The Star Sailors

Since perhaps the dawn of time, Man has dreamed of flight. It has captivated his imagination and fired his uniquely creative genius like few other things can. Within the dream, however, there was another dream, to fly to the stars, to visit other worlds. The closest of these has hung overhead, beckoning, since the formation of the Solar System and will continue to do so for eons to come. It is the moon. It was always a dream of man to walk on the moon. On July 20, 1969, late in the 20^th Century, the dream was realized, but that great achievement was only a step in a process whose beginning can be traced back to the dawn of human history, tens of thousands of years ago.

From the time he has come down from the trees, Man has looked to the heavens. At first he merely looked, unable to comprehend the vast infinity of the night sky. However as time wore on and man began to evolve from Australopithecine to Homo Erectus to Cro-Magnon Man and finally to Homo Sapiens, he began to notice that heavens were not the same from night to night, that the stars changes positioned and chased each other around the sky. Man began to take note of variety of strange phenomenon that filled the night sky, from wandering stars to ethereal curtains of shimmering light, they held his attention, but it was the sun and moon that concerned him most. From long observations of the sun and moon came the calculation of the calendar year. The Mayans in particular are known for their highly accurate calendar, as are the Egyptians. These calendars were use at first only to determine dates for religious festivals as well as when to sow and when to harvest.

As Man undertook his first voyages of exploration, on the sea and not in space he began to realize that he could use the stars determine his location. It is from the Greeks and Romans that we have the current names for the constellations. Through careful observation of the night sky with out the aid of even the primitive telescopes that would arise in Europe many centuries later, the Greeks became adept at predicting future celestial events and this in turn gave rise to what became known as judicial astrologers, astrologers who believed that detailed study of the night sky could predict the outcome of battles and foretell of famine and floods. The Greeks were also unique as they were among the first people to wonder about the structure of the universe, not just chart the nightly movements of the moon and stars. One of the earliest known theories about our Solar System was put forward by the Greek astronomer, Aristarchus of Samos, around 300 BC, who proposed a helio-centric model of the Solar System. However, not everyone agreed with this view and by the first century AD, his ideas had been completely rejected in favor of Hipparchus and Ptolemy, who in his Algamest proposed that the Earth is at the center of the universe in what is now called the Ptolemaic Model. Ptolemy claimed that Earth was at center of the universe and that the sun and all the planets revolved around it in perfect circular orbits. He also contended that the universe as a whole as made up of a series of spheres, each representing the four elements, earth, air, fire and water. The ptolemaic system would stand unchallenged for nearly a millennium.

During the Renaissance, however, things began to change. Improved navigation and advances in ship building technology meant that trans-oceanic navigation was now possible, as shown by Columbus in 1492. The pushing back of boundaries also occurred in other areas. It was during the Renaissance that the four corner stones of space flight would be laid by men whose combined genius was so far ahead of its time that they reshaped how Man viewed the world around him on a fundamental level. Their names were Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton.

The first of these four foundation stones was laid by Nicolas Copernicus in 1543. At great risk to his own life, Copernicus published a series of theories that set out to finally correct the badly flawed Ptolemaic Model. Copernicus argued once and for all the Earth went around the sun and also went so far as to suggest that Earth spun on its axis, completing one revolution, every twenty-four hours. The scientific accomplishments of Copernicus are particularly remarkable given that he had no way to conduct close observations of the night sky in order to provide evidence for his ideas.

The second of the four foundation stones was laid between 1571 and 1630 by Johannes Kepler. A German by birth, Kepler would become known for writing the Laws of Planetary Motion, a series of mathematical equations that determined how objects move in space. Kepler was able to demonstrate conclusively on paper that the Earth moves not a circular orbit, as suggested by Copernicus, but in an elliptical or egg-shape orbit, bringing it closer and farther away from the sun at various times during the year, thus accounting for the change in seasons. Like Copernicus, Kepler is remarkable in that he did not arrive at his conclusions through direct observation, but through the simple application of logical thought. Kepler’s Laws would prove to be so well developed that when the seven Mercury Astronauts were chosen centuries later, in the late 1950s, the first thing they did was conduct a systematic review of their college physics courses which included chapters on Kepler.

