Rockets Through Space Read online

  rockets through space

  The Story of Mans Preparations to Explore the Universe

  BY LESTER DEL REY

  Illustrated by James Heugh

  A SCIENCE-FACT BOOK

  the john c. winston company • Philadelphia • Toronto

  © 1957 by Lester Del Rey

  FIRST EDITION

  other books to read

  There are some other books which are well worth reading, if you want to learn still more about our next steps into space.

  The Conquest of Space, by Willy Ley, with illustrations by Chesley Bonestell (The Viking Press, Inc.), gives a great deal of information on our whole Solar System, and shows how a trip through space can take place. There are a great many beautiful pictures in this book.

  Across the Space Frontier and The Conquest of the Moon, edited by Cornelius Ryan. The Conquest of Mars, by Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley. These three titles, published by The Viking Press, Inc., are more complete versions of the articles that appeared in Collier’s magazine. These three give the full details of Dr. Wernher von Braun’s plans for the space station, the trip to the Moon and the trip to Mars. Each book also includes excellent articles by other writers as well as a large number of superb illustrations. All three books should be read by anyone who wishes to know more about future projects in space.

  The Exploration of Space, by Arthur C. Clarke (Harper & Brothers), is one of the best and most comprehensive general works on our future in space.

  The Exploration of the Moon, by Arthur C. Clarke and illustrated by R. A. Smith (Harper & Brothers), shows many illustrations of what our future on the Moon will be, together with short articles. It contains very good details on the building of a colony on the Moon.

  Finally, for those who wish to learn more about the history of the rocket, exactly how it works and how the early rocket societies operated (as well as almost any other data on rockets), there is Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel, by Willy Ley (The Viking Press, Inc.). This is a long and sometimes technical book, but no other volume quite equals it.

  up from earth

  In the future, schools will probably have courses in space and space travel, just as boys and girls are now taught all about other lands in their geographies. Unfortunately, teaching of such courses lies several years ahead. Today, anyone *who wants to learn more than the simplest facts about rockets and elementary astronomy has a very hard time finding the information.

  There are books which contain the answers, but these are too often filled with mathematics and complicated science too hard for the general reader to understand. There are also some books that are easy to read, but most of these do not give enough answers to the questions we want answered.

  I have found every time I talk before a group of science-minded listeners there are quite a few of those questions which need answers. How can we be sure a rocket will push a ship when there is “no air to push against”? That is the most common question, but there are many others.

  What will hold a space station up, after we build it? How high is space? How dangerous are meteors? Is space freezing cold or boiling hot? What about life on other worlds? If we can’t see the other side of the Moon, why can’t there be life there? If a station is only a thousand miles up, why won’t the people inside it feel the pull of Earth? Will there be space wars? Can we ever fly to the stars?

  These questions need full answers. To give those answers, as well as all the information to cover fully the other questions about space, is the purpose of this book.

  It is not meant as a textbook, instead, it is really an adventure story. It deals with an adventure that has not happened yet, but one that will begin almost at once. Going out into space will be the greatest adventure of all time. Nothing else men have done can compare with it. Even the voyage of Columbus across the ocean was less adventurous than the first trip to another planet will be.

  The only event that could compare to such a breaking away from the surface of Earth was something done by a fish, if the scientists are right. According to what many scientists believe, that fish (called a Crossopterygian, or lobe fin) came out of the water and moved about in air a long time ago. This would make him the greatest of all pioneers, since he and his children changed from a life in water to a life in air— almost like a man changing from a life in our air to one in space.

  Of course, the fish did not know what he was doing. By our standards, he was an ugly, stupid creature. He was not even a very remarkable fish. He was not big or very active; lie probably was not even very brave; and he certainly was not the best fighter among fishes.

  He was probably something like the modern lungfish. He lived in the shallows of fresh-water streams. When these dried lip in the hot summer Sun, he holed up in the mud at the bottom, barely staying alive by sucking a tiny bit of air through the small quantity of water he kept with him. To do this, he learned to use his air bladder—the sac most fishes use to adjust for depth, like the tanks of a submarine—as a very crude, inefficient lung to help his gills.

  But he learned to take oxygen directly from the air, instead of from the small amount dissolved in water, and this trick made it possible for him to learn to live on dry land.

  Maybe it was a good thing he was not able to talk about what he was going to do. Imagine what might have happened if he and all his friends had been intelligent. Think of them swimming around discussing it when he first said he would like to get out of water and see what land was like. . . .

  “Impossible. Can’t be done,” his father Rhipidistian snorted. “Nothing to breathe up there. You’d have to carry your water with you. You’d need a suit filled with it, or you’d probably explode. Don’t you realize it’s empty up there?”

  Cousin Coelacanth shook his head sadly. “You’re crazy. You couldn’t even move around. No water to push against!”

  “Besides, what good would it do you? You’ve got everything you need right here,” his best friend objected.

