no scientific validity. It also compared his theories to those advanced by novelist Jules Verne, indicating that such musing is “pardonable enough in him as a romancer, but its like is not so easily explained when made by a savant who isn’t writing a novel of adventure” (New York Times, 1920). The Times questioned both Goddard’s credentials as a scientist and the Smithsonian’s rationale for funding his re...
