Centauri Dreams

Yesterday’s discussion about Man Will Conquer Space Soon!, the landmark series in Collier’s that so elegantly defined the 1950s view of space travel, has me in a retrospective mood. The Collier’s series was highly visible, and those old enough to have seen it tend to remember its concepts whether or not they’re in an aerospace-related profession today. But a few years later a TV show called “Men Into Space” turned up on CBS, fighting for audience share and generally out-publicised by the network’s “Twilight Zone” offering. It would run only a single season and end in September of 1960, months before Yuri Gagarin’s daring ride in a Vostok.

But “Men Into Space” sticks with me for a reason. Its 38 episodes followed Col. Edward McCauley (played by William Lundigan) through a variety of space situations, using him as a viewpoint character while the astronauts he worked with dealt with breakthroughs and problems. In that sense there was a certain similarity to what would become the Mercury program — we can assume this is exactly what the producers had in mind — but in its relatively realistic view of the dangers of these missions, it also harked back to the era of the rocket plane, when test pilots flew the X-15 and its X-series predecessors to new speed and altitude records.

Image: William Lundigan, star of “Men Into Space,” who portrayed a seasoned astronaut guiding an often-changing cast through the dangers of manned spaceflight. Credit: Ziv Television Productions.

It’s that dual emphasis that makes this series interesting. Back in 2003 when I was researching Centauri Dreams in Cleveland, I was headed out to lunch with Marc Millis and Geoff Landis. This was not long after the Columbia disaster and the idea of risk — and its ability to paralyze the space program — was very much in the air. I quoted Landis on this in the book:

“If a test pilot crashes at Edwards Air Force Base…they name a street after him, and the next day someone else flies another mission to see what went wrong. With space, things are different. Every mission has to be a success, we can tolerate no casualties. It may be a cultural thing. Maybe we’ve grown too afraid of risks.”

My thought was that it’s not the people in the machines who fear the risks but the culture that sends them, and in that I agreed with Landis. But these retrospective thoughts about space in the media have me wondering just why — and when — the risk paradigm changed. If you read Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, you’ll recall the mindset that Wolfe identified at Edwards, where Chuck Yeager cracked the sound barrier in the X-1 and Scott Crossfield pushed the X-15 to every limit in the book (Crossfield is famous for saying that the X-15 was one of the few aircraft that caused grown men to cry when it was summarily retired). Wolfe is worth quoting on the idea of risk and how it looked in the late 1950s, when “Men Into Space” was made.

As to just what this ineffable quality was…well, it obviously involved bravery. But it was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life. The idea seemed to be that any fool could do that, if that was all that was required, just as any fool could throw away his life in the process. No, the idea here…seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment — and then to go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day, even if the series should prove infinite — and, ultimately, in its best expression, do so in a cause that means something to thousands, to a people, a nation, to humanity, to God. Nor was there a test to show whether or not a pilot had this righteous quality. There was, instead, a seemingly infinite series of tests…

“Men Into Space,” in a post-Sputnik America that was about to go crazy with the idea of going to the Moon, pushed its astronauts into a variety of Moon landings, space station scenarios, the building of a Moon base and two different attempts to reach Mars. The two Mars missions failed and they were not alone, for this was a show where astronauts occasionally died. Things went wrong and, unlike Neil Armstrong and David Scott’s dangerous Gemini 8 flight, which could easily have proven fatal, many of the “Men Into Space” missions lost their crews. Technical glitches were common and astronauts kept going back into space in spite of all this.

I’m an old movie buff and I particularly enjoy the depiction of aviation in movies of the 1930s and 1940s. Recently I was watching Pat O’Brien and Humphrey Bogart in “China Clipper” (1936), in which a turbo-charged Bogart pushes O’Brien’s new clipper design to the limit, flying through an advancing squall line to demonstrate that the design had what it took to survive the Pacific. Pilots died aplenty in the early days of aviation and it was considered part of the price for learning how to build better aircraft, an approach that fed directly into the culture Wolfe describes at Edwards. It’s an attitude that feeds countless aviation films of this era.