The third member of the foundation-laying quartet was not a physicist or mathematician. Rather he was a person who might easily be called the Father of Astronomy and his name was Galileo. Galileo enjoys a nearly iconic status among early modern scientists for one very simple reason; he was the first person to conduct a systematic study of the night sky. Despite being forced to recant his helio-centric beliefs under threat of excommunication by Pope Urban VIII, Galileo was the first person to observe the mountains and craters on the moon, leading him to believe that the moon was composed of similar material to the Earth. He also discovered the four major moons of Jupiter, dispelling forever the Ptolemaic Model with the clear and irrefutable evidence of what is today sometimes called the Jovian System.

If Galileo is the Father of Astronomy, then Sir Isaac Newton is the Father of Physics. Born in 1642, the same year that Galileo died, Sir Isaac Newton was a British mathematician who would become best known for his laws of gravity. Legend has it that Newton was inspired by watching an apple fall from a tree. Newton claimed that it was gravity that made this possible. He argued that the heavier an object was, hard it was to move it off the surface of the Earth. He was also able to prove that two gravitation fields will balance each other out and that the two objects generating those fields, the Earth and the moon, for example will actually orbit around each other even as they both orbit around the sun. In addition to this, again through meticulous experimentation, Newton discovered that light travels in waves which propagate themselves over a wide spectrum from the ultraviolet to the infrared. This is a science now called spectroscopy and it is one used by astronomers to study to study the light given off by distant objects in order to determine their composition. Newton is also famous for determining the speed at which at which an object can be propelled out of Earth’s gravity field, which he determined was 25,000 miles per hour. Because the required speed was so high, many at the time thought that man would never fly to the Moon, however, Newton’s experiments never said that it couldn’t be done, only that it was beyond the means of the technology of the times. By the 1860s however, space flight was firmly embedded in the public imagination, thanks in part to the visionary science-fiction writer, Jules Verne, Verne was known for writing tales of danger and incredible adventure. One of his best known books is A Voyage from the Earth to the Moon. A Voyage from the Earth to the Moon was unique not only as an early science-fiction novel, but because it was one of the first novels to propose what at the time seemed like a practical method of space flight. Verne recognized that a tremendous boost of speed was necessary for a spacecraft to be flung into space and out of the Earth’s gravitational influence.

As such his crew of fictional astronauts was launched in a huge hollow artillery shell out of a one thousand foot long cannon. This would actually be a very bad idea as the sudden acceleration from a standing stop to 25,000 miles an hour in less than one thousand feet would kill the crew. More importantly it’s simply not possible to build a cannon with a barrel that long. The largest gun ever designed was Dr. Gerald Bull’s Babylon Gun, which only had a length of 300 feet and a bore of 1 meter.

As side from Verne’s highly impractical method of launch, however, A Voyage from the Earth to the Moon is well grounded in Newtonian physics. For example, at one point in the journey, a dog which was carried on board the capsule, dies and is jettisoned into space. Instead of floating away, however, the dog continues to travel with the capsule, as both dog and spacecraft were launched from the cannon as a unit. In addition to his very good grasp on the physics of space flight, Verne also proved to be highly prophetic in his choice of launch and recovery sites.

Verne launched his fictional moon mission from Florida, correctly guessing that launching from on or near the equator would provide a kind of gravitational tailwind and deliver an extra boost of speed while cutting down on fuel. Not only would Verne’s mission launch just 100 miles from where the Kennedy Space Center would later be established, but would splash down just miles away from where Apollo 8 would land in the Pacific Ocean in December, 1968.

By the mid-19^th Century, the corner stones were in place. Newtonian physics was an established fact, as was the Helio-centric model of the Solar System. However, despite the basic understanding of how bodies move in space, there was not yet actually a way to get there, but hope was on the horizon. A growing interest in the nascent science, indeed near art of rocketry by backyard inventors and the first powered airplane flight by a pair of bicycle mechanics would redefine the realms of possibility and pave the way for the first manned space flight in only 54 years.