Prelude to Space Read Online Free PDF Page A

writers, astronomers,
     editors, and businessmen in the old Interplanetary Society. With very small capital,
     they started the publication
Spacewards
, which was inspired by the success of the American National Geographic Society’s
     magazine. What the N.G.S. had done for the Earth could, it was argued, now be done
     for the solar system.
Spacewards
was an attempt to make the public shareholders, as it were, in the conquest of space.
     It catered to the new interest in astronomy, and those who subscribed to it felt that
     they were helping to finance the first space flight.
    “The project wouldn’t have succeeded a few years earlier, but the time was now ripe
     for it. In a few years there were about a quarter of a million subscribers all over
     the world, and in 1962 ‘Interplanetary’ was founded to carry out full-time research
     into the problems of space flight. At first it couldn’t offer the salaries of the
     great government-sponsored rocket establishments, but slowly it attracted the best
     scientists in the field. They preferred working on a constructive project, even at
     lower pay, to building missiles for transporting atomic bombs. In the early days,
     the organization was also helped by one or two financial windfalls. When the last
     British millionaire died in 1965, he balked the Treasury of almost all his fortune
     by making it into a Trust Fund for our use.
    “From the first, Interplanetary was a world-wide organization and it’s largely an
     historical accident that its H.Q. is actually in London. It might very well have been
     in America, and a lot of our compatriots are still annoyed that it isn’t. But for
     some reason, you Americans have always been a bit conservative about space flight,
     and didn’t take it seriously until several years after us. Never mind: the Germans
     beat us both.
    “Also, you must remember that the United States is much too small a country for astronautical
     research. Yes, I know that sounds odd—but if you look at a population map you’ll see
     what I mean. There are only two places in the world that are really suitable for long-range
     rocket research. One’s the Sahara desert, and even that is a little too near the great
     cities of Europe. The other is the West Australian desert, where the British Government
     started building its great rocket range in 1947. It’s more than a thousand miles long,
     and there’s another two thousand miles of ocean beyond it—giving a grand total of
     over three thousand miles. You won’t find any place in the United States where you
     can safely fire a rocket even five hundred miles. So it’s partly a geographical accident
     that things have turned out this way.
    “Where was I? Oh yes, up to 1960 or so. It was about then that we began to get really
     important, for two reasons which aren’t widely known. By that time a whole section
     of nuclear physics had come to a full stop. The scientists of the Atomic Development
     Authority thought they could start the hydrogen-helium reaction—and I don’t mean the
     tritium reaction of the old H-bomb—but the crucial experiments had been very wisely
     banned. There’s rather a lot of hydrogen in the sea! So the nuclear physicists were
     all sitting around chewing their fingernails until we could build them laboratories
     out in space. It wouldn’t matter, then, if something went wrong. The solar system
     would merely acquire a second and rather temporary sun. ADA also wanted us to dump
     the dangerous fission products from the piles, which were too radioactive to keep
     on Earth but which might be useful some day.
    “The second reason wasn’t so spectacular, but was perhaps even more immediately important.
     The great radio and telegraph companies
had
to get out into space—it was the only way they could broadcast television over the
     whole world and provide a universal communication service. As you know, the very short
     waves of radar and television won’t bend around