Something happened to our cultural risk paradigm between the late 1950s and the end of Apollo, something that was certainly with us when we lost our two Space Shuttles, and I’m wondering just what it was. My guess is that the rocket-plane pilots of Edwards Air Force Base were never in the public eye to the extent that the Mercury 7 were, and that our decision to mount a national effort to reach the Moon in the context of the Cold War elevated our crews into the kind of public figures whose loss would be unthinkable. The risks of these flights were palpable, but the risk paradigm — what we all felt about those flights and those crews — seemed to be changing.

I suspect that if we do enter into a time of commercial space development, with companies like Planetary Resources actually mining asteroids with human crews launched by SpaceX or other companies, the paradigm will begin to shift again. Sheer numbers will eventually force it to, for a large enough population working on a regular basis in space is a different thing than a single crew facing long odds on a dangerous mission. The show that prompted these musings, “Men Into Space,” doesn’t seem to be available in streaming mode, but I do see various DVDs out there. Like the Collier’s series, it’s an interesting illustration of how our thinking on space has changed.

In the course of an enjoyable dinner with Douglas Yazell, Shen Ge and Al Jackson (this was in Houston at the 100 Year Starship Symposium), I learned that the Houston section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics was in the process of reprinting, in its entirety, the famous Collier’s series on manned spaceflight. Yazell is editor of Horizons, the bi-monthly publication of the Houston group, and fortunately for all of us, it is both online and free. For me, revisiting these stirring articles will be a priority as each comes out. The July/August issue contains Collier’s for March 22, 1952, first in the series.

I can only imagine how this issue of Collier’s would have drawn the eye in the typical early 1950s newsstand. The Chesley Bonestell cover shows an enormous winged rocket staging as it soars above an Earth flecked with cloud and crimson with distant sunlight. Evidently we have Scott Lowther to thank for scanning and repairing the entire Collier’s series, a fact he reports on his Unwanted Blog, where he notes that this is the first time these articles have been republished in full-color, high-resolution format since their original release. He does point out that some of the numerous original ads have been edited out — Horizons has replaced these with ads from its Collier’s team members.

According to notes offered by Yazell, Collier’s flagged the upcoming series — to be called Man Will Conquer Space Soon! — with a press release on March 13, 1952, previewing the six articles, totalling 25 pages, that would comprise the first installment of the series. In all, eight issues of the magazine, running into 1954, would offer space articles. Magazine collectors know that UNZ.org has offered the Collier’s series for some time (along with a huge amount of other magazine material), but the UNZ.org scans are low-resolution. The Horizons work restores the series in sharp, gorgeous color.

Space Seizes the Public Imagination

What an impact this series had on the imagination of readers at the time, for not only were the articles written by major figures in the scientific community, including Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley, Fred Whipple and others, but the magazine made liberal use of the illustrations of Chesley Bonestell in addition to fine (and too often neglected) artwork from Rolf Klep and Fred Freeman, not inconsiderable artists in their own right. It’s the Bonestell most people remember first, though, and many young people went on to have these concepts ingrained through three episodes in the Disneyland TV series that were based on the Collier’s concepts.

Physicist A. A. Jackson goes so far as to say, in this same issue of Horizons, that the Collier’s series may have made the Apollo program a reality by influencing countless young people to pursue careers in spaceflight. It certainly, five years before Sputnik, seized the public imagination, a possibility von Braun’s friend Willy Ley must have foreseen when he took the idea for the project to Cornelius Ryan, then an editor at Collier’s. The series drew liberally from material von Braun had developed for a science fiction novel he called Project MARS: A Technical Tale, whose appendix would become the basis of a space series in a German spaceflight journal. Von Braun’s Mars novel would eventually find an English publisher and it remains in print through the University of Illinois Press.

