Science: Passport to Space

One of the learned members of the British Interplanetary Society,† dedicated to the promotion of "interplanetary exploration and communication," decided that tomorrow's astronauts would need something besides a three-stage rocket ship before they swished into space. With deadpan ceremony last week he issued to a few friends and colleagues a "British Stellar Passport," a blue-covered, gold-embossed booklet that looks for all the world like a standard British passport.

Included in the passport are bits of information that any traveler likes to know. There is a trip schedule based on the latest calculations of voyage times to the various planets. One column lists the velocity the ship will need to escape from the gravitational pull of the planet on which it lands: 2.2 miles per second for Mercury, 6.3 for Venus, 3.1 for Mars, and 1.4 for Moon. Other handy facts: Jupiter's atmosphere is a combination of methane and ammonia; Mercury's day is 88 times as long as the earth's, while Mars's lasts only 25 terrestrial hours. With each passport went a ticket on the "Flying Saucer Service," and a clownish warning not to play cards with strangers while crossing the Milky Way.

But the aspiring astronaut almost overplayed the gag. After a London tabloid splashed a picture of the "passport" across half a page, hundreds of people asked for passports and announced their readiness to trade this world for another. Plaintively the society announced that it was all a fake—they were not prepared to sell any round-trip tickets from Liverpool Airport to Mars. They had never even bought any shares in "British Milky Way Space Ships, Inc." Then the scientists went back to what they know how to handle: their telescopes, their rocket motors, and the antiseptic world of interstellar mathematics.