Science: Journey into Space

(6 of 10)

Von Braun has pushed his startling proposal both publicly and privately before many different audiences. He is quite serious. A more elaborate version of his plan, with full secret details, is believed to be circulating among Washington military bigwigs. There are also rival satellite plans.

Any rumor that one of these plans may be adopted for immediate action sends practical rocket men into a cold sweat. Neither Von Braun nor his critics can debate freely in public. Von Braun works for Army Ordnance at its guided missile center at Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville, Ala. His job is military missiles, not space ships, but nearly all the facts that bear on space flight also apply to missiles and are, therefore, strictly secret. His opponents are muzzled by the same difficulty.

Cautious Viking. Most articulate critic of the Von Braun plan is Dr. Milton Rosen of the Naval Research Laboratory at Washington, a careful, meticulous man. As head of the Navy's Viking Project, Dr. Rosen can talk comparatively freely, because the Viking is a high-altitude research rocket, not a fighting missile.

Dr. Rosen is frankly aghast at difficulties that Von Braun lightly brushes aside. Every ambitious rocket, he says, contains a long series of intricate components; all of them must work perfectly or the whole rocket will fail. Each new element—down to valves and gaskets—must be tested over & over until its reliability is close to absolute.

This makes rocket progress necessarily slow. Rosen believes that Von Braun's 7,000-ton shuttle rockets — to say nothing of his space station—would be a reckless leap into the blind future, like trying to build a B-36 out of the engines and wing sections used in World War I. The inevitable outcome, he thinks, would be a gigantic fiasco.

Rosen admits that chemical fuels, burned in a multi-stage rocket, can theoretically place a payload in a permanent orbit. But he points out that the Von Braun plan would expend more than 6,000 tons of fuel for each 36-ton payload. Even if the shuttle rockets survived more than one trip (Rosen thinks it unlikely), the carrying charge on each ton of payload would be fantastic.

The space station, Dr. Rosen thinks, would have little military value. Equipping it to make observations would be exceedingly difficult, and any missiles that it might drop would be lucky to hit the-right country. The project, Rosen warns, would sop up most of the U.S. supply of qualified technical men. While they were aiming at space, the guided missile program—which military planners consider vital to U.S. safety—would grind to a halt.

Space travel will probably have to wait, Rosen believes, until the scientists have made some basic discovery equal in novelty to Faraday's discovery of electromagnetism. A beam of high-speed particles pushed at close to the speed of light by nuclear energy might do the trick. No one yet has the foggiest idea about how to do it.