  It was Mrs. Crossopterygian who settled things, firmly and finally. “We can’t afford all that time and money when summer’s coming on and we have to build new mud shells! You’re not going! You’ll stay home and take care of the eggs!”

  Maybe it is a good thing he was too dull-witted to discuss it first. After listening to all the arguments, he might have stayed home and estivated, as any good fish should.

  Today, those who suggest going out into space are faced with the same arguments. “There’s nothing up there to breathe. Men will have to live in pressurized suits or they may explode. What good will it do? It will cost too much when there are so many other things that need doing. And just how can we get out there at all, when there’s no air to push against?”

  Nevertheless, we are going out into space. Right now, the first small ships to make the trip are being built. Maybe it will take ten years, or perhaps twenty-five, to get men outside the atmosphere, but young people alive today will see it all happen.

  The conquest of space has not happened yet. but it is not just science fiction now. It is not something which may happen, but something that will happen, and soon. It is as much a fact as that the Sun will shine next year.

  We already have enough knowledge to tell the main facts of the adventure in space. This, then, is the story of those facts, and of what will be done with them as men go out to other worlds. It is a guidebook to the future, and the story of man’s greatest exploration. To me, it is far more fascinating than any fiction can be. To me, it is a dream that has finally come true.

  To the young people of today, however, it is more than a dream; it has become something they will have to know and understand, since space travel will be a real part of the world in which they are going to live.
br />   I hope I have helped to make the learning of the facts a little easier for you—and more fun!

  L. d.R.

  SECTION I first steps to space

  how high is up?

  n one way, it was much easier for the first - fish to move from water to air than it is for us to leave the atmosphere and get out into space. The fish had no trouble getting to the place where one left off and the other began. Water remains at about the same density from bottom to surface. Air is quite different. At sea level, 800 cubic feet of our atmosphere weighs as much as 1 cubic foot of water, which is a little over 60 pounds. A few hundred miles up, the air grows so thin that a cubic mile of it would weigh less than 1 ounce.

  This makes the problem of getting out into space more difficult than almost any trip we might try after we get there.

  In fact, if air behaved more like water, we would probably have space travel right now. It would not be hard to get into space then. Every square foot of the surface of Earth has a little more than a ton of air above it; but if this air were all of the same density, or thickness, as it is at the sea level, our atmosphere would reach up only about 5 miles. This would mean that the top of several mountains on Earth would actually project up into space!

  Life would be a great deal different in such a world. Birds, planes and balloons could rise easily to the surface of the atmosphere; they might even leap out into space, as a flying fish leaps from the water. Men could live at the very top of the atmosphere; the temperature would drop less with height than it does now. It would be possible to dig a tunnel or build an enclosed passage to the top of Mount Everest, half a mile out in space.

  Astronomers would want to work up there, where no air interfered with clear seeing. Factories might spring up above the atmosphere to produce vacuum tubes, and such things as vitamins which can be made best in a high vacuum. A vacuum, of course, is space with nothing in it. It would be cheaper to move the factories into empty space than to produce a good vacuum in the factories.

  In such an imaginary world, spaceships might well be a reality. We would know more about space, having lived in it for years, and we could start building a space station from the top of Mount Everest. With no air to slow it down and make it fall back, the station could be built only a short distance above us.

  The real atmosphere is not like that at all. It stretches up for hundreds of miles, growing thinner and thinner. At 2 miles above sea level, many people grow uncomfortable; at 3 miles up. most of us find it hard to breathe; after another mile of rising, no human beings can continue to live and work normally without extra oxygen. At 15 miles up, the best engines and superchargers we can build fail for lack of air. Yet we have not even begun to reach the end of the atmosphere.

  The Northern Lights have been observed as high as 600 miles above the Earth’s surface. Since they are caused by radiation from the Sun striking broken molecules of the atmosphere, we have to accept the fact that there is some gas at least that high. Forty years or so ago, men thought that the air came to an end at about 200 miles up, but there is too much evidence to prove this is not true.

  In the Middle Ages, nobody would have been surprised that the air went higher than 200 miles. Then people who knew that the planets were millions of miles away still thought that the air stretched through all space, without any thinning out. They wrote books about getting to the Moon by tying flocks of birds together and having people carried straight up. The idea of a vacuum was something they could not imagine. They knew that air was harder to breathe at the top of their mountains, but they did not put two and two together to make four—they made it come out more like seventeen. They added many other useless ideas to the facts and talked about spirits of the air, of getting too near the fire of the Sun, and not getting enough strength through their legs because they were too far from direct contact with Earth.

  By the time Newton discovered the law of gravitation, scientists had learned most of the basic facts and were aware that there could be no air between the planets. As late as 1800. though, people were writing stories in which balloons rose to the top of the atmosphere, or even crossed to the Moon. Still, even the scientists thought of everything in very simple terms. As they believed, the air simply got thinner as one went higher; the temperature fell steadily; and the winds became less and less.

