The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Wells’ book was followed by numerous works that referred to interplanetary flight. In 1951, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke attributed the increase in the number of books on this subject to two causes: in the first case, the conquest of the air had acted as a stimulus to imagination; in the second, the foundations of astronautics were being laid by competent scientists, and the result of their work was slowly filtering through to the general public. The researches of Goddard (from 1914 onwards) and later of Oberth had focused attention onto the rocket, and even before the modern era of large-scale experimental work had confirmed the accuracy of these men’s predictions, the rocket had been accepted as the motive power for spaceships in the majority of stories of interplanetary travel. Numerous rocket scientists, including Goddard and Oberth, acknowledged the inspiration of the fiction of Verne and Wells.

In 1903 the Wright brothers made their first historic flight. In the same year, the Russian, Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935) published his book, Space Exploration by Means of Reaction Propulsion Craft, in which he expounded the scientific foundations of space rocketry. It was the first scientific theory of space flight ever published.

Originally, Tsiolkovsky was a schoolteacher, but was so inspired by Jules Verne’s stories that he, too, tried to write science fiction. He soon introduced real technical problems into his tales of interplanetary travel, such as rocket control in moving into and out of gravitational fields. Before he wrote his book, Tsiolkovsky had actually evolved from fiction writer to scientist and theoretician.

German rocket scientists like Ernest Stuhlinger and Wernher von Braun were also inspired by a 1926 Fritz Lang film, The Woman in the Moon, and formed amateur rocket clubs, eventually developing the world’s first ballistic missile. Although the initial development of the rocket was for military purposes, the men who developed it could claim that their ultimate aspiration was space travel.

The prophets of fiction did not always get it right. In 1951 Arthur C. Clarke, himself, predicted that “orbital refuelling is the key to interplanetary flight.” The single-stage rocket which he anticipated might have needed this. But the next year Wernher von Braun was explaining the concept of the multiple-stage rocket.

A science fiction novel was later responsible for modifications to the US space program. An additional safety measure was added to the Gemini program, with Gemini III (1965) becoming the first manned Gemini mission, practising a maneuvre to act as a safety precaution. The point of the maneuvre was to avoid a scenario which had been envisaged in Martin Caidin’s novel Marooned in which a spacecraft’s retrorockets failed and it was consequently unable to slow down enough for re-entry.

On Gemini III’s third orbit it completed a fail-safe plan and made a two and-a half-minute burn with its thrusters that reduced the spacecraft’s orbit to 72 kilometres to ensure re-entry even if the retrorockets failed to work.

Stanley Kubrick directed 2001: a Space Odyssey, having first approached science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke in early 1964 to collaborate on what both hoped would be “the proverbial good science fiction film”. They spent a year working out the story, and Kubrick began pre-production in mid-1965.

On the recommendation of Clarke, Kubrick hired spacecraft consultants Frederick Ordway and Harry Lange as technical advisors on the film. Ordway and Lange had assisted some of the major contractors in the aerospace industry and NASA with the development of advanced space vehicle concepts. Ordway was able to convince dozens of aerospace giants such as IBM, Honeywell, Boeing, General Dynamics, Grumman, Bell Telephone and General Electric that participating in the production of 2001 would generate good publicity for them. Many companies provided copious amounts of documentation and hardware prototypes free of charge in return for “product placements” in the completed film. They believed that the film would serve as a big-screen advertisement for space technology and were more than willing to help out Kubrick’s crew in any way possible. Lange was responsible for designing much of the hardware seen in the film.

Senior NASA Apollo administrator George Mueller and astronaut Deke Slayton visited the 2001 studios during production and were so impressed they called the studios at Borehamwood in Hertfordshire, England “NASA East”.