Image: Chesley Bonestell’s space station distilled earlier science fiction concepts into a vivid image that would recur in 1950s SF films like Conquest of Space (Bonestell did background space art for the movie, which also tapped von Braun’s ideas). Credit: Collier’s.

If you want to see what space as a goal felt like in the early 1950s, take a look at these pages, where the excitement is palpable and the technology seemed just around the corner. So many of the tropes of the era’s science fiction films had their genesis here, as witness not just von Braun’s winged rockets but the enormous wheel of a space station being serviced by tiny space taxis, the latter rendered in detailed cross-section by Fred Freeman’s talented brush. Bonestell’s painting of a manned lunar orbiter, with its three bulbous chambers connected by scaffolding, captures the wonder of a first glimpse of the far side of the Moon and a soon to be burgeoning space race caught up in the geopolitics of the Cold War. The Collier’s editors were careful to position space as an arena for a competition the US could not afford to lose. From their introduction:

When the atomic bomb program — the Manhattan Project — was initiated, nobody really knew whether such a weapon could actually be made. The famous Smyth Report on atomic energy tells us that among the scientists there were many who had grave and fundamental doubts of the success of the undertaking. It was a two-billion-dollar technical gamble.

Such would not be the case with a space program. The claim that huge rocket ships can be built and a space station created still stands unchallenged by any serious scientist. Our engineers can spell out right now (as you will see) the technical specifications for the rocket ship and space station in cut-and-dried figures. And they can detail the design features. All they need is time (about ten years), money and authority.

Coming up next in the Horizons reprint series is the October 18, 1952 issue of Collier’s, devoted to the Moon and the attempt to land humans on it. The editorial of that issue notes that an expanded version of the March 22nd articles had already appeared as a book called Across the Space Frontier from Viking Press, a sure indication of the surge in interest the magazine had created. It also mentioned the Third International Congress on Astronautics, which had just met in Stuttgart, where a von Braun paper was read. For many, the Collier’s series took science fiction into the realm of engineering reality, matching vivid space imagery with ongoing scientific research. It was a mind-bending, career-changing journey whose pages repay our continued attention.

by Shen Ge

Coming up this January is a two-week long “minds-on ties-off” research workshop at Callao Salvaje on Tenerife on the Canary Islands. I learned about the organization behind the workshop — the Scientific Preparatory Academy for Cosmic Explorers — in Houston when I had the good fortune to have dinner with its young co-founder Shen Ge. Shen’s organization is a nonprofit academic and research corporation created by young people from many countries. It began this year with a July conference on the Isle of Man, and will soon enter what it considers Phase 1: Building educational modules for brief space courses that can be taught at the university level. The ultimate goal is an actual university with full-time faculty and students. I asked the energetic Shen if he could supply us with a brief article outlining his vision and the steps ahead.

In some respects, Shen’s ideas parallel those of the International Space University, as he notes below, although he hopes to extend their reach. The ISU is a non-profit institution offering graduate-level training from a central campus in Strasbourg, France, with a two-month Space Studies Program and a one-year Masters program covering space programs and enterprises, space science, space engineering, systems engineering, space policy and law, business and management, and space and society. More than 3300 students from 100 countries have had ISU training, developing a network of space professionals that Shen hopes to enrich and extend.

I’ve recently been asked to comment on my vision for our Scientific Preparatory Academy for Cosmic Explorers, or SPACE, an organization of which I am a co-founder. There currently exists no such entity as SPACE in the world and there needs to be if humanity is ever to become a spacefaring civilization. My vision is of an international, interdisciplinary, and hands-on research and educational university where anyone with a passion for space and a decent academic record will be welcomed to join our institution to learn and research space topics.

From recent surges in space development, whether they are publicly funded by governments in rapidly developing nations such as China or India aiming for prowess or whether they are started by young upstarts backed by wealthy entrepreneurs such as Planetary Resources or Space X aiming for profits, there is no denying that space will play a vitally important role for all of us on Earth. Just as we cannot imagine today a world without airplanes flying people everywhere for business or leisure, in the next few decades we will live in a world where we could not imagine people not taking space trips to space colonies, the asteroids or the Moon.

