One Giant Leap to Nowhere

By TOM WOLFE
Published: July 18, 2009

WELL, let’s see now ... That was a small step for Neil Armstrong, a giant leap for mankind and a real knee in the groin for NASA.

The American space program, the greatest, grandest, most Promethean — O.K. if I add “godlike”? — quest in the history of the world, died in infancy at 10:56 p.m. New York time on July 20, 1969, the moment the foot of Apollo 11’s Commander Armstrong touched the surface of the Moon.

It was no ordinary dead-and-be-done-with-it death. It was full-blown purgatory, purgatory being the holding pen for recently deceased but still restless souls awaiting judgment by a Higher Authority.

Like many another youngster at that time, or maybe retro-youngster in my case, I was fascinated by the astronauts after Apollo 11. I even dared to dream of writing a book about them someday. If anyone had told me in July 1969 that the sound of Neil Armstrong’s small step plus mankind’s big one was the shuffle of pallbearers at graveside, I would have averted my eyes and shaken my head in pity. Poor guy’s bucket’s got a hole in it.

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Gus does not agree and reminisces:

When the big event — the first man on the moon — happened, I was traveling with some friends on some of the loneliest European back country roads... We were too far from a TV set. Well, all except one of us, the driver, who had to walk about ten kilometres to a service station to get a new fan belt for his car that had broken down. He apparently saw the landing on the tele, with the local grease monkey... But for me, since there was a long wait before he came back, I was making out, slowly, in the back seat of the car with a lovely woman. We heard the whole thing on radio... as the windscreen became foggy.

This was the new era of space exploration.

So, unlike Tom Wolfe — the fellow above who wrote "One Giant Leap to Nowhere" (a bit too Christian for my liking) — "we" knew the moon landing was only part of a very difficult and dangerous exploration that had started a few years earlier with the first Sputnik, the Russian satellite. It is my view that it will take more than a couple of hundred years to realise a lot more, space-wise.

Jules Verne's had inspired a whole new generation of dreamers, following those who were enlightened enough to understand Galileo, Kepler and Copernicus' ideas. Kepler was a master mathematician who calculated the motion/speed of planets in relation to their elliptical orbits. Space exploration owes oodles to Kepler.

Following that momentous landing day, there were a few more Apollo missions that landed more personnel on the moon but the reality of staying there longer than a few hours was still remote. Still is. Not because the will is not there but the technology to do it is so greatly demanding... And there is the moon dust.

At the time of the landing, the Russians were masters of their famous Soyuz rockets. They had developed a different technology. Smaller hotter burners, but plenty more of these burners to push the load. Unlike the big Yankee space blasters,  the Russian rockets made (and still make) hardly any smoke. Just a spitting highly efficient hot blue flame. Lots of them.

If my memory is not stuck in mud, the concept of the multi-stage rocket had been mostly designed by the Germans: Von Braun who went to the US and other live scientists war trophies taken by Russia after the war (WWII). During the war, the Germans had developed two kind of long range warfare rocket, the V1 then the V2. The V1 was propelled by a pulse-reactor and flew a bit like a drone, with shortened wings. The V2 was a fully fledged rocket that did not need air (ambient oxygen) to propel. It reached London in a few minutes from its launch-pad in Germany.

We all dreamed of space. God had vanished. War was the bane of humanity... Enzymes ate my socks...

For me, space exploration did not die at the moon landing.
But it had to find new better ways of getting there and systems to sustain itself. Since then, the US developed the complex shuttle program, the Russians carried-on with their reliable Soyuz rockets and numerous satellites were launched for communication and spying by many other countries. It's a very costly pass-time.

For human-ed space crafts, getting there is often not so much the problem as to coming back. The orbital speed needed to counter-balance gravity is enormous. About 25,000 kms per hour for an orbit at around 350 kms from the earth. Considering that 350 kms is a shorter distance than from Wollongong to Newcastle, it's a mind boggling low altitude for such a feat... The lower the altitude in space, the "faster" one has to travel to maintain zero gravity. And once the speed is achieved the beauty of it all is there is no need for extra acceleration. Momentum in space is near like perpetual motion. For lunar destined crafts refined adjustments of trajectory are minimal if all the calculations between the launch speed, the diminishing gravity field of earth and the influence of the moon's gravity are correct.

A slight reduction of speed and the satellite falls back to earth. Too much speed and the satellite peels away from earth's gravity field. At an altitude of around 10,000 kms, satellites achieve "geostatic" orbits. Most telecommunication satellites operate in that range that places them stationary above a chosen geographic region of the Earth to which they relay information with maximum efficiency.

Below 150 kms, the atmosphere, although super thin, starts to create very weak friction at these enormous speeds. The edge of space is considered to be at 100 kms...