  Nothing could be further from the truth than some of those ideas. The atmosphere is so complicated and changeable that even today we are learning new and amazing things about it all the time. Meteorologists (men who study the weather and other things about our air) are using sounding balloons, radar and rockets to learn more. There is still much to be discovered, but the general picture is becoming clearer, though certainly no simpler. In fact, the more we find out about the atmosphere, the more puzzles and oddities there are.

  The lowest layer, or troposphere, goes up to a height of about 8 miles. (There are no sharp divisions between layers, but heights at which certain changes become noticeable have been selected as the separations between layers.) The troposphere is the layer in which we live, about which we know most and the one easiest to understand. As we move higher in this layer, the temperature drops fairly steadily to about 70 degrees below zero, the winds increase in speed to about 80 miles an hour, and the air pressure drops without any major change in the makeup of the air itself.

  Above the troposphere we find the stratosphere, which goes up to about 60 miles. The temperature stays about the same here until we get beyond the highest clouds, 20 miles up. Then the air begins to grow warmer again, rising to 170 degrees above zero, to change again and fall back to well below freezing at the top of this layer. The winds first decrease in speed, and then begin rising in average speed to over 100 miles an hour. Now, for the first time, we find actual changes in the air.

  From roughly 15 to 30 miles above the Earth, there is a section known as the ozone layer. In this layer, some of the oxygen is broken apart by light from the Sun. Normal oxygen has two atoms in each molecule, which break apart to single atoms. These atoms usually get together again, but sometimes each will hastily grab onto a normal molecule, to produce one with three atoms, which is ozone. (Electrical discharge through the air can cause the same change, which is the reason ozone can be smelled around some big motors and generators.)

  This action of the oxygen is fortunate for us. If the ozone layer were to vanish, most life on Earth would die almost at once! Ozone is transparent to normal light, but it absorbs some of the dangerous ultraviolet radiation and keeps this part from reaching us. If the ultraviolet were to reach us, it would be blinding and even fatal. However, there is no reason to worry. The more of such radiation there is, the more ozone it creates—and hence, the less of such light can get through. There is a state of perfect balance, in other words.

  There are other layers within the atmosphere in which the Sun’s radiation breaks up the molecules of the air. These broken parts (known as ions, and having an electrical charge) form what are called the ionization layers. Without these ions, long-distance radio would be impossible. We cannot see them, but they reflect back radio signals (except the very short radar wave lengths), instead of letting them continue in a straight line and vanish into space over the horizon.

  The ions also give us the name for the next layer of atmosphere—the ionosphere. This layer extends from 60 to about 500 miles or more above sea level. At the bottom of the ionosphere, we have the section where meteorites, falling from outer space, become visible as they reach a depth where the air is dense enough to burn them by friction. At the top of this layer, we are practically in space.

  Here the wind velocity increases steadily, up to 300 miles an hour and more. The temperature goes up even more rapidly. At about 400 miles, the thin wisp of atmosphere left is heated to as much as 4,000 decrees—far above the temperature of liquid iron!

  The discovery of this heat led to many articles in the papers which claimed that space flight was now proved impossible, since nothing could stand such a
temperature. Actually, it means almost nothing. The men writing the articles simply misunderstood what was meant; they were thinking of temperature as it registers on a thermometer—something one can feel. Scientists frequently have another meaning for heat; they know that heat is a good measure of how fast individual molecules of gas move about. The higher the temperature, the faster the movement of these tiny molecules (the reason why pressure goes up in a tire when it gets hot; the faster molecules strike the walls harder, increasing the pressure against them). What the scientists meant in saying the air was at 4,000 degrees was simply that the molecules were moving at as great a speed as they would if heated to such a level. It is true heat, but it will not affect a spaceship, because there are so few molecules in space at that height.

  In fact, the ship might even lose heat going through this section. Each molecule that struck the ship would give up as much heat as any other molecule at such a temperature—but with such a tiny number striking the ship, the total amount of heat added would be very little. Meantime, the ship would be radiating some of its heat into space, as any warm body does. The amount of heat lost by radiation would probably be more than that gained from the air around.

  Finally, above the other layers lies the exosphere—the outer shell. Here, scientists can detect some evidence of ?as, but it is so thin that it really no longer matters. It fades out into space, but it is already so much like empty space that we might as well forget there is anything there.

  The question still remains: How high is up—or how far is it to space? Truthfully, nobody can say exactly. There is no sharp line. The air begins to lose its power to resist high-speed motion at about 120 miles up; at 200 to 250 miles, rockets traveling in a circle around the Earth would be slowed only very slightly, if at all. To be on the safe side, we should say that space begins somewhere between 400 and 1,000 miles above us—and goes on and on, beyond the power of our biggest telescope to find any end.