Yet for us to reach that point, we need more people with both the knowledge and interest in a discipline that can propel humanity into a spacefaring civilization. When I look back at my own experience, I’m a little disappointed. I obtained a good education in aerospace engineering but I found three important areas missing in my programs:

1) No core focus on space. This is completely understandable since aerospace engineering also delves deeply into aircraft. There currently exists no multidisciplinary space educational university for the undergraduate. There are aerospace engineering programs around the world but many of them are not related to space or are heavily specialized in one area.

2) Lack of other classes related to space that were not engineering-oriented. Many new discoveries are made from cross-disciplinary studies. Yet at engineering schools, we are required to take so many engineering classes that we inevitably cannot learn much of other interesting fields. We are advocating a multidisciplinary space education that includes topics such as astronomy, astrophysics, computer science, astrophysics, space law, space commerce etc. in a 4-year educational curriculum.

3) Lack of research opportunities directly related to space. Unless the student lands an internship or enters a co-op working for a space company, actual space research is limited to a handful of professors. And as mentioned above, much of the research actually being performed in the aerospace engineering department is still geared towards aircraft. We seek research that emphasizes the skills and knowledge needed by those who will explore the cosmos.

The International Space University (ISU) is a needed step towards creating an educational entity that revolves around space and offers more than a single discipline such as aerospace engineering can provide. Conversations among ISU professors and alumni such as Christopher Stott, Chris Welch, Adil Jafry, and Virgiliu Pop helped all of us realize that even ISU is missing something. It is missing the educational pipeline that lies before it. The people who seek to go into ISU have already obtained at least a 4-year education elsewhere, often in a field not related to space.

We decided with the understanding support from ISU personnel that the establishment of SPACE will substantially complement the established ISU. Our goal: To build an international space academy that will complement the existing International Space University (ISU) by providing a four-year university of space studies. This will endow the people with the skills and mentality to go to the stars and go there to stay.

In my vision, I see the next five years for SPACE as an arduous path of overcoming initial skepticism and establishing our dream in physical reality. Chris Welch affectionately called us “Dreamers 3.0” (ISU was co-founded by Dreamers 2.0) at his presentation at our inaugural conference earlier this July [2012] but I would like to say that we’re more than “Dreamers.” We are “Do-ers” as well.

We lack tens of million dollars to build our institution (although we would certainly be glad for the help of any rich benefactors to our cause). Hence, we are building up our reputation via events such as the upcoming January SPACE Retreat on Tenerife, our annual conference in July, and our upcoming educational modules to teach our space design and sociology courses at universities around the world. We are concurrently conducting research on asteroid mitigation, space imaging, and space trajectories for which we will publish papers and present at conferences.

Through our activities as “Do-ers 3.0,” I see enough attention drawn to our cause in the next five years from both the wealthy and the population at large that we will be able to secure the funds needed to build our campus and research buildings here on Earth. Hopefully, in my lifetime, we will have satellite campuses on space stations in orbit, on asteroids, and on the Moon as well. Our fundamental thesis is that exploration is education, and that scholarly instruction and research are merely two aspects of discovery. The ultimate goal of SPACE is to help build a space-faring society.

Shen Ge received his Masters in aerospace engineering from Texas A&M University in 2011 August and received his undergraduate with a dual major in aerospace engineering and physics with Magna Cum Laude in 2008 December from Georgia Institute of Technology. His background is in space design, space simulations, and experimental design. He has great interest in manned space exploration, near earth asteroids, and space debris. His work on his Masters was on designing an innovative payload for a near earth asteroid mitigation mission. He also has interest in space entrepreneurship and public engagement of space-related endeavors. He is currently actively spearheading SPACE as a nonprofit international undergraduate and graduate space university and research institution.