Yes, I know the numbers are way off and they’re missing dark matter, dark energy and a host of other things. But from a layman’s perspective, I think it gives a very good understanding of the basic concepts.

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The Mystery of the Vanishing Universe

In the case of the disappearing galaxies, the evidence is contradictory and the jury’s hung

by Morton M. Hunt

IN the files of the world’s astronomical observatories there are a number of photographs, enlarged from tiny negatives. They are hazy, smeary pictures, almost formless; all they show are some rather indistinct patches of light. But because these streaky patches of light never quite appear just where they should on the photograph, but are joggled a little bit offside from where all calculations say they should be (a phenomenon known to astronomers as the “red shift”), the photographs form the evidence of the greatest mystery of all science—the beginning of the universe, and its ultimate end.

What the pictures suggest is that the whole universe is blowing up—or rather that all the stars in the universe are scattering out and getting farther from each other. The stars—in fact, the total matter in the universe—are, in the words of the great British astronomer, Eddington, “dispersing as a puff of smoke disperses.”

Knowing the rate of this expansion, scientists can figure backwards to a time when it all started, a time when the universe existed as a ball of unimaginably concentrated fluid matter possibly no larger than a hand—had there been any hands to compare it with. Conversely, the scientists can figure the time when the universe may be so completely dispersed as to be a vast void in which matter, infinitely attenuated and diluted, will be practically non-existent. Doomsday will be hardly a raging fire; it will be more like a slow dissolving into empty coldness.

At least, that’s what some of the astronomical detectives make from the photographic evidence. The trouble is that there are half a dozen conflicting points of view among the stellar sleuths. And to make everything thoroughly confusing, each one of the theories can be proved absolutely inconsistent by its adversaries. If only the photographic evidence weren’t there, everyone might be perfectly happy. But that’s the mystery of it. Something has. to be explained; it can’t be escaped. But the explainers are still groping in the very dark outer spaces for an answer.

Now that the 200-inch telescope on Palomar Mountain in California is busily scanning the deeps of space, the answer soon may be forthcoming—perhaps next year, perhaps in a few years. When it does come, astronomers the world over will heave happy sighs, as they begin to put the universe together in better shape.

Before you can understand what the fuss is all about in this greatest of all mysteries, there are a few words you ought to know, if you don’t already.

First item is the solar system—the sun and the planets that revolve around it, one of which we call Earth.”

Next one is the old familiar word star. A star—any star—is a huge incandescent body in space, like the sun (which, by the way, happens to be a pretty mediocre star, a little above average in size and brightness, and wholly undistinguished from any other star). Most stars are quite far from any other stars. For example, Proxima Centauri, the star nearest the sun, is so far away that its light takes nearly four and half years to reach us—or, as astronomers say, it is four and a half light-years distant. A light-year, if you like big numbers, is about 6,000,000,000,000-six trillion-miles. If both the sun and Proxima Centauri were only as big as Ping-pong balls, they’d be 500 miles apart, on such a scale.

Yet despite this unthinkable order of distances, you haven’t begun to get to the really wide open spaces. For imagine now, if you can, a host of 40 billion such stars, each about as far from its nearest neighbors as the sun from Proxima Centauri. Take this vast aggregation and shape it like a flat cookie, or spiral, somewhat thicker in the middle and tapering off around the perimeter. This vast but thin-spun thing, some- thing like a disk-shaped blob of smoke particles, is about 100,000 light-years wide in diameter, so that a spectator on one rim could see the other rim only as it used to be 100,000 years earlier. The entire thing, when seen from a very great distance away in empty space, would look like this, when all its billions of stars seemed to merge together.

Well, that’s variously called an island universe, an extra-galactic nebula or more simply a galaxy. We live in one, as you might have guessed; we call ours “the Milky Way,” and we can’t see it as a spiral cookie because we’re in it. More accurately, our sun together with its planets is just one of the 40 billion stars, and happens to be about two-thirds of the way out from the middle towards the edge; consequently, we can see the Milky Way as a band pretty much all around us.

Now suppose that there are millions— actually millions—of such galaxies. Huge as they are, they are afloat in an immense sea of space, and are scattered out at immense distances from each other. The average distance between neighboring galaxies throughout the universe is about 100 times the diameter of the galaxies themselves. The average distance between any two galaxies is two million light-years, which comes to twelve million trillion miles—12,000, 000,000,000,000,000 in round numbers, if that means anything to you. (To get some idea of what that number means, suppose there were a thousand fast bank tellers who could each count out five one-dollar-bills per second. Working day and night without ever stopping, they would require about 80,000,000 years to count out that many dollar bills.) The broad picture of the universe, then, is that it looks mostly like empty space. Here and there throughout it are wisps of cloudy haze, either floating alone, or in loose clusters. Each wisp is a spherical or spiral cloud of particles, which are incredibly minute in relation to the wisp itself; yet each of these particles is a star probably as large and bright as our own sun.

But even this is not all. For although astronomers already know of the existence of millions of these galaxies (which appear to us as tiny hazy patches in the sky, usually invisible to the naked eye), this whole picture of the universe probably represents less than one per cent of the entire thing. Man just hasn’t been able to see the rest of it as yet.

As far back as the time of the American Revolution, the famous astronomer Sir William Herschel had likened our own system of stars—our Milky Way—to the external galaxies, which in his small telescope appeared merely as hazy specks of light. But not until the early years of this century did the notion win wide acceptance. The main reason was that there was no adequate way to measure their distance, and so be sure they were outside the Milky Way. As a matter of fact, the only method used was triangulation (similar to a Boy Scout’s measuring of the width of a stream), which could measure only those stars less than 100 light-years away—and that took the astronomer only one-tenth of one per cent of the distance across our own Milky Way, to say nothing of getting outside it to check on all the other galaxies.

Then in 1912 astronomer Henrietta Leavitt studied a certain type of star which pulsates, varying in brightness over a period of a few days or a few weeks, and discovered that the slower the pulsation, the brighter the star Harlow Shapley saw in this the key to the distances of the galaxies. Even though great distances could make the pulsating star look dim, he realized he could judge its true or absolute brightness by the rate at which it got brighter and fainter. Knowing its absolute brightness, he could figure its real distance.

By locating such stars in the galaxies —and they were becoming more clearly visible with higher-power telescopes-it became clear that the millions of galaxies actually did lie outside the Milky Way and were, like it, collections of billions of stars. An astronomical free-for-all ensued, with everybody combing the sky and the photographic plates for the tell-tale Cepheid variables, as the pulsating stars were called, and then calculating the distances of the galaxies that contained them.

That’s when the trouble started. An astronomer named Vesto Slipher was working at Lowell Observatory, in Flagstaff, Arizona, trying to learn something about the motion of these galaxies. He wasn’t content to know how far away they were; he wanted to know whether they moved, and if so, how fast they were going.

The method he used was what is called “spectroscopic analysis.” He aimed his telescope at the galaxy, passed its light through a slit and then through a complicated kind of prism. Sir Isaac Newton had first found out two and a half centuries before that a prism would break up light into its constituent colors. Since then, scientists had perfected prism analysis, so that on the spread-out band of colors (or spectrum) yielded by the prism, they could easily identify certain dark lines that revealed the presence of specific chemical elements in the light-source. Best lines of all were the two dark strips crossing the spectrum band, caused by the presence of the element calcium.

Whenever Slipher set up his apparatus on some distant galaxy, he could break up its faint light with the spectrograph and locate the dark lines of calcium every time. Of course, they should always have been in the same spot, if the galaxy were stationary; but if it were moving, those lines would be a little bit off to one side or the other. The reason for this is familiar to everyone who has ever heard a passing train blow its whistle, or a passing auto blow its horn.

The sound, as you remember, goes something like this: be-e-e-e-y-ou-ou-ou. The sharp drop from high pitch to low pitch occurs as the car or train passes you and starts going away from you. Sound depends on a number of vibrations reaching your ear each second. If, say, 440 sound waves hit you in a second, you hear a note that corresponds to A in the middle of the piano’s range; if more hit you, you hear a higher note. When the auto comes at you, even though its note may be a pure A, more than 440 waves hit you per second and you hear a higher note; when it goes past, it is still blowing an A, but each wave is released a little farther away and takes longer to get back to you, so that less than 440 hit you each second. The sound drops down in pitch. This is the well-known Doppler effect, first analyzed by Christian Doppler of Prague, back in 1841.

Light, of course, consists of vibrations, too (though not air vibrations, like sound). Many more of them hit you per second—500 trillion per second for yellow light, for example. The color you see is like the note you hear: If more vibrations hit you per second, you see a “higher” color—a bluer one. Fewer vibrations produce a redder color.

But let’s get back to Dr. Slipher, whom we left in the Arizona desert. He hoped to learn whether the galaxies were moving, by passing their light through his spectroscope. If the dark lines of calcium didn’t appear where they should, but were shifted toward the blue end of the spectrum—the higher frequencies—he would know that the entire galaxy was moving toward our own galaxy. If the calcium footprints were shifted towards the red end of the spectrum, the galaxy was moving away from our own. And by some fine measuring of the distance on the photographic plate, and some careful computations, he would even know how fast it was going in miles per second.

The strange thing, he found, was that in nearly every case the calcium lines were shifted toward the red end of the spectrum, meaning that almost all the several dozen galaxies he had observed were moving away from us rather than toward us. But he didn’t probe much further into the matter, and beyond thinking it definitely odd, didn’t suggest that a larger mystery was contained in these observations.

Along came the astronomer Edwin Hubble (SI, Nov., 1947) of California. With keen mathematical insight he probed into Slipher’s figures, and noticed an extremely odd thing: The farther away the galaxy, the faster it was running. If this were true, and if it checked for the other galaxies yet to be examined, it could mean—the most ridiculous notion ever to arise in astronomy—that every other galaxy was fleeing our own, as though we had some kind of colossal cosmic b.o.

But astronomers have learned humility in the face of the great things they see every day, and it was altogether too presumptuous to suppose that our own galaxy—no different from millions of others—should be the center of the retreating universe. Rather, it might be that the whole universe itself was expanding, and hence all particles in it were getting more distant from all other particles. In an explosion, for instance, where a mass of grains is shot outward, each grain gets farther from every other grain as the explosion moves outward. To an observer on such a grain, every other grain would seem to be moving away from him—and the farther away the other grain, the faster it would be moving. So we needn’t be the center of the universe. Instead, the entire universe might be expanding, and all the galaxies in it might be spreading out farther from each other in a huge cosmic dilution of matter.

The whole thing seemed absurd-absurd on a grand scale. Sir Arthur Eddington said of it that it was “so preposterous that I feel almost an indignation that anyone should believe in it except myself.” But plenty of evidence was there, and more was piling up fast.

The Night Watch In a grand rush to understand this greatest of all facts about the realm of creation, astronomers the world over swung their telescopes on the-galaxies. Night after night they would huddle in their fur robes in the chill domes of mountain-top observatories. The telescope would follow a galaxy slowly across the sky, picking up a wisp of light so faint it hardly made a mark upon the photographic plate. Often the plate would have to be covered after the night’s work and re-exposed the next night and the next, sometimes for eight to ten nights, before one readable spectrogram was obtained.

And what was it like? A tiny smeary photograph, such as was described at the beginning of this article. Back in the early 1930’s, before better techniques were perfected, the photo negatives were only a tenth of an inch long, and had to be magnified and then measured with great precision, before the calculations of the galaxy’s speed could be made. A difference of l/50th of an inch would have tremendous significance.

But the evidence was overwhelming. After years of this work, and after the accumulation of hundreds and thousands of records, it was found that only five galaxies were moving toward us— and these were near ones—while all the rest were moving away. The farther they were, the faster their apparent speed. Out at the sublime distance of 240 million light-years there were galaxies streaking away from us at .25,000 miles per second—one seventh the speed of light. And at 500 million light-years we could see galaxies too faint to be spectrographed, which were probably moving at one-third the speed of light.

Naturally, then, as bigger telescopes would be built, they would rapidly approach the distance at which galaxies would be moving away at or above the speed of light. And, therefore, they would be invisible. They would, in fact, be to all intents and purposes non-existent. And even those we could see would be approaching that vanishing point continually. In fact, after a while there would be no galaxies visible at all except our own Milky Way. In a few billion years all others would have vanished beyond the speed of light. “Let us make haste to study them before they disappear!” exclaimed Eddington.

At any rate, the red shift exists beyond any shadow of doubt. And it implies motion—fantastically fast motion. That much is agreed. But from that point the difficulties begin.

First of all, if everything is expanding at a rate we can measure, then it is a relatively easy matter to figure out how long ago it all started—with everything all in a heap, so to speak, before the big blow-out. Every astronomer calculates the beginning of the expansion a bit differently; some place it at about two billion years ago. But Hubble, who spotted the whole business in Slipher’s figures, has refined the calculations and believes that it all started only one billion years ago.

That means that one billion years ago —if the red-shift evidence is correct—all the galaxies and all the suns within them were one mass of super-concentrated, super-hot matter. No solids or compounds existed then in that pre-explosion fluid. It might have been something like an incredibly dense star; or it might even have been nothing but an infinitely small point of infinitely concentrated something-or-other.

Flatly contradicting this, however, is the undeniable truth that life existed on earth more than a billion years ago, on a crust and in an atmosphere not too unlike our own today. In addition, there’s the evidence of uranium, which acts as a kind of cosmic clock to belie the red-shift timetable. Uranium imprisoned in the earth’s rocks slowly disintegrates, leaving behind in the rock both helium and lead. Laboratory experiments have been made to measure the rate of decay of uranium; half of it is gone in about 4.5 billion years. So by delicate tests on the uranium-bearing rocks, we can tell how long the uranium has been there, breaking down into lead and helium.

The evidence is simple: it’s been there two billion years. That means that the earth was a solid, relatively cool mass two billion years ago. Some even put it higher; Harlow Shapley puts the earth’s formation at somewhere about three billion years ago.

How Old Is the Universe?

Furthermore, there are all sorts of stars in the sky—young ones, middle-aged ones, senile ones. From what we know of the sun, it will require many billions of years to go through its whole life-cycle. But then how about the older stars now in existence? Where had they been when the lid blew off? Are they young, but prematurely aged? If so, why? Or are they really old? If so, how could they have been in the midst of the primal blast, only one billion years ago? Some astronomers insisted that this kind of evidence showed the universe was far older even than three billion years. Sir James Jeans figured it as being at least 10,000 billion years old. The conflict seems irreconcilable.

Another question arises about all this outward motion of the galaxies: Where are they going to, anyhow?

Once upon a time men might have believed that the universe extended out infinitely in all directions, and that the galaxies were simply moving out into empty space. But Einstein changed all that. His theories—amply proved by astronomical observations—pictured space as consisting not of straight lines or straight distances, but as being curved. Wherever matter existed in space, it bent or misshaped the space as a flaw in steel might distort and create strains in the metal all around it. Space curvature accounted for the motion of bodies and the motion of light with greater accuracy than Newton’s theory of gravitation. Einstein’s concept explained the actions of the universe with the most satisfying accuracy.

But the curved-space concept did away with the idea of an infinite universe. What happened was that the total amount of matter in the universe caused its space to keep bending on around until it closed up and returned on itself. Don’t try to picture that. You can’t do it any more than you can visualize a minus quantity of anything. It’s mathematically true; the proof lies within the view of telescopes when they observe certain strange gravitational effects, and certain minute irregularities in the orbits of heavenly bodies. But to picture such a universe, round and finite, yet without any external boundary around it, is not for our minds.

James Jeans, the English man-of-all-science, said that “it becomes a bewildering paradox as soon as we try to grasp it in terms of a mechanical model.” His compatriot, Lord Bertrand Russell, added, “It is the privilege of pure mathematicians not to know what they are talking about.” Russell, needless to say, is a pure mathematician.

But if Einstein’s universe can’t be pictured, an analogy may help you to understand it. If you lived on the surface of a globe, and if you could understand two dimensions but were a perfectly flat creature unable to comprehend “up,” you would think your universe infinite because no matter how far you looked around it, or how far you crawled, you never came to an edge. Yet, with good instruments, you’d be able to measure curvature, and your brain would tell you that somehow the universe closed around on itself and was really finite. You’d know it was so; but you wouldn’t be able to draw a picture of it.

Now on the surface of such a sphere— or let’s make it a rubber balloon—put a number of spots, each spot made up of a billion little points. The spots are galaxies, the points their stars. They are a certain distance from each other. Now let some great cosmic breath blow the balloon up slowly. Each spot will be- gin to get farther from each other spot, though none of them is actually moving across the surface of the balloon. And from any one spot the law of motion will be simple: The farther away another spot is, the faster it will seem to be running away. That’s the expanding universe in which we live. And now that you’ve seen it, forget it. That’s only an analogy, and the universe probably isn’t like that at all.

