Science: Glimpses of the Moon

Astronauts (people who dream of traveling through interstellar space) have been sleeping dreamlessly since the war began. Reasons: 1) lack of materials for building space ships; 2) the drafting of astronauts for more immediate work on military rockets. But by last week many enthusiasts were stirring in their sleep and dreaming again of the interplanetary takeoff.

"Flight into outer space," exclaimed Harry Harper, a spokesman for the new Combined British Astronautical Societies, "is no longer a Jules Verne or Wellsian dream." His British group includes able young chemists, physicists and plane engineers. In spare-time work on their hobby, they have laid out a campaign, to start with the launching of experimental rockets 60 miles into space,* and culminating in a three-man jorney in a 1,000-ton space ship, already designed, to the moon.

20,000 M.P.H. Harper's group figures that the 240,000-mile trip to the moon would take only 48 hours; in the celestial vacuum their ship would attain a speed of 20,000 m.p.h. Their vehicle, probably using liquid oxygen and gasoline for fuel, would be propelled by a series of rockets whose shells could be jettisoned as they were used up; the ship would eventually weigh less than a tenth of its take-off weight. Passengers would be protected against acceleration effects by springy hammocks, against extreme heat & cold by rotation of the ship's outer shell, to distribute the sun's heat evenly on all sides.

Arrived at the moon, the ship, steered and braked by auxiliary rockets, would settle down rear end first. Its passengers, in diving suits, would emerge to explore the moon's surface. The rocket ship would take off again from a portable launching platform. After regaining the earth's atmosphere, the voyagers and ship would land by parachute.

7 M.P.S. Astronauts actually talk like that in fairly low voices, without breathing hard. The fact that no astronaut has yet succeeded in shooting a rocket more than two miles up does not shake their faith. They have learned something of what they are up against and have turned their studies to practical engineering details. Some of the problems are clearly posed in a new book (Rockets; Viking; $3.50) by Willy Ley, onetime colleague of German Professor Hermann Oberth, reported inventor of the robot bomb (TIME, July 10).

The speed at which a rocket would have to travel to get free of the earth's gravity has been calculated as seven miles per second. The best rocket fuel yet tried (liquid oxygen and gasoline or alcohol) has a theoretical propulsive limit of two miles per second, and no actual rocket has approached that limit. Using the best present metal alloys and fuel, says Ley, a rocket ship designed for a round trip to the moon would have to be one-third the height of the Empire State Building—apparently a practical impossibility. But war research has improved fuels and alloys, produced new high-flying antiaircraft rockets. Ley, anticipating further improvements, is sure that "the rocket to the moon is possible." With the impregnable calm common to astronauts, he observes: "The idea of space travel has by now reached a rather high state of perfection.''