As mentioned before on this site (SPACE-TIME POLITICS), the US military and the Russians did explode nuclear bombs in the atmosphere, in the stratosphere and in the Van Allen belts "just to see what would happen" in the 50s and 60s. The result is a band of highly dangerous radioactive particles floating about 1000 kms above the earth. This orbital level is basically out of bounds for space stations and shuttles. Thus whenever crews flew to the moon they had to cross this highly charged nuke-field that also has a natural high energy and particle density. A few minutes was okay but lingering in it was (and still is) a no-no...

My grandmother saw some of the first aero-planes fly, before WWI, when she was in her thirties. She lived long enough to see Concorde fly and be a virtual witness to the moon landing. Extraordinary times of human endeavours that seem to have stalled somewhat, possibly due to generation X, Y and Z being too comfortable with their iphones, — having no clues as to what feat of technological evolution, including space technology, had to be performed by generations before them, for these younger ones to become illiterate while TXTing...  or Twittering like twits.

Thus while "space exploration is forgotten" by the young and the restless, there are thousands of satellites orbiting the earth, most launched with a purpose — commercial or military (the US uses more than 250 spy satellites with high definition cameras that can read number plates on a good day, but they collect so much data that analysts tend to miss the important bits).

Since the beginning of the space age we've created more than 10,000 pieces of space junk — from flakes of paint, hurling at 25,000 kms an hour, to heavy disused satellites — orbiting the earth at various speed, at various levels and traveling in various directions. All this in itself can create high destructive impacts in case of collision.

What the harsh reality has told us, against our Peter Pan dream through the cosmos, is that the universe is huge and that's it's not easy to conquer — even in the relative short distances between the Earth and the Moon, and between the Earth and Mars... We need to be smarter...

The dreamers may have been replaced with shy pragmatists and uninspired accountants, because experience has told us gravity is a critical dangerous master. We can jump so high but the energy output needed to a smooth landing is phenomenal. Margins of errors are small. Every-time a shuttle re enter the earth atmosphere, the angle of penetration, the speed of approach, the shield protection — all are critical, often beyond the scope of human twiddle. Only a computer with accurate timing can do the crunch.

Thus one of the major problems for Space exploration is exponential cost. The faster one goes the more expensive it is by a factor of knots. Similar to airlines who flew the Concorde. Supersonic flight took a nose dive not so much because one Concorde crashed but because it was expensive to run. Tickets were not cheap with rare discount to royalties. Furthermore the supersonic noise associated with the flight restricts the flying above oceans. The longest flights on Earth from Europe are to Australia and New Zealand — but the flying is mostly over populated land... Thus people were likely to complain about the double bang of large supersonic planes and would send the bills to the airlines for their broken windows. And the refueling stops would defeat the speed advantage over a subsonic plane.

Thus the new era of flight has gone "cheaper": bigger subsonic planes like the A380 — a plane so huge it carries nearly time and half its own weight in fuel, yet is 30 per cent cheaper to operate per passenger — or the constantly delayed Boeing Dreamliner built of carbon fiber supposed to be lighter thus more economical...

Some dreamers have proposed building half plane, half rocket vehicles that would reach beyond the atmosphere to achieve greater speed  being subsonic on take off and landing. But the cost of fuel, etc...

Meanwhile, the budget for NASA has sadly diminished compared to the general US budget and shrunk compared to what is spend on the stained windows of churches and over-sized concrete statues of christs...

I strongly believe this is only a temporary loss of focus from silly presidents more inclined to wage wars for illusionary profit rather than flex a country's true dream about space. I also believe the space program has gone on the back burner because religion is on the way up. Muslim extremists, Christian extremists and Zionists, all are disguised as moderate people, to trumpet goodwill despite their bad faith and constant fist fighting. Religion on this Earth is like a disease. It's benign when it's only about people going to church or the mosque or the temple, but deadly when mixed with a dash more extremism, stupidity and bombs...

Religion is silly, really. Space is the reality of where we are, even if we are alone in the entire universe... It's our choice to understand with more clarity and less godly bullshit, our true spacial nature.

Space exploration is not dead. Our imagination has already gone beyond Red Dwarf, Alien and Torchwood — and has been spurred by Blake 7 and Doctor Who... We've been so distracted from reality. We came close to it though with "2001 — A Space Odyssey" except for the time reference. Not a bad thing as god has nowhere to be and the work at hand is giganormous.

One Giant Leap to Nowhere? Of course! Of course since the entire universe is about nowhere and everywhere... We do not know yet of any other place — but this tiny Earth that we're mucking up big time — where conditions for our weak animal status travellng in flimsy craft exist. But the dream of space must go on, without giving in to the silly religions.

Space, here we come...