Getting back to the troubles of the expanding-universe theory, if space isn’t infinite, then the galaxies aren’t expanding into it. Rather, space is finite and it is expanding, like the rubber balloon. That accounts for where the galaxies are going quite nicely. One problem, at least, seems to be solved.

But another leaps up to take its place. Let’s grant the universe is as Einstein says; and let’s grant the red shift really shows an expansion, despite the contradictory evidence as to how old the universe is. But if the galaxies are assumed to be receding, there arises a trouble called the “dimming effect.”

If a small boy were blowing beans at you through a beanshooter, from the back of his father’s open car as it sped away, the beans that hit you wouldn’t have as much force or energy as they would if the car were standing still. Likewise, light coming from a receding source will have less energy—that is, will look dimmer—than the same light coming from a stationary source.

It’s Closer Than You Think Therefore, each galaxy is not as far away as we think. The Cepheid variables within each galaxy, whose brightness was the key to the galaxy’s distance, are actually brighter than they seem. All the measurements are wrong. But they can be corrected mathematically.

Applying this correction, astronomers suddenly got a strangely lop-sided picture of the universe: The farther away from our own galaxy you went, the more densely you found other galaxies concentrated in space. There seemed to be, in fact, a bunching-up of galaxies, a thickening shell of matter, all around the margins of space—and beyond would lie even greater concentrations.

That’s a disturbing and unnatural picture, to physicists and astronomers. Matter ought to be pretty uniformly distributed through space, just as air is uniformly distributed in a room.

How to get rid of this bunching effect? Einstein himself had an answer. The bunching-up, he felt, was purely an observational error due to the curvature of space. Einstein then calculated just how much of a curvature the universe would have to have (what its radius would be) in order to produce such an error. It came out to be only six times as great as the distance the 100-inch Mount Wilson telescope could see (the 200-inch telescope on Palomar Mountain should see one-third the way around the universe).

Einstein’s solution to the bunching-up difficulty sounded fine. Then along came Hubble once again, to check on it. He performed an astounding feat-he counted all the matter in space; he added it all up. He did this by photographing a piece of sky bit by bit on 1,283 negatives, and counting the galaxies that appeared on the pictures. The total came to about 44,000. Multiplying this figure to extend it over the whole sky, this meant there probably were 100 million galaxies within the range of the 100-inch telescope.

That’s quite a lot of matter. But it’s afloat in quite a lot of space—so much so, in fact, that averaged out, the density of matter throughout the universe is comparable to about one hydrogen atom per cubic meter—a vacuum surpassing by far the best that could ever be produced in an earth-bound laboratory.

Another Impasse The trouble with all this is that, according to Einstein himself, the curvature of space is caused by the density of the matter in it. And the amount of matter that Hubble had counted in space just wasn’t nearly enough to make Einstein’s curvature the right one. Space did curve, Hubble agreed, but not at the rate Einstein had called for. And only that wrong rate could explain the bunching-up effect. So once again astronomers wound up in an impasse.

Forgetting all this, and merely agreeing that the evidence seemed to show an expanding space, astronomers still couldn’t agree on what it meant. Some insisted that it meant the universe started as a concentrated cloud of galaxies. Others—including Canon Lemaitre, the Belgian priest-physicist—pictured the genesis of the universe as an explosion of some primordial “atom” of supercompressed matter. Only this past year, three American scientists described what may have happened during that explosion. Alpher, Bethe and Gamow (whose collaboration, Bethe has con- fessed to SI, was inspired by the pun their names made on the alpha, beta, and gamma rays of radium) even calculated that five minutes after the explosion started, the elements began to form from the separating matter; and about ten minutes later the whole process of building all the universe’s elements had been virtually completed.

It’s an exciting idea, even if a bit stiff for the average mortal mind to visualize. But, of course, the biggest question is entirely unanswered by it: How did the original “atom” get that way? What super-compressed it? And what set off the explosion that made the universe?

Others, such as the physicist Millikan and the Anglican clergyman-scientist, Bishop Barnes, avoided this problem by deciding that the expanding universe was really a pulsating universe. It expanded for a while, and then the forces became unbalanced and sent it back in the other direction. The conversion of matter into radiation, occurring in each star, and the re-creation in space of matter out of that radiation, could be connected with the forces that alternately expanded and contracted the universe.

As a minor matter of interest, if their theory were true, the galaxies might not now be running away from us at all. We think they are because we are looking at light which left them as much as 150 million or even 500 million years ago. In the meantime, the universe may have started back, and the galaxies may now be bearing down on us—or rather on each other—in a deflating-balloon effect. But we won’t be able to see this for millions of years.

It’s a striking notion. And it certainly by-passes the uncomfortable question of what caused the primal atom to explode into this universe. The universe, Barnes and Millikan might say, just always was. But there’s trouble even with this answer; the uranium which dates the earth and causes difficulties in the atom-explosion theory, causes the opposite kind of difficulties here. For a pulsating universe would be infinitely old; all the uranium would have long since broken down into helium and lead. The timetables are still out of order, somewhere.

Another try at escaping the whole mess was to explain the red shift as not even indicating expansion, but something else altogether. Einstein’s theories had shown that matter and energy are not different things, but different states of something basic. Matter could turn into energy—as in the stars or in the atom bomb—and back again. Consequently, when light passed through the gravitational field of a large star—or through an area of bent space, in the Einstein way of thinking—the light would be deflected or bent, just as though it had weight. This was proved in 1919 during an eclipse, when stars near the sun were shown to appear a little out of place.

Maybe and Perhaps Now if light traveling through space is held back a little by each particle of dust—and the great “empty” black spaces actually have vast quantities of such dust in them—then maybe the light would be gradually slowed down by the total gravitational force of all the dust. The farther it had come, the more dust it had passed through—and the slower it would be, and hence the more red shift it would show.

That could explain everything and do away with the expanding universe idea altogether. But who turns up to slaughter this excellent suggestion? Hubble, of course. For his calculations on the total amount of matter in space show that there just isn’t one hundredth the amount necessary to produce the red shift on this basis.

Wistfully, some bedraggled theorists have wondered if maybe light doesn’t just get “tired” while traveling through space and time. They don’t know why it should; they haven’t a scrap of evidence to prove that it ever does. But wouldn’t it be nice if it did? That could explain everything. But alas, there just isn’t anything to base this supposition on except wishful thinking.

Something Is Happening The mystery, therefore, remains. One thing is clear: There is undeniable evidence that something is happening. And perhaps the discrepancies and contradictions will disappear as scientists perfect their equipment and smooth out their theories. Almost every major astronomer in the world has said, or believes, that the new 200-inch telescope on Palomar, peering twice as far into space and seeing about eight times as much of the universe, will solve the mystery. It will look beyond to the faster-receding galaxies, it will look for more of the “bunching-up” effect, it will remeasure the curve of the universe, it will see if there are perhaps any great holes of truly empty space outside the present limits of observation, and it will make possible better calculations as to the rate and duration of the universe’s expansion.

And the answers to this great riddle should also answer the greatest questions man can ever ask: When and where did the universe begin, and when and how will it end?

Martian Life May Exist on Earth
THAT kinds of life which originated elsewhere in the solar system not only have reached the earth in past ages but still are here in much the same forms as when they arrived is the opinion of a Viennese scientist. Striking evidence is supplied by the bacteria which live in salty, desert regions and develop red colors, like the prevailing red color of the planet Mars.

Explosion of Sun Overdue

ACCORDING to calculations of astronomers, an explosion of the sun is some 600,000,000 years overdue, assuming that our private star has the same number of outbursts as the average star—which may not necessarily be correct. A definite number of star explosions occur in a definite area of space in a given period, and from these facts it is computed that the average star explodes once in 400,000,000 years.

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German Telescope is UNIQUE in Design

ANEW departure in the way of design and operation of high power telescopes has been effected at the Treptow astronomical observatory, near Berlin, which is one of the best in Germany. Of a design that is distinctly unique—it might be called modernistic—the new mammoth telescope, shown in the photo at the left, has many features that add immensely to the facility of star-gazing.

One of the chief features of the new telescope is the barrel. It is built in sections, and resembles at a distance a war time “big bertha.” Because of this the inhabitants of the surrounding territory have given it the name of the “Peace Gun.” The barrel is 70 feet long, with a weight of 22 tons; the lenses have a diameter of 28 inches and are a foot thick. Three months were required in the grinding and polishing of the lens which magnify the stars to a size where all the details of the surface of distant planets are plainly visible.

The mechanism for focussing the telescope on the distant stars merits special attention. The entire instrument with its subsidiary equipment hinges on a huge axle 8 feet long which supports both the barrel and two eleven-ton counterweights. This axle is geared to a powerful motor which gives elevation to the barrel, while rotation is achieved by rotation of the platform. The mechanism is so arranged that once a star is brought into focus it can be followed in its course through the heavens without further adjustment. The astronomer is thus relieved of the necessity of changing his position as the position of the observed planet changes. He merely needs take a single position for observation and the mechanism keeps the star in focus. Steel girders form the major support of the entire construction, and the barrel of the telescope is braced rigidly with heavy cables. The total weight amounts to more than 130 tons. The instrument is protected by a gigantic canvas cover during storms.

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• The WORLD’S BIGGEST EYE (Aug, 1930)
• 200 INCH TELESCOPE Is Greatest Engine of Science (Aug, 1930)
• Photographing Stars with a Rocket (Aug, 1930)
• THE POOR MAN’S TELESCOPE (Aug, 1930)
• How They Trailed a New Planet (Aug, 1930)
• 2,000-Inch TELESCOPE May Reveal End of Universe (Aug, 1930)

Tall Periscope Aids Golfers

A NOVEL “skyscraper” periscope shows golfers the blind fairway at the third hole at the Aberoovey golf course in Wales.

The unusual periscope is 30 feet tall. At the third hole of the course the fairway rises so abruptly from the driving tee that golfers can not see the green even though the hole is only 165 yards long. By peering through the periscope, waiting golfers can see in what direction to drive and also note when the putting green is clear.

The periscope is a hollow wood tube fastened to a pole. The top of the instrument is covered with a gabled roof to protect it from rain.

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race to the planets

BY WILLY LEY

It won’t be long! Earthmen are fast removing all obstacles to me conquest of Interplanetary space* EARTHMEN have set their thoughts on the conquest of space. More than that, they have set their hands to it. In dead earnest they are committed, in both the Old World and the New. It now can definitely be said, the race to the planets is on!

Most experts are agreed that the first unmanned guided missile will strike the Moon some day during the next ten years. The fist manned Moon rocket will probably follow within five years after that. But that trip will not include a landing; it will be merely a trip around the Moon, at a comparatively close but respectful distance, with return to Earth after circling it a few times.

The best rocket fuels known at the present time will not allow more than that. Even a landing on the Moon with subsequent return to Earth seems to be somewhat beyond the reach of chemical fuels. It might be explained that the simplest way of expressing the value of a chemical fuel is to name the exhaust velocity which it will produce. The largest known rocket motors burn alcohol with liquid oxygen, and their exhaust velocity is about 7,000 feet per second.

Considering that sound moves through air at the rate of about 1,000 feet per second, this is quite a high figure, though it is only about half the theoretical exhaust velocity of that combination. If you wanted to go only to the Moon, land there, do some preliminary surveying and research, take off again and return to Earth, you would need a ship which carries some 20,000 times as much fuel as its own dead weight.

That, of course, is impossible.

But there are a few more powerful chemical fuels. Let’s jump across the pages of the handbook of chemistry and look at once at the most powerful usable combination known to chemists—hydrogen burned with ozone instead of oxygen. This has a theoretical exhaust velocity of 18,500 feet per second. Actually an exhaust velocity of about 12,000 feet could be obtained if scientists and engineers knew how to handle that combination, which they don’t at present. Supposing they do learn, the space ship which is to land on the Moon and return to Earth still would have to carry a fuel load of about 150 times its dead weight, and that is impossible, too.

Though this sounds gloomy, it probably isn’t very important. For the chances are that the engineers will never learn how to handle the hydrogen-ozone combination in a space ship, but that by the time the first chemically-driven guided missile crashes on the Moon, we’ll probably have the first rockets propelled by atomic energy.

In July 1946 a new project was quietly started at Oak Ridge. Its name is NEPA, from Nuclear Energy for Propulsion of Aircraft. The purpose of the project is to investigate how atomic energy can be utilized for the propulsion of aircraft and rockets. No outsider knows right now how it can be done and it is quite probable that the insiders, at this moment, are not too sure, either. But in time they will emerge with an answer.

One principle of that answer is clear even now. A rocket operates by burning a fuel with oxygen and by expelling the products of combustion. A nuclear energy rocket could not do that; it would not be allowed to consume valuable uranium or plutonium and throw out the fission products. These products would be fantastically fast, but they’d be too light in weight, and therefore inefficient. An atomic rocket would need something else to throw away, a kind of “filler mass.” Rear Admiral William S. Parsons stated recently that this filler mass could be hydrogen gas.

The hydrogen gas, he said, would not be “burned” as a fuel, it would just be heated to very high temperatures by atomic energy—say something resembling, or rather derived from, a high-intensity pile—and expelled through the exhaust nozzles. Hydrogen is advantageous for this purpose from every point of view. The lighter the molecules of the exhaust gas, the better it lends itself to a high exhaust velocity. Hydrogen has the lightest molecule that exists. Hydrogen is also cheap and plentiful— being one of the main constituents of water—and if one has the necessary machinery for producing very low temperatures it can readily be liquefied and in that state is easy to handle.

Supposing that the atomic engine is capable of expelling the hydrogen gas with a velocity of 65,000 feet per second (nine times as fast as the exhaust of a V-2 rocket), the moonship will need carry only about 2.5 times as much fuel as its own dead weight. The V-2 rocket now carries a little more than 3 times as much fuel as its own empty weight. This means that the moonship can be built without special difficulties, once the gentlemen of NEPA find a method of handling atomic energy for this purpose. And—it must be added— once they solve the difficult problem of protecting the travellers from the radiation which emanates from the atomic engine.

Since the mass which is thrown out of the exhaust nozzles is hydrogen, that moonship could also go to Mars and back, provided that water can be found somewhere on the Moon. Astronomers do not like to commit themselves on this point, but-most of them seem inclined to grant the probability of water existing somewhere on the Moon, in the form of ice, of course. A well-stocked refuelling station for atomic space ships will carry slugs or bars of plutonium-rich uranium (carefully stored so as to be below critical mass), liquid hydrogen for the rocket nozzles to throw away, liquid oxygen for the travellers to breathe, and some minor items such as vitamin pills and frozen food.

But if there is no well-equipped refuelling station, any body of water will do. In that case the ship will have to carry the necessary equip- ment for electrolysis of water, resulting in gaseous oxygen and gaseous hydrogen, and the equipment for liquefying these gases. The atomic powerplant can provide the necessary energy for these operations, while the low temperatures of the lunar night will make the job of liquefaction easier than it is here on Earth.

Before we go on let’s have a look at the solar system, just as any traveller on Earth would have a look at the map before he sets out on a trip. We need to, much more than the surface traveller. Any island, however remote, to which he might want to travel, at least stays in one place—but our planets do not stay in one place.

The case of the Moon is easy, for it moves along with and around the Earth in space. It would be possible to set out for the Moon at any moment. Things are slightly more complicated than they may seem at first glance, but the pilot of a space ship bound for the Moon does have the enormous advantage that he can see his target all the time. The navigator who is bound for Pit-cairn Island is not as well off.

But if the ship is going to Mars things are different. All the planets move around the sun—fortunately all in the same direction and all about in the same plane—but they do not move with equal speeds. Mercury, innermost of the planets, is the fastest by far. Venus, which is next in line, is somewhat slower, Earth, which comes next, is still slower, and Mars, outside the orbit of Earth, is again slower. They all move in ellipses, with the sun in one focal point. The space ship also has to move in an ellipse with the sun in one focal point; but the ellipses which are the orbits of the planets are nearly circular, while that of the space ship orbit will be elongated— elongated enough to touch the orbit of Earth at one end and that of Mars at the other.

Of course you can get a space ship into such an orbit any day you please, but that’s not enough. You don’t just want to touch the orbit of Mars, you want to touch the planet Mars at some predetermined point in its orbit. It’s somewhat like trying to meet a fleet which is going ahead under full steam. Your only advantage is that you know the planet’s course and speed; astronomers can tell for any hour for many years to come just where Mars is going to be.

But we are getting ahead of the story. First the ship has to take off from Earth. It might be able to take off directly, but this would be impractical. The exhaust of an atomic-powered ship might be radioactive and therefore highly dangerous to the spectators; it certainly would be inefficient. The efficiency of a rocket motor increases as the speed of the rocket increases. In a space ship powered by nuclear energy the inefficiency would be really bad, just because it has such a high exhaust velocity.

For these reasons it will be practical to carry the ship to a high altitude, say 50,000 feet, and there bring it up to a speed of some 450 or 500 miles per hour. More would be better, but that is about all one can get from a large jet-propelled carrier plane. At the highest altitude at which the carrier plane can fly at high speed, the rocket will separate from it—the plane getting out of the neighborhood of the dangerous radioactive exhaust blast as fast as possible.

The exhaust will appear as a flame, for two reasons. The hydrogen gas will be heated to incandescence and look like a lance of light merely because it will be so hot. And the hot hydrogen will unite with the oxygen of the air and burn in the chemical sense. This will add precisely nothing to the propulsive power of the rocket, but it certainly will increase the spectacle, especially when seen against a night sky.

The first job of the free ship will be to get out of the atmosphere which impedes its movement; therefore its nose will be pointed upward vertically or almost vertically at first, until it reaches a height of 80 miles or so, then it will be slowly depressed until the longitudinal axis is almost horizontal. This—for difficult mathematical reasons—is the most efficient method of getting a space” ship up to full speed. The result is a curve which has been named the synergy curve; it points east for highest efficiency in take-off. Once the ship has attained a velocity of 5 miles per second it cannot fall back any more. If necessary it could make a half circle around the Earth in order to point at the place in the sky where the Moon is due to arrive some 90 hours later. That would not take any fuel; but for many reasons the time of take-off would be so chosen that the synergy curve points in the right direction.

Experiments with centrifuges have proved that a normal man with a sound heart can stand ten minutes of an acceleration of four gravities. The atom-powered ship will need only about eight minutes of such acceleration to have all the speed it needs to get to the Moon. It need only throw out a little more than 2\k times its own unfuelled weight of hydrogen gas, then it will not need active propulsion any more; its momentum will carry it to and across the line where the gravitational attraction of Moon and Earth balance each other; and from then on it will fall to the Moon, because of the Moon’s attraction, and it will have to resume power only to brake its fall and land.

The spot for landing is one chosen because it is either known or at least suspected that there is water in the vicinity. If there is none, there will be enough hydrogen left in the tanks to return to Earth—a relatively simple matter because the Moon does not have the terrific gravity of our home planet. If there is water the tanks can be replenished with liquid hydrogen, however, and the really long trip begun.

The Moon revolves in an orbit around the sun along with the Earth. Its speed is such that the attraction of the sun is just balanced. If the ship adds its speed to that of the Moon it will move too fast for the sun to hold it in this orbit, therefore it will drift outward in the solar system, away from the sun. Farther out is the orbit of Mars, and that planet too moves with just the speed which balances the attraction of the sun. Since there, farther out, the sun’s attraction is less powerful, Mars can move more slowly, and does. While the ship is coasting outward, the sun, of course, is steadily pulling at it from inward, and it is this pull which decreases the ship’s surplus speed, so that when it gets to Mars the speeds of ship and planet will very nearly match.

Most of the trip from the Moon to Mars is again performed on momentum, just like the trip from Earth to the Moon. And, strangely enough, the trip from Moon to Mars does not require much more “throw-away mass” (hydrogen) than the trip from Earth to Moon. But it is going to take much longer. Just how long it takes will depend partly on the relative position of the planets, but mainly on the amount of fuel available. The maximum duration is 258 days for the trip; with some extra fuel expenditure this could be cut down to some 80 days. Most of the extra expenditure would be made when the ship comes close to the planet. The ship may have too much surplus speed when it gets there. Such speed would have to be reduced by rocket action, or the ship would overshoot its mark.

We know that there is water on Mars. The blinding white polar caps of that planet, as seen in the telescope, prove it. But the fact that the polar caps melt completely during the Martian summer also proves that there is not very much water— a customary estimate assigning an average thickness of 2% inches. Still, what is very little water for a planet is a great deal for a space ship, even for thousands of them, so ithe problem of getting fuel for the return to Earth is easy, as far as the planet Mars is concerned.

During the long drift outward the pilot of the space ship can establish his position well enough by means of astronomical observations, but when he approaches the planet closely these will not be precise enough. With the instruments which a space ship could carry, an error amounting to a few dozen miles could be expected. As long as the planet is a million miles away, such an error does not matter. Later it might become disastrous. But experiment has proved what was theoretically certain from the outset— that a radar set is a means of measuring distance in empty space as it is on Earth. We know what an exploring party will mainly find on Mars—sand. But we have no idea what else such a party would find. There are dark areas which once were taken to be seas. Now it seems much more likely that they are not seas, but either just darker areas, areas of ground darker than light-colored desert sand, or areas of vegetation. It seems quite certain that some of them are areas of vegetation. We still don’t know what the famous “canals” are. What we see might also be vegetation. There is no way of telling from this distance whether rows of stagnant pools are in the center of these possible lines of vegetation. Or what else. They might, they just conceivably might, be actual old canals, long broken down and useless. It will take a space ship to find out.

The explorers will have plenty of time both to find out and to recharge their liquid hydrogen tanks. The reason is, the planets move. And that they move with different speeds. If the explorers decided to return to Earth after a week’s stay, they could easily return to Earth’s orbit— but the Earth itself would be a very, very, very long way from the point of its orbit which they would reach. To set out on the return trip at once would require either an ultra-powerful ship or a period of patient waiting. And since the first ship is likely to be under-powered rather than over-powered, a waiting period is indicated. In the most unfortunate case that waiting period would be 455 days, about a year and three months; but if there is some power reserve available, that waiting period can be cut down to only a few months, about the time which would be needed for purposes of general exploration. The ship, while waiting, could easily make exploratory trips to the two small moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, or to distant points on Mars itself, since the hydrogen these short trips would use up could always be restored. It is only the long drift inward through the solar system, the long drift home, which requires waiting and timing and hoarding of fuel supplies.

The trip back will in one way be the same maneuver which got the ship to Mars, but in others the opposite of that maneuver. Mars, you remember, moves in its orbit with just the velocity needed to counterbalance the sun’s attraction. If it moved more slowly than it does, its speed would be Insufficient to counterbalance the sun’s attraction and it would begin to spiral toward the sun. When the space ship takes off from Mars it deliberately effects just that. The synergy curve will be pointed in such a way that the ship falls behind the planet and is, seen from the sun, slower than the planet. This being the case, the sun’s attraction wins out over the speed of the ship and draws it inward, in a long ellipse, and as the ship is drawn inward it moves faster and faster. Since we have talked about a surplus speed for the first maneuver, we might call this a deficit speed. If the deficit speed is measured just right in the beginning, the ship will drift inward in the solar system until it reaches the orbit of the faster-moving Earth, having picked up, while drifting, enough speed (much as a stone rolling downhill picks up speed) to match that of the Earth. And if the timing is right, the Earth will be in that spot, or very close to it.

This sounds fine, but the trip is not yet over. The Berth has its gravitational field, too, and when the ship gets close, Earth wants to draw it down. But the Earth also has an atmosphere, which here is fortunate, for it is possible, by careful maneuvering, to utilize the atmosphere as a braking medium.

If the ship were allowed to plunge straight into the atmosphere it would simply burn up, like a meteorite. But if it is made to just graze the outer layers, its speed will be reduced somewhat, without the ship’s being heated to a dangerous extent. Swinging out into space again it will cool off, radiating the heat away, and be ready for the next grazing. This will be repeated four or five times. Each time the speed will be reduced further, so that, in the end, the ship will be ready for landing. (By the time the first ship returns from Mars, this maneuver will be well known and well tested by pilots who have returned from trips around the Moon.) Once definitely inside the atmosphere, additional parachute-like “air-brakes” can be used. The first few may burn up; but each one, even if it is destroyed, will in the course of its use reduce the ship’s speed some more, helping it finally to approach the surface with reasonably slow speed. The final landing may need rocket help once more—but that will be rocket help without the collaboration of the atomic pile. It will be hydrogen gas burned with oxygen in the old-fashioned manner, so that the landing area will not be drenched with radioactivity.

The exploration of space will be the next great chapter in the history of humanity, and it may be that this” exploration will help to avert future wars. Because when a man meets another man on the Moon, or on Mars, or on Venus, that man will no longer be a Frenchman, or a Russian, or a Chinese, but another man from Earth.

The exploration of space will not begin tomorrow or the day after, but it is so close that most of the people now alive will see its beginning. In the laboratories scientists are hard at work on problems that already begin to yield. The race to the planets is on.

britain’s challenge

BY Alfred ERIN

The British Interplanetary Society is working at top speed to put a Made-in-Britain space ship on the Moon—first. On the following pages MI presents a summary of their program, obtained by Alfred Eris in an exclusive interview with officials of the Society in London. Here is a serious challenge to American rocket-men!

BRITISH scientists are working at top speed on plans to conquer space and already have outlined a five-stage program to culminate in the voyage of a space ship to the Moon.

The British Interplanetary Society has subdivided itself into research groups, the better to tackle the many different problems of space travel, and at the same which is a rotatable air-lock, which will spin in the opposite direction from that of the space station itself, to enable passengers to step from the ship into the station. Imagine the living quarters in the shape of a ring around the cylindrical powerhouse, about halfway up, and from the living quarters, attached by means of spokes, an annular ring, parabolic in shape. The other end of the powerhouse culminates in steam coils, surrounded by a wide annular ring, smaller than the first but also acting as a parabolic reflector to trap the rays of the sun.

The intense heat generated thereby can be counterbalanced by “cold coils” on the back of the annular rings, which will be in perpetual shadow and intensely cold.

The auxiliary powerhouse consists of a smaller power station with a parabolic mirror. The observatory has neither rejectors or rings. Conditioned air and electrical power are supplied by cables stretching like tentacles from the first two units. All three parts of the station will be aided by small jet-propulsion units to swing on their own axes at the distance considered most convenient, 150,000 miles from Earth. Turbines on the space station will be spun by nitrogen. There will be no loss of this gas as the units will be working in a closed cycle.

The space station is expected to be built piecemeal by parts brought up from the Earth. Centrifugal force will maintain it if its orbit between the Earth and other olanets.

British scientists consider the space station of paramount importance for, as always, the prime problem is fuel. No other factor is expected to be half so troublesome. If atomic energy can be utilized, their worries will be just about over. Failing that, they look at current research statistics and shudder.

For figures now available indicate that a round trip to the Moon, including a landing there, will require 229 tons of fuel for each ton of payload. If no landing is made, the amount will be cut by 60 tons. These figures are based on the best propellant available today, a combination of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, which will yield a speed of a little over three miles per second. But, obviously, the consumption of fuel is based on the chemical energy of the fuel, and if a small atomic-energy unit can be harnessed the boys will have no cause for weeping.

Radio communication between Earth and the space station will be simple. A beam of only 50-watts power is considered ample, as there is no attenuation with distance in a beamed signal, and the space station will obviously be in the direct line of sight.

•The British space-travel enthusiasts were delighted to hear, recently, of the assertion by one of the foremost German rocket men, Von Braun, that the Germans were working on rocket space ships and expected them to be in use in 10 to 15 years. This period they hope to cut down considerably by intensive work carried on right now by research groups throughout England.

For the sake of efficiency, the Society has organized research sections under the following classifications: Orbits (involving their best talents for mathematical calculations and computations), Fuel, Electronics (including Instruments), Structures, Motors, and Nozzles.

Opening their great scheme of interplanetary exploration will be a flight to the Moon. Since the Moon’s low gravitational influence (about one-sixth that of the Earth), will require much less power for the space ship to free itself of its field, the Moon suggests itself as the ideal jump-ing-off spot for voyages to Mars and Venus, next on the itinerary.

The voyage of 240,000 miles to the Moon is expected to be nowhere near as formidable as it sounds, once the fuel problem is solved more satisfactorily. Driven by chemical reaction units, the space ship could do it in 48 hours. Venus, which is 26,000,000 miles at its closest approach to the Earth, is considered 48 days’ travel, and 90 days will be needed for Mars, 35,000,000 miles away.

Atomic energy, harnessed and adapted specifically to rocket propulsion, promises the super-concentration of power which will bring travel to the planets down to a matter of hours and not days. The space ship will make ample use of radar in altimeters and meteor detectors. Although hitting a meteor is a distinct possibility, the mathematical chances are so minute that the scientists refuse to worry about them.

To deal with the effect on any space ship of the intense heat on one side and the extreme cold on the other, the British machine will rotate in its flight at the rate of three revolutions per second.

Communication between the space ship and Earth will be by means of ultra-short-waves beamed directly, as between the space station and the Earth.

The approved design for a space ship provides for a cylindrical rocket with a control chamber in its nose for a crew of three astronauts, or space travelers. The ship will be powered by main and auxiliary jets, the whole propulsion system having a honeycomb design and the firing of the rockets in series being under the control of the crew, who will regulate the rate of ascent- so as not to accelerate at a speed which might be injurious to the human body. As it spends its rocket tubes, the space ship will jettison them.

When nearing the Moon, the auxiliary jets will very gradually be employed to turn the ship over, so that the landing is made stern first, in position for the takeoff.

Landing will be made by the power of the main jets. On their return to Earth, the astronauts will detach the nose part of the rocket with its equipment, and it—and themselves—will be landed by parachute. The astronauts will, of course, wear conditioned suits specially built to withstand lack of atmosphere and extreme cold. It is thought that any leading manufacturer of high-altitude equipment in Britain could take the specifications and make their space suits to order.

The question of the effect of almost unthinkable speeds [Continued on page 162] upon the human body has already been studied. It is found that the body is not affected by velocity, but by too violent acceleration. The space ship will be designed with fully controlled propellants so that the rate of acceleration is not permitted to impose a fatal strain upon the occupants. Again, the use of atomic power should permit of a gradual building-up of the acceleration, with no adverse effects upon the astronauts.

The British Interplanetary Society is over 300 strong, composed of engineers and scientists, in distinction to now-defunct similar organizations consisting of dreamers and theoreticians. Work on space travel is kept at a high pitch. Come what may, they are resolved that the lunar equivalent of Paul Revere will some day shout, “The British are coming.” American rocket workers they dismiss with a smile, as toiling in an unscientific fashion. They describe the Americans as building rockets first, firing them, then wondering why they went wrong. They are not intimidated by United States Army Air Force missile experts who are quoted as saying they expect to be able to shoot a rocket to the Moon within 18 months.

British rocket men point to British achievement in radar and other developments, considered by the uninitiated as pure U. S. inventions, and feel that their lead in space travel should be taken as a matter of course.

Whether the first space ship to land on the Moon will be British or not remains to be • seen. Whatever happens, man is certainly no longer Earth-bound. How far in the universe he will eventually travel, no one living today can guess. •

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Is Radio Earthbound?

By D. C. WILKERSON

Can Radio Waves conquer interstellar Space and travel from planet to planet? That is the question the scientists hope to answer with Prof. Goddard’s proposed Moon Rocket, Which will contain a radio transmitter.

HOW IT LOOKED IN 1925

This article was originally published in RADIO NEWS, our sister publication, in March, 1925. It shows that even 33 years ago realistic individuals were thinking ahead on the subject of radio transmission. It is rather amazing that author Willterson predicted the future so well, as evidenced by the fact that we are receiving transmissions from space today. Note the similarity of the rocket conceived by Dr. Goddard back in 1925 (shown on page 52) to a modern rocket, the “Thor” (shown here).
—THE EDITORS

DURING the last year, more than any-other year in history, men have been given the results of scientific radio achievements which stimulate the imagination, as a spur to lagging engineering and technical development.

We have experienced the near approach of Mars, the flurry of mysterious radio impulses apparently connected with the fiery planet in some way, but the findings of this investigation *have not been thoroughly tabulated from all quarters.

Professor C. Francis Jenkins, the television and telephotographic expert, made signal graphs of the electrical disturbances for the whole time of Mars’ approach period, and there are other results yet to be centralized for study from all over the world.

From scientific research and countless years of grinding labor, the human race has been able to grasp the immensity of the eternal universe to which the earth is an insignificant part. The average “man in the street” now knows that we on earth are flying at tremendous speed through the heavens, linked to the sun and the other planets, our solar system being in turn linked in some way to the greater system of tremendous stars.

Astronomers have yearned for centuries to bridge the gap beyond our own infinitesimal plane, and determine whether or not nature has peopled other worlds with living, thinking beings like ourselves. The physical limitations of space and the force of gravity chain us to the earth, but the eye, aided by giant telescopes, has pierced the heavens and found there much food for reflection.

Even with the tremendous magnifying power of the mightiest of modern telescopes, we cannot discern on any other celestial body traces of life. The face of the moon, the nearest object in point of miles to our earth, discloses no vestige of animal or vegetable life. The greenish haze noted on the surface of Mars has not been satisfactorily observed generally.

HEAVISIDE’S RADIO WAVE THEORY The sudden growth of radio has placed in our grasp a new force of most portentous possibilities. It is practically instantaneous. Its wave moves with the speed of light. A modern English physicist, Dr. Heaviside, has propounded the theory that radio waves are earthbound, being guided by the electrical properties of the surrounding gases.

This theory enjoys great vogue among men of high authority. More adventurous minds have hoped that by means of the radio wave we might communicate with other living beings on other planets. What a masterful conception to stimulate the hopes of man! To reach out beyond our own little sphere and find other civilizations will do more to advance human thought and development than all the works of religious founders for all time.

Communication from airplanes and airships between each other and with radio ground stations has given support to the thought that possibly the radio wave is not fettered to earth, and that it might penetrate to interstellar space.

Electromagnetic disturbances caused by mighty eruptions shown in spots on the face of the sun have been noted on the earth and records made from them in radio stations. If such disturbances can project a radio wave from the sun to the earth, then is it not proved that these impulses can carry on through space?

To obtain exact proof of this perplexing question has been a problem impossible of solution, since we had no way to set up radio waves beyond the earth’s zone of influence, until Professor Goddard first brought out his projected Moon-Rocket.

THE MOON-ROCKET The Moon-Rocket has been discussed in these columns before, and a lengthy discourse about it would be out of place here. Simply, the plan is to build a giant rocket which shall move through space by the ejection-reaction principle. It will carry a series of explosive charges sufficiently powerful to drive the body of the rocket beyond the gravitational pull of the earth, the successive charges to drive the rocket to the moon. As the mighty projectile progresses through the heavens, it will be watched by thousands of astronomers who will check on its flight, speed and the place where it lands on the moon. This latter item, of course, depends upon the accuracy of calculations made for the proper time, place and direction of initial flight.

TO INCLUDE RADIO TRANSMITTER It is now proposed to include in the mechanism of the rocket a small but powerful radio transmitter which shall be set in operation at the moment the rocket is released. Coincident with the verifying of the flight of the rocket by astronomers, the vast army of radio listeners will stand by their receiving sets with watches in hand noting the strength of signals as long as they shall continue.

This will settle once and for all whether or not the radio wave, our only present-day hope for signaling other intelligent creatures on other planets, can conquer the void between our interstellar neighbors and ourselves. What a wonderful inspiration it will be to mankind to realize that there exists elsewhere than on earth other living, thinking beings.

Some plans were made for carrying a man as a passenger in the Goddard Rocket, and volunteers were even listed for the journey. Such a human sacrifice has been discouraged, for there is little doubt but that a man thus carried could not survive the trip for many reasons. It is also believed that the first tremendous impulse of the rocket in flight would be great enough to burst the blood vessels of the passenger; therefore the idea of the passenger has been abandoned.

In lieu thereof, the radio transmitter has been suggested as a passenger. It will certainly provide intelligent means for obtaining important facts about the vast spaces existing throughout the universe.

When the world of science knows for a certainty that the radio waves can carry through interstellar space, the time when further and more ambitious attempts to communicate with our planetary neighbors will be hastened.

This may answer the cynical queries of skeptics who demand to know what use all this sort of thing is to the world. Every new scientific fact produced supplies further tools with which to better our fast-growing and complicated structure of civilization. Let us hope success crowns the efforts of all men who dare to pioneer the distant fields of our universe.

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Is There Life On Mars?

By G. Harry Stine

Viking-Aerobee Operations Engineer White Sands Proving Ground AT THIS moment the planet Mars is swinging to within 35,400,000 miles of the Earth—about the closest it ever gets—and astronomers the world over are training their telescopes on it. They will be making drawings, photographs, and spectrographs of the surface details in order to find answers to some of the mysteries which surround the sun’s fourth planet.

With the advent of the space travel era almost upon us Mars will be receiving a lot of attention because, after the moon, it is certainly the next target in space for our up and coming space explorers. And there are a number of important questions about that planet which can only be answered by going there.

Mars is very much like the Earth in many respects, but very much different in others. It is almost one and a half times as far from the sun as we are and therefore receives less solar energy in the form of heat. In addition to being a colder world, Mars is not quite half the size of the Earth. Its day is just about the same as ours—24 hours and 37 minutes—but its year is almost twice as long. The Martian atmosphere contains some oxygen—not very much— and the temperature on Mars’ equator at noon is about 70 degrees F.; however, the temperature quickly falls far below zero at night.

The Martian surface is nothing like the Earth’s, however. We can see no oceans and have some reason to believe that oceans never existed on Mars. But we do see other things, and those things are puzzling.

Back in 1877, an Italian astronomer named Schiaparelli announced that he had observed markings on the surface of Mars that looked like channels—or, as he called them in Italian, canali. This stirred up a storm of controversy which hasn’t been settled yet and probably won’t be settled until the day we land, a space ship on Mars. Many people mistook the word canali to mean “canal,” and a canal to us is a waterway which has been built by intelligent beings. Percival Lowell spent his life trying to prove that intelligent Martians built the canals as a sort of super irrigation system for a planet which had lost most of its water.

There can be no doubt that there is . something there which certainly looks like straight lines; I’ve seen them myself through the telescope. But whether they are cracks in the hard crust of Mars, natural features of a different N origin, or waterways is hard to de- You can find proponents for all three theories.

But another astounding Martian feature which ties into the canal problem is the change which takes place on the Martian surface. When Spring conies to the northern hemisphere of Mars, the prominent polar cap begins to shrink and a very unusual phenomenon takes place. A cloak of greenish-purple begins to spread southward across the Martian surface, turning the reddish-ochre desert areas different shades of green. Sometimes it follows the lines of the canals, spreading out from them. It avoids some areas altogether.

Most astronomers seem to think that this color is due to some type of vegetation. Most of them are willing to admit that conditions on Mars—temperature, air pressure, etc.—would allow such simple plant forms as lichens or mosses. They admit that it may be due to something which is not life as we know it. But there they stop cold.

They go on to point out that the surface conditions of Mars would not allow intelligent life to evolve. The conditions are all against it, they say.

But perhaps we are somewhat biased. Thus far we have studied life—and the physical and chemical sciences—mostly on the surface of our own world under a very narrow range of temperature, pressure, gravitation force and atmospheric composition. As an example, let’s take a look at Earth from the viewpoint of a hypothetical Martian: “Life on Earth? Impossible! Too much free oxygen in the atmosphere and you know what a violent chemical element oxygen is! And the Earth is much too wet; nothing could exist down there with all that water! And as for temperature, it’s far too hot!”

When we speak of life—intelligent life in particular—we are thinking of our own world. It has what we call a planetary ecology; there are both plants and animals, and a balance exists between them. It is a very complicated balance. For example, plants and animals have been using and reusing Earth’s air and water and soil chemicals for millions of years, yet they are still there, having been recycled over and over again by this balance of forces.

Here, however, is something which we can apply to Mars. It must also have a closed system if there is life on the planet because such a closed cycle is required by life—or at least we think so. If it has plants, it must also have something similar to animals to balance out the forces.

To go a step further, let’s take a very broad look at life in general. Life here on the Earth is made up of carbon atoms which have the ability under the conditions which exist here to form themselves into very large and complex molecules. Life itself is based on this, because out of these organic carbon molecules come the amino acids and the proteins which are the basis of life. Human beings are merely a very large and complex arrangement of these complex carbon molecules.

Perhaps the basis of all life is a situation and environment capable of producing large and complex molecules. Perhaps large and complex molecules exist on Mars, formed under conditions which we have not yet explored even in our own chemistry labs. (We have barely succeeded in duplicating some of the conditions we think might have produced life here!) And perhaps Mars does have some sort of intelligent life, based on a totally different life chemistry than we know.

Rocket men with their eyes on space travel are interested in this type of planetary astronomy . . . and astronomy in general since the future of the rocket lies in that direction. And they realize that Mars will probably give us a whole new look at what life really is. The Red Planet may even give us some of the answers to the meaning of life itself. There it is: a whole new world with life of some kind on it, there for us to study when we get there.

Whole library in a nutshell
This latest space trick might work well with earthbound libraries. The magnifying viewer on the astronaut’s knee holds 12,000 pages of microfilmed manuals, maps, and navigation data for use in the Apollo lunar spacecraft. The film is coded and indexed so a flip of a switch puts any page on the screen in 15 seconds.

METEOR CUTS LIGHT WIRE

A meteor’s prank recently plunged the town of Herman, Nebr., in darkness. The heavenly missile. falling during the night, clipped a main transmission line. Then it dug a fifteen-inch hole in the ground, where witnesses say it lay spouting flames for hours. Electric repair men hurried to the scene to splice the first recorded break made by a meteor. When the object was recovered, it was found to have been fused into a shape grotesquely resembling a small pig.

Meteors of this size seldom reach the earth, luckily for its inhabitants. But specimens of more than fifty tons have been recovered. An Oregon miner became the first person on record to run away with a big meteorite when he carted a fifteen-ton specimen from a field, whose owner sued successfully to get it back.

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Exploring the Moon by Rocket Ship

by ROBERT ESNAULT-PELTERIE as told to ALFRED ALBELLI

Alexander the Great wept because he had no more worlds to conquer, but the modern scientist is more optimistic and plans to conquer worlds situated millions of miles from the earth. In this article a famous French experimenter tells of his problems in building a moon-rocket ship.

Editor’s Note: After 25 years of investigation in aeronautics and astronautics, Esnault-Pelterie has worked out a systematic plan of procedure for making a flight to the moon. He first plans to build a rocket, containing only scientific instruments, that will travel 100 miles into the air, descending by parachute and bring back data of the stratosphere. This he believes will be done in two years.

Then he plans to construct mail rockets for European and later trans-Atlantic service. These mail rockets at first will not carry passengers but this will come when the pilotless ships have attained perfection. From the experience thus gained he believes that a successful interplanetary rocket can be constructed. He explains his problems and how he hopes to overcome them, in this article.

THE first question that comes to mind is—what is the interplanetary problem?

I think we can understand the answer to this question best when we picture our position in the universe. We live upon a little speck of dust called the Earth. About 92,000,000 miles away is the Sun that warms us and keeps us alive. The Earth continually moves around the Sun in an orbit that takes 365 days to complete. Moving with it, in other orbits, are the other planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, et cetera.

The Earth, in addition to being a satellite of the Sun, has a satellite of its own, the Moon, which circles about us continually at a distance of about 240,000 miles, completing its revolution every 28 days. It is this Moon that is to be the outer terminus of the first interplanetary journey.

There is a property possessed in common by all these bits of dust, and that is gravitation. The planets are held in their orbits around the Sun, the Moon is held in its path, and even more important to us at this moment, we are held close to the Earth by this force.

In order to escape from the Earth to reach the Moon we must be able to oppose that force of gravity and lift ourselves against it for the distance of 240,000 miles. Surely this is a gigantic task. For consider —the airplane has been able to climb only eight miles above the surface of the Earth. The balloon, without passengers, has reached an altitude of only 22 miles.

Fortunately this force of gravity will let go if we pull against it hard enough. As we draw away from the Earth the force does not remain the same. It diminishes according to the square of the distance. This is a fact that will be of great help to us. It means, for example, that if I were out in space 4,000 miles from the surface of the Earth, the pull upon me would be only one-fourth that of the Earth’s surface. If I were 50,000 miles away from the Earth, I would weigh only one pound.

From that point on, as I neared the Moon, my weight would decrease to zero. At a point 220,000 miles from the Earth, between the Earth and the Moon, I would weigh nothing.

The speed with which we must start the projectile away from the Earth to allow it to escape into space is the speed we must attain in making an interplanetary journey. It can easily be calculated. It is 6.664 miles per second, or about 80 times the speed of the fastest airplane.

We need an engine that does not require air, and also one that can be started gradually. These requirements are met by the rocket, which not only has the advantage of the airplane, of expending its power gradually, but also the additional advantage of needing no air for its propulsion. I gave a mathematical demonstration and experimenters, such as Professor Robert Goddard, have found that a rocket develops its greatest efficiency in a vacuum.

The rocket is a very simple device. It works by burning fuel in a confined space. The fuel by burning turns into gas which creates a terrific pressure in the combustion chamber.

This pressure not only causes the gas to rush out of an exhaust nozzle, but also to push the rocket ahead.

The principle by which the rocket works is that of recoil, which was explained by Newton in his third law of motion. The principle is demonstrated to every sportsman or soldier when he fires his rifle. The kick of the rifle is the same reaction as that which makes the rocket go forward.

The rocket we will use will be a very complicated and a refined piece of apparatus. Instead of ordinary black powder, we will use a fuel perhaps a hundred times more powerful. We will have to find ways of burning this fuel quickly, of controlling it, of steering the rocket. We must take this device which is perhaps thousands of years old and make it over into an engine which will perform the greatest task we have ever asked of anything.

Our first problem is to find a fuel, more powerful than any ever before used. We must have a fuel that is dependable, so that we can tell exactly what it will do under any circumstances. Our next problem is how to design the rocket so that we can get the most out of the fuel. Perhaps when we come to shoot the rocket finally at the Moon, it will not be a single rocket, but two or three, joined end to end, and arranged so that as each rocket burns out, it will drop off, finally leaving only the tip, with its passengers, to go on and complete the journey.

This is only a part of the mechanism we must provide to make the space flight possible. We must make provision on the ship for supplying our air to breathe, our heat, our food, and other necessities. We must have instruments for navigation. We must also have instruments which tell us with accuracy our speed, for while we must acquire a velocity of 24.000 miles an hour to keep from falling back to earth, we must not exceed that speed. If we do we are likely to go shooting off into space and never come back.

Therefore the problem of building a space ship means not only finding adequate fuel, but also controlling those fuels, finding light but sufficiently strong materials from which to construct the ship, making instruments, and providing conditions that make life possible for crew and passengers.

The serious scientist, who realizes and understands these difficulties, each one being a great job in itself, will not predict how soon all of them will be solved. I am certain, however, that there is no obstacle in the way of an interplanetary flight—unless perhaps a voyage to one of the distant planets—that cannot be overcome by an application of scientific principles which we now know.

My own method of approach to this problem was first to lay the theoretical foundation—in other words, to work out the mathematics of the problem. The results are in my book, “L’Austronautique”. Having laid the theoretical foundation, I am ready now, as soon as conditions are fitting, to begin experimental work.

Experiments on rockets are very costly. The work requires precision, not only in making and handling fuels, but in building the rocket itself. I do not claim to be able to build a ship that can travel to the Moon tomorrow or ten years from now. There are too many things which must be done first to allow any predictions.

I have now gone far enough to know that with $40,000 with which to carry to completion experiments on fuel that I have in mind, I can within two years build a rocket to travel upward 200 miles. Such a rocket would carry instruments to gather information of great value to science. It would also serve to give me further data on its operating possibilities, and I would discover what could be done to extend its range and efficiency.

Finally at the end of five years of labor, I believe that at a cost of $1,000,000 a rocket could be built to travel between Paris and New York in half an hour.

This rocket, carrying mail at first, and later passengers, would leave its terminal, rise into the upper strata of the air, up to 800 miles above the Earth, and crossing the Atlantic in a great elliptical flight, descend in a long, gentle glide to its destination. At such heights great speeds of 7,000 to 8,000 miles an hour, necessary to this flight, would be possible because there would be no resistance from the air.

All that I can say is that as a result of 25 years of study of this problem, I believe it could be done.

As for the next step, the building of a space ship—naturally an estimate of that would be even more inaccurate. For, as I have just shown, as we go en the problems become more exacting and more difficult.

The contingencies that must be provided for are enormous. Only after we have mastered the difficulties of building rockets capable of traveling from point to point on the Earth can we begin to undertake a rocket for the greater distances. Nevertheless, I have full faith that a Moon rocket can and will be built.

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The WORLD’S BIGGEST EYE

A GROUP of American astronomers soon will experience one of the greatest scientific thrills of the century. On the night the world’s most tremendous telescope is completed they will take turns peering into a tiny, brilliant eyepiece.

Looking at the heavens with the aid of the most extraordinary piece of glass ever poured, they may make discoveries that will completely change man’s conception of the universe.

After years of research the men in charge of building the monster instrument for the California Institute of Technology are now at work. Astronomers estimate that the mirror, 360,000 times more powerful than the human eye, will magnify the moon and planets 10,000 times. Through the telescope the moon will appear only twenty-five miles away, at which distance large buildings could be easily seen. The 100-inch telescope on Mount Wilson, only half the diameter of the newest instrument, can detect a candle flame 5,000 miles away. With the aid of this telescope approximately 2,000,000 nebulae, each as crowded as the Milky Way, have been found. It can peer into space a distance of 400,000,000 light years.

The new telescope, astronomers hope, will penetrate at least three times farther into space, thus opening an unexplored sphere thirty times the size of that now sounded. Already tasks that appeared insurmountable have been overcome in constructing the curved mirror that has 240 square feet of surface and is to be smoothed to an accuracy of two one-millionths of an inch.

Under the guidance of Dr. George Ellery Hale, who built the 100-inch telescope, leaders in many branches of science are co-operating with the International Education Board of New York which provided the $6,000,-000 telescope fund. Drs. J. A. Anderson and Francis G. Pease of the Mount Wilson observatory are in charge of the work.

Instead of gathering light by lenses, all large astronomical telescopes use a curved mirror to gather the light from a star and focus it at one point inside the barrel of the telescope. There a prism diverts the light to a point outside the barrel, or a flat mirror returns the gathered light will be able to sit inside the tube, directly in the path of the incoming light, for in spite of the shadow the observer will cast on the mirror, less light will be lost than if the rays were shunted outside.

The most crucial part of the project—that of making the giant reflector—is now well under way. The problem was to find a material that could be ground to the necessary accuracy and that would remain unaffected by atmospheric changes. Glass and fused quartz were tried but a super pyrex borosilicate glass finally was selected after a trial mirror 120 inches in diameter, the largest ever made, was poured, allowed to cool and examined. The giant 200-inch disk of this substance was poured recently. Instead of a deep disk, the mirror is comparatively thin, with an intricate system of ribs and webs on the back to give the surface strength and to provide grips for the metal backing. Even in this thin form, the completed mirror will weigh nearly twenty tons. Months will be required for the mirror to cool, after which it will be ground and polished. In the final stages polishers will work less than an hour a day. Otherwise the heat from their bodies might affect the curve on the surface.

Instead of silver, the new mirror will be coated with aluminum. Inside a huge vacuum chamber individual atoms of aluminum will be deposited on the glass surface, giving it a reflective power greater than that of silver and one that is especially sensitive to weak ultraviolet rays. Meanwhile, a vast amount of auxiliary instruments like thermocouples, spectroscopes, and photoelectric cells are being built. Among other unique devices is a solar furnace consisting of mirrors and burning glasses with which astronomers hope to focus the sun’s rays and obtain a heat approximating the 6,000 degrees centigrade temperature of the sun’s surface.

The ponderous fork-type mounting from which the telescope barrel will swing is also being designed. Huge motors and cylinders of compressed air will move the whole base under the control of an astronomical clock so that after the instrument has been pointed at a star, it will automatically follow the object as the earth turns. A change in temperature of only a few degrees would influence the “figure” of the mirror, throwing its focal point out, so the huge dome is to be double-walled to prevent the entrance of heat during the daytime. The mirror will remain covered and protected when not in use, and water circulating around its mounting will keep the mass at the same temperature as the outside air when the shutters of the dome are rolled back. The mirror will never be used to observe the sun, for the hot rays might permanently disfigure its surface.

Contrary to accepted notions, the telescope will rarely be used for visual observations of the stars. Photographic plates are infinitely more sensitive to light than the human eye. By means of time exposures astronomers can obtain pictures of stars so faint the eye would never detect them. In the future astronomers will make their greatest discoveries in the photographic dark room.

Instead of trying to make the telescope increase the size of star images, astronomers hope that it will condense them to the tiniest pin-points of light. No telescope powerful enough to show the shape of a star can be built and the goal of the telescope builders is to achieve an instrument in which even microscopic vibration is absent.

Nearly as important as the mirror itself is the site at which the telescope is to be erected. A place where the stars twinkle less is sought. Twinkling is caused by unequal densities in the air, giving a fuzzy appearance to star photographs. The choice now has narrowed down to one of four mountain tops.

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• THE POOR MAN’S TELESCOPE (Jun, 1934)
• How They Trailed a New Planet (Jun, 1934)
• 2,000-Inch TELESCOPE May Reveal End of Universe (Jun, 1934)

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Science Newsfront

Last-minute news and notes to keep you up-to-date

By ARTHUR FISHER

NASA fights auto pollution

The big guns of aerospace technology are being enlisted in the battle against the major source of air pollution in this country—automobile exhaust. The mission: to reduce the one-quarter to one-half ton of carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons each car spews into the atmosphere in a year, as a result of incomplete fuel combustion. The battle plan: Develop a thermal reactor that would replace the standard exhaust manifold and serve as an afterburner. But such a reactor must withstand temperatures occasionally exceeding 2,000 degrees F, thermal shock from cold starts, and jarring vibrations—all problems routinely encountered in space exploration. That’s why the National Air Pollution Control Administration has asked NASA’s Lewis Research Center to help develop new materials and designs for thermal reactors. Engineers at Lewis are using a V8 engine hitched to a number of experimental reactors. They have learned that the temperature inside must reach a minimum of 1,400 degrees F to clean up exhaust products. Next will come studies to develop iron-chromium-aluminum alloys as reactor materials, and eventually a ceramic core that can withstand shock.

Shaking up the Lunar Rover

Vibration testing of Boeing’s Lunar Roving Vehicle is under way. Seen here on a large electromechanical vibrator, a test version of the moon explorer will be buffeted and jiggled to simulate the stresses of a Saturn V launch and actual operation on the lunar surface. The first of four Lunar Rovers is scheduled to be carried on a forthcoming Apollo mission. It will be nestled in a cargo bay at the bottom of the coming Apollo Lunar Module.

Shock waves break records

The fastest and most powerful shock waves ever produced by man have been generated at the Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science, as part of continuing research into ways to control hydrogen fusion. The waves flashed down a special, 10-foot-long metal tube at six million miles an hour—some 3,000 times faster than the speed of sound, and 10 times faster than any shock waves previously created. The tube was filled with deuterium—a hydrogen isotope. The waves, driven by a two-million-ampere jolt of electricity, heated the deuterium gas to more than 10 million degrees, enough to release neutrons and fuse its atoms into helium nuclei, actually the very essence of the fusion process.

Ink jets copy photos

A new technique developed at Sweden’s Lund Institute of Technology can make a nonphotographic high-quality copy of a picture on ordinary paper in just 40 seconds. It relies on writing with a thin jet of ink forced at high pressure through a nozzle. The jet draws a line on the moving recording paper. When 500 volts is applied to the nozzle, the jet instantly changes to a spray, and the line is interrupted (the spray droplets can be masked from the paper by a diaphragm). Thus the intensity of the line can be modulated by the voltage. The reproducing device actually scans the original optically and converts its information into electric signals, which then regulate the copying procedure to suit.

New wide-range laser

A new laser at Bell Laboratories, dubbed the “exciplex” for “excited-state complex,” can emit light in a range of colors from near ultraviolet to yellow-almost half the visible spectrum. The frequency desired can be selected by “tuning” the organic dye material that actually lases. Although other tunable dye lasers exist, this one has a tuning range four times greater than any previous single dye type—a very important advance for researchers who are investigating the interaction of light with matter and need to tailor the frequency of laser beams to specific requirements.

The rectangular chip you see almost lost on the face of a penny is a fullblown, infrared, continuous laser—the first of its kind. Made from a crystal of semiconductor materials, it can operate from a dry-cell battery at room temperatures, and needs no cooling. Thus a whole unit with power supply might take up no more room than a pocket flashlight. Scientists at Bell Laboratories, where the mini-laser was developed, say it will run for years and will cost mere dollars to produce. This laser, or one like it, will probably see duty in the not-too-distant future in communications systems. A single laser beam can carry many thousands of electronic signals, including phone, radio, and TV communications.

Salting the oceans with gold

The U.S. Government is dumping gold into the oceans. No, it’s not a gigantic boondoggle, but a joint effort of the AEC and the Army Corps of Engineers to study the effects of ocean currents on coastline erosion and sediment flow. The researchers dump sand tagged with minute amounts of radioactive isotopes of gold in coastal waters a short distance offshore. Then underwater radiation detectors can trace its movement out to sea up to 1,500 feet and parallel to the coastline more than 8,000 feet. Only a quart of the glittery sand is needed to investigate an area of more than 500,000 square feet of water-borne sediments. The dispersal can be monitored for a week before dilution and the radioactive decay make the gold undetectable.

Fort to get honorable discharge The Departments of Defense and Health, Education and Welfare are reported to be planning to convert the super-secret Ft. Detrick, Md., facility into a civil lab—possibly for critical medical and environmental research. Ft. Detrick has been a center for research in chemical and biological warfare.

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Daring Men in Seven Nations Aim to Harness GIANT Rockets

FIFTEEN years ago the rocket was a toy, fit only for fireworks or laboratory demonstrations. Twelve years ago only one scientist in the world, the American physicist, Dr. Robert H. Goddard, of Clark University, Worcester, Mass., was working to transform this ancient plaything into a source of power for fast vehicles. So rapid has progress been, since then, that today the rocket is a young giant, though as yet too impetuous and uncontrolled for commercial use.

Scientists and daring men of seven countries, including the United States, are making serious and audacious tests that may soon solve the problems connected with this form of transportation.

A few weeks ago I visited the Raketenflugplatz at Berlin, the world’s most extensive experimental ground for the study of rockets. It lies in Reinickendorf, not five miles from the heart of the German capital, and sprawls northward into the hilly, tree-protected country surrounding the metropolis. At this plant, larger than the famous flying field at Tempelhof, six engineers are working seven days a week to accomplish the miracle of harnessing giant rockets.

The name Raketenflugplatz means “rocket flying field.” It was not without design for the future that the Verein fur Raumschiffahrt, the German society sup- porting these experiments, laid out so large a field. Within five years, the engineers there have predicted, rockets carrying mail will leave and arrive at the Raketenflugplatz on schedules, connecting all Europe by fast projectiles.

When this first objective has been safely accomplished, the workers of the German society will be ready to try a more ambitious project. . This will be the shooting of a mail rocket across the Atlantic, to land somewhere near New York, with a cargo of letters or valuable express.

Such transatlantic rockets will be the forerunners of great rocket ships built to carry crew and passengers. They will cross the ocean from New York to Berlin in an hour, or two hours at the most, rising through the thick lower atmosphere on wings like those of an airplane, then speeding through the upper part of their course, perhaps five hundred miles above the surface of the globe, at an estimated speed of 3,000 miles an hour.

The chief engineers of the Raketenflugplatz are Rudolf Nebel, Willy Ley, and Klaus Reidel. They have announced that transatlantic passenger flights will not content them. Supported by a society of more than 1,000 enthusiasts, these German engineers hope some day to launch from their rocket field a bullet-shaped craft destined for the moon or one of the planets. They see no theoretical reason why it cannot be done, though difficult mechanical problems raise many practical obstacles. But one by one, through the cooperation of rocketors and scientists all over the world, these are being overcome.

IT MUST not be assumed that, : because their project is the largest, the Germans are the only ones working on the rocket problem, or indeed that the Raketenflugplatz is the only place in Germany where experiments are under way.

At present there are groups and individuals working in Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Russia, Roumania, and the United States to solve the technical barriers to the use of this new engine. In each of these countries the program is essentially the same—first an altitude rocket that will go up fifty, a hundred, or two hundred miles, to the extreme limit of the earth’s atmosphere, driven by powerful liquid fuels and properly equipped with scientific apparatus and a parachute to bring both rocket and instruments safely back to earth. Then mail rockets, under control from start to destination, shooting between cities, bearing commercial traffic at enormous speeds, to be followed by rockets capable of crossing the oceans or encircling the world, carrying freight and passengers. Finally, powerful ships of space, roaring to the moon or to our other neighbors in interplanetary space.

As you read these words, the first high altitude rocket may be hurtling upward from any one of nearly, a; score of experimental stations here and abroad, penetrating into that borderline between atmosphere and space that no instrument made by man has so far touched. When that has been accomplished we may look for the rapid development of rocket traffic, for the greatest problem is that of applying tremendously powerful liquid fuels in such a way as to get the full energy without bursting the rocket.

The fuel at present being experimented with by the Germans consists of liquid oxygen and gasoline. The oxygen is necessary because the combustion is so rapid that it could not be supported by the oxygen of the air. The handling of the oxygen is one of the chief difficulties. To keep it liquefied it must be maintained at a temperature colder than 183 degrees below zero, Centigrade. At this temperature even mercury is frozen, and special, elaborate containers must be used to handle the liquid.

ABOVE this temperature the oxygen . boils furiously, giving off quantities of oxygen gas. If the container is closed to prevent free evaporation a tremendous pressure is created almost instantly, and if no provision is made to relieve it, the container will burst with a terrific explosion.

During the rocket’s flight the oxygen fuel must be kept cold, yet under sufficient pressure to force it rapidly into the combustion chamber, which is the motor of the rocket. There, not many inches from the extreme cold of the oxygen, a temperature as great as that of the oxy-acetylene flame exists, fed by continuous streams of gasoline and oxygen.

A most important problem, and one that has not been definitely settled in spite of the many experiments, is the best shape for the combustion chamber, and the materials from which it should be constructed. This chamber, which the Germans call the rocket motor, is the place in which the continuous driving explosions take place. From one end of it projects the slightly flaring nozzle through which rush the escaping gases.

The best shape so far discovered is cylindrical, with rounded ends, so that the inner chamber looks not greatly unlike an egg with both ends the same size. It has been learned that the fuel must be introduced at the lower end, near the exhaust nozzle, but in such a direction that it squirts upward, the streams of gasoline and oxygen meeting somewhere above the center.

ROCKET motors are now being built of aluminum or duralumin, with an inner lining of thin copper. They are surprisingly small for the power they yield, and this is one of their advantages, shared by no other’ motor. There are no moving parts, consequently no mechanical losses. A small rocket motor not much larger than an ordinary egg, weighing complete not much more than a quarter of a pound, will yield a “lift” of about twenty-five pounds, and can shoot a ten-pound rocket upward for twenty miles in little more than a minute.

It is difficult to calculate the actual horsepower generated by a rocket motor, since there is no revolving shaft from which the brake horsepower may be taken. Further, the faster a rocket goes the greater its efficiency. This theoretically approaches the maximum when the rocket motor is moving forward at the speed of the ejected gases. This may be in the neighborhood of a mile a second, and since to date no rocket has ever gone so fast, we must depend upon calculations alone to give us the horsepower generated by such an engine.

Dr. Paul Heylandt, a German experimenter, recently announced that he had built a rocket motor weighing fourteen pounds capable of delivering 200 horsepower. A gasoline motor of the same power would weigh between 250 and 350 pounds—a comparison which shows the enormous advantage of rocket power in craft that require light engines.

Dr. Heylandt’s motor, attached to a specially constructed automobile, was tried out at Tempelhof air field. Burning a fuel consisting of liquid oxygen and gasoline, it emitted a roar that startled persons two miles away and sent the car forward at a terrific speed.

THE fact that vehicles such as automobiles and ordinary airplanes are structurally incapable of traveling at speeds sufficient to utilize the full efficiency of rocket motors may forever prevent the employment of this method of propulsion for such machines. Rocket vehicles will have to be streamlined to the last degree, perhaps shaped like military torpedoes.

In fact it was a ship of just this type that was recently described by Harold A. Danne, one of the aeronautical engineers in America who has given his attention to the problem. The transatlantic rocket ship will have a water-tight and air-tight cabin. The wings and landing gear will be drawn into the body when the craft is in full flight, and it will go roaring through the upper strata of the atmosphere at a calculated speed of 3,000 miles an hour or more, with a spear of bluish-white fire streaming out behind. These ships will have to be equipped with special navigating apparatus, probably devices like modern compensating artillery gun sights, to permit steering by the fixed stars.

Such flyers will make the journey from New York to Paris in an hour or an hour and a half. Los Angeles will be only about an hour away from New York. Commuters from San Francisco can go daily to their jobs in Chicago.

Before these wonders come to pass, however, a stupendous amount of work must be done. We are still in the first stage of rocketry, and a large portion of the work is now being done not with actual rockets, but on what technicians call the “proving stand” —a set-up on which rocket motors can be tested as to lift and efficiency without going to the trouble or expense of building the entire rocket. Less spectacular than actual rocket shots, the proving stand work is nevertheless extremely important at this stage.

LIQUID fuel rockets consist of three parts J —the tanks for fuel together with the necessary feed lines and valves, the motor or combustion chamber and its nozzle, and the “pay-load” compartment, which in small rockets includes the instruments, such as the barometer, thermometer, and camera sent up to record a picture of conditions at high altitudes, and the parachute or other landing gear.

Each part presents innumerable unsettled problems. The tanks must be arranged so as to give the rocket complete balance in flight, whether they are full or empty and in all stages between. The pay-load must be light, compact, and able to withstand shocks, and its compartment must be so placed as not to disturb the balance of the rocket. The motor must be of just the proper size and shape to get the most out of the fuel that can be carried, else the rocket will fall short of its mark, or worse yet, explode.

At the German rocket flying field an elaborate technique has been worked out for making and testing rocket motors on the proving stand. This work is necessarily dangerous, and every precaution is taken to have all workers in safety behind embankments dur- ing tests. The fuels are turned on by remote control, and the lift of the rocket motor is automatically recorded by a special clockwork device.

A series of experiments along this same line will soon be started near New York by the American Interplanetary Society, the organization in this country that corresponds to the German society. Several individual Americans, particularly Dr. Robert H. Goddard, are also carrying on experiments with rockets. Dr. Goddard is now devoting his full time to rocket experiments at Roswell, N. M., under a grant of $100,000 made by the late Simon Guggenheim.

ANOTHER American at work on the problem of adapting liquid fuels to rocket motors is Harry W. Bull, of Syracuse, N. Y., a student at Syracuse University who gained international attention by his experiments with a rocket sled last spring. Bull is now making use of the laboratories of the university to develop a powerful rocket motor, and may later build a rocket making use of his discoveries.

These are by no means the only Americans who are working on this fascinating new problem in this country and abroad. In Vienna, the American physicist, Dr. Darwin O. Lyon, is reported to be building a new rocket, following the accident that destroyed his attempt at Mt. Redorta, in Italy, last year. Several universities and technical schools in this country have now begun to ‘ turn their attention to rockets, and it is likely that several students of engineering will make a mark for themselves in the near future with discoveries now on the way.

Americans must hurry if they are to compete in this field with the engineers of Europe. There are now four European groups organized to further rocket study, and all are headed by engineers, scientists, or mathematicians. The president of the German Verein fur Raumschiffahrt is Professor Hermann Oberth, internationally known rocketor. A new organization has recently been formed at Vienna under the leadership of Guido Baron von Pirque, one of the foremost engineers of Austria.

IN LENINGRAD there is a group headed by Professor Nikolas Rynin, mathematician and engineer, and in France a committee of members of the French Astronomical Society annually awards the international Rep-Hirsch prize of 10,000 francs for the furtherance of astronautics, as the new science of space navigation has been called. This prize is made possible by the interest and generosity of Andre Hirsch, the French banker, and Robert Esnault-Pelterie, author of L’Astronautique, an aeronautical engineer of international reputation.

Perhaps never before in the history of science, with the possible exception of radio, has a projected development of this kind attracted so much popular attention, or enlisted so many enthusiasts. In Europe more than 1,000 persons belong to the various societies and contribute regularly to the experiments. In this country we have not heard so much of rocketry, but already there are several hundred enthusiasts organizing to begin experiments on an important scale.

Perhaps the day of huge space-ships flying to the moon is still a considerable distance away, but it is reasonable to believe that persons now living will see rockets cross the ocean with freight, and perhaps even passengers. It is not impossible, with so many working on the problem, that all of these things will come even sooner than we think. Rockets may be crossing the ocean yet in this decade.

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Chicago Man Stakes Claim to Outer Space

SCIENCE ILLUSTRATED PHOTOGRAPHS BY RUS ARNOLD

Early this year, 74 envelopes, each addressed to “The Honorable Secretary of State” of 74 different nations were dumped into a Chicago mailbox. Within the envelopes was the announcement that a new nation had been formed and was asking lor recognition. The intruder into world politics was a thing called Nation of Celestial Space, the brainchild and property of a Chicago publicity man and “industrial designer,” James T. Mangan.

The idea of a nation encompassing all of outer space smote Mangan late last year when he and Ernest Eckland, his partner, were idly talking about “stuff.” Eckland pointed out the window and remarked that there was “plenty of stuff out there.” That did it. On the stroke of midnight, December 20, 1948, Mangan declared the Nation of Celestial Space into existence. Then he carefully waited nine minutes for Earth to vacate the space it had occupied and also seized that. Mangan explains this act by saying, “I felt that the new state should have an absolutely flawless territory to start with.”

A well-known printing type designer, Robert Hunter Middleton, was hurriedly pressed into service to letter a declaration written and signed by Mangan as “First Representative” of the new nation. To insure its legality, Mangan recorded the declaration with the Cook County, Illinois Recorder who agreed to accept it only after a frantic and embarrassed consultation with the State Attorney.

Right now Mangan is more determined than ever, but quite bitter about people’s reactions. “They are interested to an over degree,” he complains, “but their interest is completely unintelligent. Only my wife, my son and my partner see the depth of it. This is a new, bold, immodest idea.”

He is also disappointed because none of the 74 different Secretaries of State have even acknowledged his request for recognition. To get around this snub, he has applied to the United Nations for a place in that body. They seem to be ignoring him, too. Despite this, Mangan insists that “before I die, I’ll get at least one nation to recognize me.” At the present time, Mangan is 52 years old.

Undaunted, he has announced that he will eventually sell chunks of space— the size of the earth—for a dollar a piece. Although he refuses to sell any of his territory yet, already he has received 400 applications for space lots. He feels the impetus for this came from Secretary of Defense Forrestal’s announcement of a project to build a space station far above Earth (see Escape from Earth, Science Illustrated, November, 1948, which indicated such a project was soon to be announced).

Incidentally, it may come as a severe shock to Mr. Forrestal and all the generals and admirals to discover their project is a direct violation of the territorial integrity of the Nation of Celestial Space. Mangan also lists as “trespassers” radio, television and wireless—all of whom are “violating the law right now.”

Mangan intends to be very strict with space ships and space stations which he feels will be actualities in 20 years and, if unchecked, will be zooming all over his nation. He has flatly declared that under no conditions does he want his space violated by any kind of war craft. If they come near it, he threatens, they will be treated as trespassers; but he doesn’t know what he can do about it.

Before Mangan sells space lots he first wants to draft a constitution. And before he can do that he wants to get a good definition of space. He says that the most widely used phrase—”It undulates”—is inadequate. He leans to his own definition: “Space is the great servant of the Universe . . . it is a great muscle loaded with magnetism.”

Mangan has very definite ideas of what kind of a country Celestial Space will be. He says the new nation will not be a democracy “as I don’t like voting.” There will be no taxes because “I don’t like taxes.” It will have no citizens, only Participants—people who buy a dollar’s worth of space. The rights of Participants are limited to “suggestion rights or thinking rights,” nothing more. Mangan is inclined to view his country as a kind of intellectual tyranny, but he thinks it will be very popular.

In addition to the revenue that will come from the sale of space (he points out that an incredible number of Earth- 42 size chunks can be carved out of his domain), Mangan is toying with the idea of issuing stamps and selling them to collectors. He is influenced in this by the example of Lichtenstein, a small country in Europe that derives a large part of its national income from the sale of the incredible number of stamps it puts out. Mangan is now trying to persuade some small U.S. town to change its name to Celestia and act as headquarters and post office for the nation.

An obstacle to Mangan’s claim to all outer space may come from land owners who may feel that they own the land below them and the air above. That concept has been breached time and again by airlines and the Civil Aeronautics Authority who feel that the air is free.

But even if people’s property rights extend straight up and down, Mangan believes it is not too important. He points out that space is curved and once you leave the limits of the earth, the distance between the boundary lines grows more and more huge. The concept of owning property upward and downward, Mangan says, “is the biggest oversight in history.”

Mangan also believes that Celestial Space will serve as a bulwark of international peace. “Look at it philosophically,” he says. “If you owned something 8,000 miles in diameter and 25,000 miles in circumference, you might realize that war is something to be laughed at. My nation might even give people enough bigness of thinking, enough bigness of disdain to make them feel international squabbles are petty.”

To make sure his nation doesn’t go astray, Mangan is about to change his will and leave all his property rights to his children. He is sure they will carry on the struggle after he leaves this planet forever.

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MAN TO THE MOON

What will that first trip be like when—soon— brave men soar into the skies to conquer the moon?

Here is a preview of that great adventure By Tom Alexander Author of Project Apollo: Man to the Moon { Harper and Row, New York)

Illustrations by Ray Pioch THE FLIGHT A top their vast and audibly seething assembly, three men lie breathing quick in concentration as earth and rocket begin to cast off lines. In the last second a hundred switches clatter, fires are kindled, valves open, flames belch and cough smokily. Long, slow vibrations run upward through the rocket to jostle the crew, then begin smoothing away as the launch pad’s hold-down clamps fall. The Saturn poises, struggling against earth’s gravity and an atmosphere clinging like glue to its sides. It rises in a thunderous stroke to stage-one burnout at 150 seconds and 36 miles. …

The million-pound thrust of the second stage cuts in to spiral the astronauts outward toward their parking orbit, where the third stage burns briefly, circularizing their elliptical path. For an hour and a half the craft drifts around its orbit. The computer muses on radar data coming up from earth and resets verity into the inertial-guidance system, whose delicate sense of direction has been a little addled by the stresses of the last few minutes. Finally, while the craft passes over that side of earth most distant from the moon, the third stage fires once more. Their radiation counters crackle warningly as they soar into the inner Van Allen belt, then diminish. They have 30 minutes between the belts to tend to the LEM, to fit it tip-to-tip to the Apollo capsule.

LANDING ON THE MOON Faint, steady noises accompany them: the whir of gyros, a tiny hum of inverters converting fuel-cell electricity into alternating current, a hiss of air in the pilot’s spacesuit. Periodically, a pump whines, a valve or relay clucks to itself, a control jet moans. Every few minutes, earth breaks in on the loudspeaker with a message, a query, or a time check—but already earth is only a mildly interesting “they” and the astronauts are “we.”

They cross past the moon’s dark western limb and brake into an orbit girdling the lunar equator. After long minutes of drifting through the darkness beside the moon, cut off from contact with the earth, the spacemen come in sight of the sun again, and shortly cross the terminator— the moon’s sunrise line. The commander and systems manager don their pressure suits and pull themselves into the bug—the LENT ( Lunar Excursion Module)—for good. Finally, in the eightieth hour of their voyage, another countdown begins during which they open the latches on the docking attachment that has clamped the two capsules together. A brief squirt from the bug’s thrusters and the two craft drift apart.

The bug tumbles over to point its engines forward along their flight path. The mains roar terrifyingly for 400 seconds, killing their orbital speed and allowing the moon’s gravity to take hold and start them downward. The craft slows rapidly to a near halt. As they tilt downward, they reduce the thrust until the rocket is roaring gently, and they are sliding along 200 feet above the moon.

Their descent is made as quickly as possible and with a slight forward movement to keep them clear of the dust that begins to fountain up far below from the invisible bite of their rocket’s blast. Moving along, they write the signature of their path with an increasingly denser rooster tail of dust, until, abruptly, some 15 feet above the moon’s surface, they cut their engines and plop into the enveloping dust of the Oceanus Procellarum.

THE RETURN FLIGHT The returning explorer sticks his head in through the bug’s snoutlike front hatch. He places the last labeled bag of geological samples and the photographic film on the cockpit floor and finishes hoisting himself in.

The crew grinds through its last cheek-out. Now, exactly on schedule, the whine of the mother ships radio beacon comes up over the low hills to the east. As the bug climbs within three degrees of the zenith, its takeoff rocket blasts ostentatiously as it parcels out precious velocity toward careful ends. The lunar scene disappears behind a curtain of dust and fire, and the bobtailed remnant of the bug rises off its spider-legged pedestal—a pedestal whose descendants could become as commonplace on celestial bodies touched by man as his 55-gallon drums have become in all the distant corners of the earth. Whirring downward from the moon, systems ticking through the 80 hours of cislunar space, Apollo winds out the final movements of the clockwork that was set in motion the instant it left earth a week before.

The plan is for the craft to enter the atmosphere 400,000 feet above the Pacific, skidding on its bottom, to plunge in and briefly sample the maximum of 10 Gs and 500 degrees permitted, then to skip out to the cool of space and weightlessness before making the final plunge. In the course of that plunge, Apollo’s skin will be seared, charred, and melted, and it will emerge looking like a burned popover.

Hopefully, at the right moment the slowed and sizzling capsule will tumble into the skies over the United States. At somewhere around 15,000 feet, like a whipped-cream topping, first a stabilizing drogue chute; and then the three main, slow-opening parachutes will bloom. Billowing parachutes are the happiest sight of all in the astronaut trade.

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Coast-To-Coast in 40 Minutes

By G. Harry Stine

Three hundred miles up at two miles per second, then an 1,800-mile toboggan ride—that will he the new transcontinental rocket.

IN A RELATIVELY short time you may be able to have lunch in New York City, hop aboard an airliner, and have breakfast in Los Angeles the same day! The present seven-hour plane trip will take only 40 minutes.

Let’s slide forward a few years. The place is just outside New York City on a cold, blustery day. Inside the passenger terminal, luncheon is being served in the restaurant. It looks like an ordinary airline terminal except for the signs over the desks: Transcontinent Rocket Lines, Atlantic Rocket Service and others. We check in at The Transcontinent Rocket desk where our baggage is carefully weighed —along with ourselves. Weight has always been a prime factor in rocket work.

When our flight is called we rapidly finish our light lunch and head for the boarding gate. Now, its silver sides shining coldly, a huge rocket transport stands beyond the gate, 80-foot delta wings spreading over the concrete ramp. Three rocket nozzles gape from the rear of the ship. It looks more like a very fast jet plane than a rocket. But its average speed across the continent will be 4,500 mph!

We climb a stairway into the belly of the craft where a stewardess, after consulting her weight-distribution sheet, directs us to a seat next to a window in the forward part of the cabin. The cabin looks much like a 1956 airliner’s except for the seats.

As we settle down, the stewardess comes around to explain that the seats are built to stay “under” us at all times; that is, they will automatically swing to support us under the terrific accelerations of the ship.

Then the belly hatch is closed and the ship is towed out onto the big field by a tiny tractor. It stops next to one of the big concrete flame pits, partially filled with water, which cool the rocket flame during the take-off to prevent it from damaging the ship.

The ship suddenly tilts up, being lifted to the vertical position by a device much . like those used for the same job with big guided missiles. Within a minute, the transport is standing vertically on its wing and rudder tips over the flame pit. Then the ground crew is swarming over it, attaching big hoses through which the rocket propellants—liquid oxygen and gasoline—are quickly pumped into the ship. Over 60 tons of propellants are put aboard, more than two-thirds the takeoff weight of the ship!

Our watches show it is 11: 50 a. m., New York time. The ship is now ready to go but the pilots up in their cabin must still complete an elaborate set of checks and tests. Once the rocket transport is on its way, there will be no turning back.

Then, over the loudspeaker comes the warning, “Stand by for lift! One minute to zero!”

We are securely strapped into our seats which have swung so that we are now lying on them.

“Thirty seconds!” Things start happening. There is the high whine of motors and gyros, the hiss of pressurized gas, the muffled slam of valves.

And: “Zero!” A thundering, muffled bellow assaults our ears. The rocket motors have started as scheduled, on the dot of noon. There is a slight vibration, then we are being pushed into our seat-couches by a tremendous force. If we could watch, we would see the ground slip quickly away, the clouds slide by and the sky growing progressively darker. But the acceleration of the ship has us pinned to our seats. It is, however, only a force of about three g, and men have taken much higher acceleration without discomfort.

The rocket motors keep burning for only two-and-a-half minutes. Once the proper speed has been built up, the rocket motors stop and the ship coasts upward like a giant artillery shell, aimed across the continent.

At this point, the ship is moving at nearly two miles per second and is about 100 miles up. We have been given the same two-mile-per-second velocity as the ship, and when the motors stop, we coast upward with the ship. And we suddenly feel ourselves falling!

But we are falling up with the ship. So we do not detect gravity. We are * in that strange state known as sub-gravity, or free-falling. We have no apparent weight. This does not cause discomfort; two decades of experiments by test pilots and flight surgeons have preceded this trip. Even back in 1955 they had learned that zero-gravity does not bother a person provided he is strapped down as we are.

By the time we reach our peak altitude of 300 miles and start falling back toward the ground, the Earth can be seen as truly round. The Great Lakes are visible, as is Hudson Bay far to the north. The sky is velvet black. The

cloud banks below shine pure white, reflecting sunlight.

Now we are falling back toward the ground somewhere over Illinois. Ordinary test rockets would come screaming in to hit the ground if they were making such a flight. But, thanks to some research conducted by Dr. Hsien-Tsien at the California Institute of Technology, we will not crash. Back in 1949, he laid out the basic course or trajectory we are now flying.

At about 25 miles altitude, there is just enough atmosphere outside so that the bat-like delta wings can begin to have effect. They lift. Rudders and ailerons are effective again. Air streams past the ship, more and more of it as we dive deeper into the atmosphere.

Then our seats change position again and the pilots bring us slowly out of our dive and into level flight. The big transport slices through the upper atmosphere; it is now a supersonic glider with its nose pointed toward Los Angeles. Falling from 300 miles altitude has given us enough speed to glide the remaining 1,800 miles to the West Coast.

The Great Plains of Kansas are under us now, wrapped in the thick of a blizzard of which we can see only the distant tops of the clouds. The high Rocky Mountains are under us in a matter of minutes. They look like tiny wrinkles in the surface of the greenish-brown earth.

The leading edges of the wings are glowing red-hot from the compression and friction of the air at this tremendous hypersonic speed. But their high-temperature alloys will not melt away. Were there not 25 years of rocket research behind us we would be in trouble because the ship has been encountering the so-called thermal barrier ever since it got back into the lower portions of the atmosphere. Air conditioning keeps the cabin temperature comfortable.

The Earth loses its apparent curvature quickly as we pass over Nevada. Up forward, the pilots are vectoring on Los Angeles with radar and talking to the rocket port tower there by radio. Then the Sierra Nevada range slides beneath us and we can see roads and fields and towns again. The ship slows noticeably as the big flaps and air breaks are extended. Then the big landing gear drops out of the fuselage . . . and we are over Los Angeles, still gliding, but heading for a landing under the controlling hand of the great-grandson of the GCA instrument landing system.

There is a squeal of tires as the ship touches the runway and the big drag parachute billows from the tail of the ship, dragging us to a quick, smooth halt. We are down in Los Angeles. The time is 12:40, New York time. The sun over the eastern horizon tells us something else, however. It is only 9:40 a. m. here in Los Angeles. We have raced the sun across America and won!

Such a rocket flight is not a fantastic dream to the men who are working with rockets today.

In the midst of all this research, rocket men can foresee a time when such a rocket trip from coast to coast will be a reality. There are problems remaining to be solved, certainly. But they are engineering problems and they can be solved. After that it will be only a matter of building “hardware” and making tests.

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200 INCH TELESCOPE Is Greatest Engine of Science

by WILLIAM JENNINGS

COOLING slowly in a brick igloo in Corning, N. Y., is a lake of 34 tons of molten glass, representing the greatest scientific project ever attempted by man. It took six years to reach this stage of the great task and it will be more than four more years before its success is known.

From far and wide scientists came to see the formation of this huge lake of glass— the pouring of the 200-inch telescope mirror that is expected to reach out into the unknown depths of the universe.

The work has hardly begun with the pouring of the mirror. Countless problems still face the scientists who have undertaken the task.

The most complex of these is the shaping of the mirror. To properly reflect and focus light from the stars the mirror of a telescope must have a concave surface that is exactly parabolic. Amateurs feel that they have accomplished much when a six inch mirror is polished and corrected to fractions of an inch after a few days’ work.

The shaping, figuring, polishing, and silvering of the 200 inch mirror will require four years’ time. When it is completed, it will have a concave paraboloid surface true to within two millionths of an inch.

When the mirror is ready, engineers must find means to mount this great disk of glass that is 16 feet 8 inches in diameter and 26 inches thick.

The telescope is of the reflecting type. That is, the light from stars is collected by a huge concave mirror, and focused on a smaller mirror which transmits the light to any eyepiece, where the astronomer or the camera sees the enlarged image. Usually the focal length of a mirror is eight times its diameter. The focal length determines the length of the telescope. A 200-inch mirror would require a telescope more than 130 feet long.

To overcome the engineering problem of mounting and swinging a tube of such great length, the focal length of the great mirror will be reduced to 55 feet, requiring a telescope only 60 feet long.

The popular conception that this great telescope may reveal cities and life on Mars does not interest astronomers. They believe they have proved quite conclusively that human life does not exist on Mars. The 100 inch mirror at Mount Wilson observatory determined that only one-tenth of one percent of oxygen exists in Mars’ atmosphere, not enough to support life.

The purpose of the 200 inch telescope is to gather more light to show the faintest stars, planets and nebulae. The huge “eye” will reach farther into space. It will increase man’s knowledge of the vast voids of the cosmos, in which countless universes whirl on to an unknown destiny. The instrument will be used chiefly for photographic, spectrographic and radiometric work, that will give astronomers a better picture of the minerals and gases existing countless light years away from the earth.

The gigantic telescope will cost $12,000,-000 and will weigh 1,600 tons with its mounting. It will gather about 2,000,000 times more light than the human eye or about four times more than the present largest telescope, the 100-inch instrument of Mount Wilson Observatory.

A great difficulty that still remains to be solved is the transportation of the mirror to the site selected for the telescope. At first the plan was to ship the mirror from Corning, N. Y., to New York city by rail, from New York to Los Angeles, via the Panama Canal, by sea, and then by truck to Pasadena and to the site selected by Mount Wilson astronomers.

The plan had to be abandoned when it was discovered that the mirror will be too high for railroad bridges if loaded on a flat car on edge and too wide for tunnels if placed flat on flat cars.

Apparently the only means to transport the glass disk is overland. There remains the complication of finding a route without bridges and tunnels that are too small for the world’s greatest package of freight.

Reflecting Surface to Be Aluminum The glass disk, after it is shaped and polished, will not be coated with silver as has been done in the past. The reflecting surface of the 200-inch mirror will be aluminum, put on the disk by a special process developed by Dr. J. Strong, of the California Institute of Technology. The mirror will be placed in a high vacuum. Tungsten wire, coated with aluminum, will be heated electrically until the aluminum evaporates and collects in the form of a vapor on the mirror.

The pouring of the glass disk was a great spectacle. Approximately 7,500 persons, in addition to more than 100 scientists, witnessed the operation. In a large furnace in the Corning Glass Works the 34 tons of pyrex borosilicate glass was heated white hot at 1,500 degrees Centigrade.

The mold, studded with circular cores which will leave indentations in the mirror for mounting purposes, rested on the floor of the brick igloo. A workman, with a shield before his face, opened a furnace door. Eight men shoved the 20-foot handle of a huge ladle into the glaring interior, dipped the bucket into the dazzling mass of liquid and came out with 750 pounds of molten glass.

The ladle was trundled along an overhead monorail to the brick igloo where 400 pounds of the glass were poured into the mold. The other 350 pounds hardened before it reached the mold, and the glass had to be broken off.

Workmen Labor Ten Hours Three ladles were used, one for each furnace door. For ten hours the ladlemen dipped and poured load after load, while spectators looked on in relays.

The ladles became red hot on each trip and had to be dipped into water to cool before taking on another load. The molten glass was so hot it melted some of the cores from the mold. These were found floating on the liquid glass, and had to be taken out with ten-foot pincers.

The glass is cooled very slowly so that it will anneal properly and will not crack. Within a short time the glass experts will be able to judge the success of the pouring. If the glass is found imperfect the great task will have to be done over.

In 1938 this telescope, the greatest ever devised, is expected to be ready to turn on the heavens and seek new fields. The great mirror will be held in a 60-foot skeleton steel tube in an observatory yet to be built.

When all difficulties are overcome, man’s greatest “artificial eye” will look three times farther into space than is possible now.

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• How They Trailed a New Planet (Jun, 1934)
• 2,000-Inch TELESCOPE May Reveal End of Universe (Jun, 1934)

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What You would Find on Mars

By R.S. Richardson and Glenn C. Moore

Staff Members, Mt. Wilson Observatory

SEVERAL months ago thousands of people in the United States became panic stricken when they heard on the radio that men from Mars were invading the earth.

At that time Mars was 223,100,000 miles away, almost the greatest distance possible.

But since then the Red Planet has been drawing steadily nearer, until on July 27 it will be only 36,030,000 miles away, the closest approach for fifteen years past and for fifteen years to come. From a faint speck of light, Mars has grown until now it appears brighter than any star in the whole heavens—a glowing ball of fire low in the southern sky.

Gazing at our nearest neighbor in space” this summer, we cannot help wondering what kind of a world it is. What strange things would we find on it? How would we feel there?

Astronomers have much to learn about. Mars, but they do have a very definite knowledge of certain weird effects that an Earth man would experience there as the result of conditions that are actually known to exist from the most recent and the best established astronomical studies.

If we were able to reach Mars, perhaps by space ship, it would be advisable to don a gas mask connected to a tank of air before venturing from our aircraft. For although Mars is known to have an atmosphere sixty miles in depth, it is lacking in oxygen, and may even contain gases that are highly poisonous. Also a high-powered rifle might be handy, for we have no idea of what dangers might await us.

Undoubtedly our first sensation on stepping outside and stretching our legs would be one of amazing lightness. After a few careful trials, we would find that a leap of ten feet in the air required practically no effort at all, and that we could still land without hurting ourselves. Similarly, we could throw a rock the size of our head sixty feet, and broad jump forty feet with ease. The task of unloading the space ship would be quite easy, for we could shoulder 300-pound sacks of provisions without much exertion.

In reality we would be no stronger than at the start of the journey, but the force of gravity on Mars is one-third of that on the earth, and therefore we would seem to be three times stronger. This would be a great advantage if any creatures of Mars attacked us, for if their strength is proportional to the force of gravity to which they are accustomed, we should be the equal of three of them. And if there were too many of them to fight, we should also be able to run faster than they can.

The low force of gravity would probably cause some ludicrous sensations at first. For example, we would have to make a distinct effort to sit down. On bending over, we would discover that the old familiar force we have always relied upon to pull us down the rest of the way is not there any more. And on pouring out a drink, the water would drift lazily through the air as if it were in a slow motion picture. We would also have to set the glass down very gently, for only a slight jar would be enough to splash the water out.

Suppose you had brought along an expensive pendulum clock that had been adjusted carefully before leaving, and a cheap pocket watch for ordinary purposes. After twenty-four hours, if the pocket watch read twelve o’clock noon, the pendulum clock would only have gotten as far as three o’clock in the morning. No matter how many times you took it apart and put it together again it would still go on losing twenty-two and a half minutes per hour compared with the cheap watch.

The trouble arises from the fact that the period of a pendulum depends upon the force of gravity, while the rate at which a spring uncoils does not. The only way to remedy the difficulty would be to make a radical change in the length of the pendulum. On the earth, a pendulum thirty-nine and one-tenth inches long will make a swing once every second, but it would have to be cut down to fifteen inches on Mars to swing once a second. Then the pendulum would drive the clock so that it would keep time with the pocket watch just as it did on the earth.

But even if the two clocks were made to agree, after about a week we would notice something else had gone wrong with them. Gradually both clocks would get out of step with the sun. That is, when the sun was highest in the sky so that we knew the time must be near noon, the clocks might read two o’clock in the afternoon. In this case, the error would be caused by the difference in the rotation period of Mars and the earth, a day on Mars being thirty-seven minutes twenty-two and fifty-eight hundredths seconds longer than here. Therefore, a clock that goes twice around the dial in twenty-four hours would appear to gain about thirty-seven minutes per day on Mars. This would be an easy matter to fix by making a slight change in the rate. It is interesting to note, that the force of gravity and the length of the day on Mars are known by astronomers so accurately, that a space explorer could rate his clock with complete assurance that only a slight adjustment would be required after reaching Mars in order for it to keep perfect time there.

The low surface gravity is caused principally by the fact that Mars is only one-tenth as massive as the earth. While the low force of gravity would give us a funny feeling at first, there is no good reason why we could not soon adjust ourselves to it. Certain other conditions, however, might prove harder to overcome. One of these would be the hardship of preparing a meal. To begin with, we could not cook by fire because there is not enough oxygen in the air of Mars to light a match. All the cooking would have to be done by electricity. Furthermore, although a little heat would soon set the water to boiling vigorously, it would only be lukewarm. For the temperature at which water boils decreases as the pressure of the air gets less. While we cannot say exactly what the air pressure is on Mars, it must be much lower than it is here, perhaps only twenty per cent as much. In this case, water would boil on Mars at a temperature of 140 degrees instead of 212 degrees, and a pressure cooker would be necessary to make it any hotter. The low atmospheric pressure might cause us severe distress, such as deafness and mountain sickness. Indeed, if the pressure were too low, we would have to go around incased in an air-tight suit inflated to atmospheric pressure in order to survive. Otherwise we would explode, like a deep-sea fish that has suddenly been brought to the surface.

Water is exceedingly scarce on Mars, and to be on the safe side we should bring along an abundant supply. There are no oceans, seas, or rivers, over sixty per cent of the planet being a barren desert. Practically the sole remaining source of water is the white deposit at the poles believed to be a layer of snow and ice a few inches thick. The polar cap shrinks with the approach of summer and a dark border forms around it that stays in contact with the cap, presumably due to water from the melting snow. Probably all the water on Mars could be emptied into the Great Lakes.

At noon in the tropics the temperature may rise as high as fifty degrees Fahrenheit. But a few hours after sunset it falls to freezing, and by midnight it must be much colder than the lowest temperatures ever experienced on the earth. It might easily become cold enough to freeze carbon dioxide, causing dry ice to form on the ground like frost. Large white deposits are often seen on the early morning side of Mars, that disappear later in the day as the ground is heated by the sun’s rays.

On the whole, we would find Mars a cold and dreary world, not at all suitable for beings like ourselves.

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Space Cops to Enforce World Peace

Man-made satellite rocketships may soon revolve in endless orbits around the earth, policing our civilization.

By Frank Tinsley

NATIONS of the world are racing to send the first man-made satellite revolving in an endless orbit around the earth. In the hands of an agressor, such a machine might mean slavery for all mankind, but as a police unit of the United Nations, it holds a promise of world peace.

Back in the closing days of 1948, when Secretary of Defense James Forrestal disclosed the existence of an “earth satellite vehicle program,” the press and public reacted with a gasp of incredulous amazement. For the first time, responsible officials had dared to admit that they were seriously investigating the fantastic dreams of Sunday-supplement screwballs!

To those in the know, however, the news was no surprise. The snowballing mass of scientific data on the space around us was no great secret. The problems involved in space travel —physical, engineering and human —were being methodically tackled and licked. Rocket designers’ slip-sticks were getting hot. Astronomers were calculating take-off ellipses and orbits. Physicists were feeding figures into vast mechanical brains and medical specialists were busy with the human angle.

Then, under the pressure of political crises, the furor was forgotten. No further news was forthcoming and, space wise, John Q. Public went back to sleep.

However, it was a short nap. During the past year, John Q. awoke again to a realization that this space stuff was more than mere entertainment. He heard solid technical men like William B. Bergen, vice president and chief engineer of the Glen L. Martin aircraft company, predict earth satellites in ten years.

Early in September, too, Space Medicine, a book edited by Prof. John P. Marbarger, Director of Research in the Aeromedical and Physical Environment Laboratory, was published. This book on the medical aspects of space travel is a symposium by eminent specialists in the field, including the Surgeon General of the Air Force. It covers the physical hazards of interplanetary travel, the effects of rapid acceleration and loss of gravity, bioclimatology and the possibility of life on other planets in a scientific manner that leaves no doubt of the book’s seriousness.

Then there was the meeting in London of the International Congress on Astronautics sponsored by the British Interplanetary Society. Gathered there were the world’s leading rocket engineers, physicists, astronomers and space scientists. The consensus of opinion of the Congress was that a 50-ton earth satellite vehicle would be boring through space about 300 . miles above the earth at a speed of 18,000 mph within a decade. In 25 years, they believe, flights to the moon may be possible.

A paper on practical interplanetary rocket design by Dr. Wernher von Braun was even more specific. Technical director of Germany’s wartime rocket research station at Peenemunde, Dr. Braun is the designer of the famous V-2 and now heads Uncle Sam’s secret rocket center at Fort Bliss, Tex. He believes that all the basic engineering know-how to build a chemical fuel satellite is now at hand. Given sufficient money, it could be ready to go in five years! What’s more, he has a preliminary design on paper right now, in the form of a huge, three-step rocket.

This multiple-step rocket builds up, by successive increments, sufficient speed to break the grip of the earth’s gravitational pull. This escape velocity is roughly 23,000 feet per second. The theory is simple enough. A three-stepper is three rockets in one, nesting atop each other. The topmost unit—the satellite vehicle—-carries the crew, instruments, etc. The lower two are simply booster rockets to build up speed.

Having reached escape velocity outside the earth’s atmosphere, the power is then cut off and the satellite coasts through space in a long curve. There is no loss of speed as the ship is now operating in a vacuum with no friction to slow it down. When the curve of its trajectory equals the curvature of the globe and the outward pull of its weight exactly counterbalances the inward pull of terrestial gravity, the ship revolves endlessly around the earth—a man-made moon.

A satellite rocket of this type is shown in the accompanying illustrations. It differs from von Braun’s concept in that provision is made for the satellite unit’s return to earth when its air supply approaches exhaustion. For this purpose, it is fitted with wings and stabilizers mounted in canard (tail-first) form. As in the recently unveiled X-5 supersonic plane, these have an adjustable degree of sweep-back, ranging from 40 degrees for rocket take-off to 10 degrees for landing as an airplane.

In the extended position, considerably more wing area is exposed, permitting a slower landing. The wing loading is further decreased by dropping the satellite’s fuel tanks and rocket engines just prior to landing. Records, films, and three of the four man crew are also parachuted to safety leaving only the pilot to bring her in.

A jet engine with separate fuel tanks, centrally mounted beneath the passenger cabin, is uncovered when the encircling rocket engine ring is dropped. This gives the pilot complete control during the final approach. The main landing wheels are also uncovered. Unfolded, they form a conventional tricycle gear with the nose wheel mounted in the lower tip of the vertical stabilizer.

Air, food, clothing and living equipment are being worked out by the Air Force’s Space Medicine Labs. Correct angles of ascent, orbits and braking ellipses through the atmosphere for slowing down the satellite on her return journey are probably already winking through the maze of tubes in mechanical brains. For there is still much to be done before the Columbus of space is outward bound.

But, given the go-ahead, it can be done and in a reasonable amount of time. Meanwhile, John Q. Public can only sit tight and hope that the first permanent space-buggy is a benign one, set whirling by the United Nations and carrying space cops to enforce peace on earth instead of war.

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• Rockets Soup Up British Bike (Dec, 1951)
• LIQUID OXYGEN RUNS AMAZING AUTO (Dec, 1951)

• Must Tomorrow’s Man Look Like This?
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How Scientists Visualize the REAL Flying Saucer Men

When scholars of the universe recreate spacemen along logical scientific lines, even those supposed weird little saucerites seem ordinary by comparison.

By I. B. Neer

PRYING eyes of science are probing into space again in the hope of detecting life on other planets. Armed with new facts, previously accepted theories about what lies beyond the Earth are being discarded by scientists every day and the possibility grows more and more distinct that creatures, more fantastic than our most vivid imaginations could conjure up, may inhabit the planets around us. They make those startling stories of weird little men in flying saucers seem tame by comparison.

Dr. Henry Norris Russell of Princeton recently threw a bombshell into scientific circles when he said: “It appears now to be probable that the number of inhabited worlds within the galaxy is considerable. To think of thousands, or even more, now appears far more reasonable than to suppose that our planet alone is the abode of life and reason.”

And H. Spencer Jones, Britain’s Astronomer Royal and one of the world’s most noted inter-planetary authorities, declares: “It is reasonable to suppose that life on any other world will have developed along forms that are entirely different from any with which we are familiar and that are possibly beyond our conception.”

Just how would those inhabitants look? Could they be men, beasts, plants or a combination of all three? To get the answer, experts in the field were polled. This question was put to them: “Knowing what we do about conditions on other planets—differences in the constitution of the atmosphere, in the proportion of land and water, the temperatures and other phenomena—what kind of people could conceivably inhabit them?”

Some startling answers resulted. However, all the experts pointed out one vital fact: on most planets, life as we know it cannot exist. An earthman would die at once on Mercury, his organs ruptured by the boiling of his blood in the tremendous heat of the sun—if he weren’t asphyxiated for lack of oxygen and dried up by lack of water. But the experts all agreed it is entirely possible that other planets may have developed their own life forms, entirely different from ours, suited to the very, very special conditions existing on their worlds!

Let’s go planet-hopping and take a look at a portrait gallery painted by the imaginations of inter-planetary experts.

First to Venus because it is most like the earth in weight and size and, except for the moon, comes closer to us than any other globe. Scientists are convinced that the planet Venus has an atmosphere, but it is composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide, with no detectable free oxygen. No evidence of water vapor has been observed, hence the surface of the planet must be largely desert, with no rivers, lakes or oceans.

What kind of people can live there? John W. Campbell, Jr., a profound student of extra-terrestial life who is editor of Astounding Science-Fiction, a magazine which has successfully prophesied many of the most astounding recent scientific discoveries, says: “Life can exist on Venus without oxygen. Here on earth we have micro-organisms which can stay alive in sulphuric acid and kerosene. Undoubtedly there are life forms which can take the oxygen from carbon dioxide, and why can’t these be creatures of flesh?”

Would a Venus man look vaguely like a human? “Why not?” counters Mr. Campbell. “After all, the human form on Earth represents two billion years of experimental engineering on the part of nature. It is the best possible form to do the things it has to. There is every reason to suppose that life on Venus, or on any other planet, if it has developed to a high level, has taken human form. But this form would have to conform to the specific conditions of the planet.”

Thus, Mr. Campbell points out, the lungs of a Venus inhabitant would have to be designed to perform a special function of extracting oxygen from carbon dioxide and his body cells would have a different chemical nature than ours. Now, since carbon dioxide is an extremely poor source of oxygen, a Venus man would have to breathe in considerable amounts to extract oxygen, hence his lungs would be developed to enormous size, giving him a tremendous barrel chest.

His food, Mr. Campbell says, would consist of fats and hydrocarbons. Trying to get life energy from these sources is like trying to burn gasoline under water—it can be done, but you need an awful lot of gas. Therefore, a Venus man would have a grossly protuberant belly and heavy, columnar legs to support his bulk. Because his energy source is poor, his movements would be lumbering and sluggish. And since he must eat such huge quantities, he would literally eat himself out of house and home, living a nomadic life, constantly on the prowl for food.

For this reason, Mr. Campbell thinks that the existence of a high culture on Venus is extremely doubtful since culture develops when people don’t have to spend all their time just keeping alive. The Venus man would have no time to think, hence the race would be virtually beastlike.

Now let’s leap to Mars and observe a Martian as described by Major James R. Randolph, engineer, mathematician and physicist, who taught at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N. Y., and Rhode Island State College and lectures extensively on interplanetary subjects. This is his conception of a Mars inhabitant: He has slender arms and legs, a large chest, wide, flaring nostrils and a broad mouth. His head would be about a quarter the size of his body; his eyes would be dark-adapted, with wide pupils. His size is problematical— Major Randolph’s guess is that he would be about four feet tall but he frankly admits there is no real basis for the assumption.

Now, why would a Martian look like this? Gravity on Mars is only 38 per cent of what it is on earth, hence everything would be easier to push, pull, pick up and carry. If everything weighs less, there would be less need for muscle, hence the reed-like limbs.

Why the large chest, the wide mouth and nostrils? There is considerable evidence that Mars has an atmosphere but it is extremely thin and the pressure is very low. Now, says Major Randolph, since air occupies more space if there is less pressure, a Martian would have to take much more air into his lungs than we do and oversize organs would result.

The mouth and nostrils would be wide for the same reason—larger air spaces would be required. The head, encompassing a normal brain, would be the size of an earthman’s thus disproportionate to the rest of his body.

Now come to Jupiter and prepare for a shock. Inhabitants who can conceivably live there are really something to see. The conditions on this planet are such that Jupiter man would have to be short, squat, with tremendous muscular developments and no eyes in his head! Yet despite this, he would be able to see in his own way.

Mr. Campbell explains: “The massive muscles would evolve because gravity on Jupiter is two and a half to three times that of earth, requiring the expenditure of considerable energy. The atmosphere is so dense and deep that it is perpetual, unrelieved night, making eyes useless, hence undeveloped.

“But why couldn’t a Jupiter man see by a built-in sonar system, much like bats?”

Next, we call on Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—the cold, remote wastes of the solar system. The atmospheres of these giant ‘ planets are known to contain hydrogen, marsh gas, helium, ammonia (on Saturn) and no oxygen at all. Such an atmosphere is poisonous to Earth men.

However, Fletcher Pratt, famous military and naval analyst and inter-planetary researchist, says: “Knowing what we know about these three giant planets, any life form there must be completely different from ours. It would have to use a nitrogen instead of an oxygen base, with lungs and other internal apparatus designed in such a way as to extract nitrogen from the atmospheric gases.”

Because of the known difficulty of extracting nitrogen from methane and ammonia, the creatures would have to possess enormous intake surfaces, and since gravity on the three planets is extremely high, they would possess heavy, squat forms. Light would be absent because of the distance of the planets from the sun, hence, like Jupiter men, the inhabitants would not have eyes but “some sort of organ to keep from running into things.”

Mercury, the fastest-moving planet in the solar system, has three lands—one of eternal day, one of eternal night and the third (the so-called intermediate zone) a land of light and darkness. The land of night is intensely cold, the land of day burning hot. But the sun alternately rises and sets in the area in between, producing temperature variations.

Kenneth Heuer, lecturer at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and author of the book Men of Other Planets, tells how a Mercurian might look.

He would follow the shifting sun every moment to stay in the most favorable zone, Mr. Heuer says. This means that he would be on the move practically every minute, would have no definite home, hence no culture could arise. A Mercurian would probably be four-footed, to make locomotion simpler. His food would consist of lower forms of vegetation, such as lichens on rocks. And again, because of the extremely tenuous atmosphere, the inhabitant would have a deep chest and large breathing orifices.

Now, between Mars and Jupiter are more than 50,000 tiny worlds—minor planets called asteroids which have not been able to hold any atmosphere. They are airless, waterless, barren wastes. Hence, Mr. Heuer believes no life such as we are familiar with could possibly exist. No life, that is, except . . .

“Why couldn’t mineral life exist there?” he asks. Rock men?

“Exactly. Mineral life could best withstand the conditions which, as far as we know, are totally devoid of any animal life-sustaining factors.” How would they move or talk?

“They wouldn’t move. They would remain eternally where they are. And why couldn’t they communicate with one another by some form of telepathy?”

There you have them—the creatures of other worlds as come to life in the scientific imaginations of the experts. Perhaps in centuries to come, man will span the vast reaches of the universe and at long last come face to face with his neighbors in space.

Until that time, however, we can only sit at our instruments, study the heavens and, based on what we see, let our imagination roam into other worlds. •

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Photographing Stars with a Rocket

WILL science ever be able to take photographs of the spectra of the sun and other stars with cameras far outside the range of the earth’s atmosphere? Speculation on this possibility has been renewed by the recent experiments of Prof. Robert H. Goddard, of Worcester, Mass., in launching rockets of his own design powered with a secret liquid propellant which he invented.

Contrary to popular belief, Prof. Goddard has no intention of occupying one of his rockets on a fantastic journey to the moon. As pointed out by Dr. C. G. Abbott, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, a close friend of Professor Goddard, the professor’s experiments are directed toward a scientific exploration of the upper heavens at distances now far beyond the reach of man.

Spectra of stars and other heavenly bodies are now shut off from human observation by stratas of ozone many miles up. If one day a Goddard rocket is able to penetrate that layer and climb above it, it would probably be possible to take automatic photos of the spectra of the celestial system, a feat now impossible. The layer of atmosphere surrounding the earth, estimated to extend to a height of 45 miles, acts very much like a hazy curtain drawn over the lenses of astronomers’ telescopes.

The greatest distance yet penetrated into the atmosphere is 22 miles, attained by sounding balloons of weather bureaus carrying instruments to study the upper air. Strict secrecy surrounds the distances penetrated by Prof. Goddard’s rockets. His latest experiments caused a sensation around Worcester, where a group of villagers in the neighborhood of Goddard’s experiment station observed what appeared to be a flaming meteor which hurtled through space at breath-taking gait, lighting up the landscape and finally bursting with a thunderous roar.

To propel a rocket to great heights, Prof. Goddard now realizes that a fuel with high energy content, such as hydrogen mixed in careful combination with oxygen, is what is required. For several years he experimented with smokeless powder.

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Sun Not So Bright
Compared to other stars in the same class, our sun is a weakling as far as brightness is concerned. According to recent tests at Harvard University, it gives off only seven tenths of the radiation it should for its size.

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Skyrocketing to Mars

Will Man Ever Reach the Red Planet?

Rocket machines operate more efficiently in the vacuum of interstellar space than in an atmosphere. Will science be able to harness this new force for interplanetary travel?

SCIENTISTS say that in the next few months we may see the first trials of man-carrying rockets, which will be shot off into space in an effort to land some intrepid adventurer on Venus or Mars! Visions of a Jules Verne voyage to another planet are actually nearing realization through the lessons learned from recent rocket tests made by Fritz von Opel and Anton Raab, two Germans who have made exhaustive studies of rockets as a means of propulsion.

Through lessons learned from applying the rocket-propelling principle to the Opel rocket-propelled car, an American, Robert Condit, has constructed an interstellar rocket in which he intends to shoot himself to Venus.

This rocket is capable of carrying a man beyond the influence of the earth’s gravity, it is claimed, where its speed will carry it along the orbit on which it is aimed until it reaches the gravitational influence of another planet. Large tubes project tailward, emitting the chemically produced gases, which by their jet propulsion shoot the rocket into the heavens.

Astronautical voyages are not a new idea. An obscure contemporary of Jules Verne, one Achille Ayraud, upon coming across notes made by an earlier scientist, proposed a trip to the moon a century ago.

This is the idea credited with furnishing Verne his theme for the story “From the Earth to the Moon.”

After Jules Verne’s time, when military science had advanced to the study of ballistics, Robert Esnault Pelterie, one of the most original scientific minds of France and a noted designer of airplanes, carefully estimated the weights and forces needed to propel a rocket ship to the moon, and found the idea not only feasible technically, but projected a plan for its accomplishment before the Societe Francaise de Physique in the year 1912.

From that time to the present, one experimenter after another has made tests on various rocket-propelled devices. One May day in 1928 a rocket engine was fitted to an Opel special car at the Avus Speedway in Berlin to see what effect such a gaseous jet motor for rocket driving would have when installed on an auto.

At about the same time it was announced that the rocket propulsion principle was being applied to the airplane by Anton Raab, famous German aviator. It is rumored that Junkers, the famous German plane builder, is also working on a plane which will be designed to shoot through the heavens from Europe to America, taking advantage of the rarefied atmosphere in attaining the enormous speed of 300 miles an hour while carrying a load of passengers in a hermetically sealed cabin.

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Future GIs to ride rocket troopship

Troop transport in 45 minutes to a brush-fire war anywhere in the world is proposed by Douglas Aircraft space engineers.

The 80-by-210-foot re-usable rocket shown at right would speed 17,000 m.p.h., carrying 1,200 troops and equipment. Landing upright, it would debark them by portable ramps, jet packs, and rope ladders.

It’s called ICARUS: Intercontinental Aerospace craft—Range Unlimited System.

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Blast a Home in the Moon?

THE latest in a series of proposals for your lunar living facilities—in case you decide to make the trip—suggests construction could begin even before you land. A projectile from Earth would carry special shaped charges to blast a shaft (Fig. 2A) in the Moon’s surface. At a predetermined depth it would blow a spherical chamber (2B).

When the construction crew lands, an airtight membrane would be dropped into the chamber (2C) and inflated, and equipment and supplies would be installed (2D). The finished Moon base would consist of a series of the pressurized chambers connected by tunnels. Surface structures would contain airlocks, according to the proposal made to the American Rocket Society by a researcher from General Electric’s Missile and Space Vehicle Department, Philadelphia.

Inflatable Solar Collector

Rocketing into space in a canister the size of a teacup, a solar collector will billow out to a conical shape with a metalized Mylar reflector that is seven feet in diameter.

The sun’s rays striking the reflector are focused onto a collector. These rays will be transformed into heat energy which then may be used to power various electrical and mechanical instruments in space.

Under tests by the G. T. Schjeldahl Co., Northfield, Minn., the collector is held to precise dimension by a rim inflated to five pounds per square inch of pressure.

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THE POOR MAN’S TELESCOPE

AS EVERY astronomer knows, a steady mounting is a must when using high magnification. Generally, to obtain the required steadiness, it has been considered necessary to build a strong, heavy instrument, made with high precision, often mounted on concrete piers. The disadvantage of such instruments, in their lack of portability, has led us to develop the six-inch reflecting telescope and mounting shown here. We feel it combines features especially suited to the needs of the amateur. With a 6-inch diameter and 54-inch focal length the whole assembly including mount weighs only 9-1/2 lbs. As the beam of the mounting is supported in two places instead of one, powers of up to 360 can be used with the same steadiness of image normally found in a telescope of this size when using only 50 power. Backlash has been practically eliminated and eyepieces may be changed without losing the object under observation. Fine planetary detail and moon craters as small as half-a-mile in diameter may be seen if the optical elements are of good quality. Above all it is easy to carry and to set up, steady even in a wind and can be built with a minimum of accurate machine work.

Construction begins with the tripod. Obtain a 3/4 -inch pipe 12 inches long with one end threaded. Cut the tripod legs from pine and the two circular plates from plywood as shown. Drill a hole one inch in diameter in the center of the larger plate and screw the pipe into it so that it is perpendicular. Draw three radial lines 120° apart on the bottom of the plate and on each line drill a 3/16 diameter hole 1/2 and 1-3/4 inches from the pipe. Position legs one at a time, butted against the pipe, and mark, drill and screw onto the large plate. Bore a 1-1/16-inch diameter hole in the center of the other plate so that it fits snugly onto the pipe. Slide it down the pipe, mark, drill and screw it onto the legs. Drill and tap two holes in the pipe for 1-inch 6-32 screws 1/4 and 3 inches from the top. Bend the screws slightly so they can be turned by hand. Insert conduit into the pipe and lock. