The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Astronomers are now combing the pictures for the galaxies that date back to when the Universe was emerging from a mysterious era known as the cosmic “dark ages”.

Appendix – Space, Fact and Fiction

The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters has an additional theme running through it. This theme is the interaction of fact and fiction. Science fiction has inspired numerous scientists. Later some of these scientists made that fiction into reality. Many pioneering rocket scientists were inspired by the novels of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.

Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon was published in 1865 and was the first story to be based on scientific principles – science fiction. There had been earlier stories about interplanetary travel. Perhaps the earliest known story was written during the Second Century AD. It was the “True History” by Lucian of Samos. At that time it was widely thought that the earth was the centre of the universe (the Geocentric theory). After Lucian, stories about interplanetary travel were neglected until the invention of the telescope.

The telescope was invented in the Netherlands in 1608 but was made famous by Galileo Galilei. The original design was easy to copy. It was a three-powered instrument that magnified the image three times. Galileo constructed his own instruments, making them increasingly more powerful. Using a twenty-powered instrument he observed the Moon, discovered four satellites of Jupiter, and resolved nebular patches into stars. He published his findings as Sidereus Nuncius (The Celestial Messenger) in 1610.

The astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was the first man to discover the exact laws governing the movements of the planets – principles which apply to the movements of spacecraft. Kepler also wrote a story about interplanetary travel which was published in 1634, after his death. In Kepler’s story, Somnium, a man travelled to the moon, the method of propulsion being supernatural, with the description of the moon and space based on the knowledge revealed by the telescope. In particular, he knew space was a vacuum.

In From the Earth to the Moon Verne did not take the easy way out and invent, like many writers before and since, some mysterious method of propulsion or a substance which would defy gravity. Verne’s brother-in-law was a professor of astronomy who knew that if a body could be projected away from the Earth at a sufficient speed it would reach the Moon, so he simply built an enormous gun and fired his heroes from it in a specially equipped projectile. He worked out all the calculations, times and velocities for the trip and described it in minute detail. One of its most interesting features was the fact that it was fitted with rockets for steering once it had reached space. Verne understood that the rocket could function in an airless vacuum, but he never thought of using them for the whole trip.

An earlier work of science fiction had featured a spacecraft powered by a form of rocket propulsion, like a ram jet. In 1656 Cyrano de Bergerac wrote Voyage to the Moon and Sun in which a man travelled to the moon on a craft powered by heated air. His flying machine was a large light box, airtight except for a hole at either end, and made of burning glasses. The glasses focused sunlight into its interior. Heated air escaped from one of the nozzles and was replenished through the other.

H.G. Wells’s contribution was less scientific but more readable than earlier interplanetary stories. His First Men in the Moon (1901) is one of the very few interplanetary romances which is regarded as a work of art. Technically it was a retrogression from Verne, whose space-gun was at least plausible and founded on scientific facts. To get his protagonists to the Moon, Wells invented “Cavorite”, a substance which acted as an anti-gravity agent. His heroes had only to climb into a sphere coated with this useful material and they would travel away into space; to steer themselves towards the Moon, it was merely necessary to open a shutter in that direction.

The concept of an anti-gravity substance originated with J. Atterley, whose Voyage to the Moon had appeared in 1827. Atterley had numerous successors who also used anti-gravitational metals to leave Earth.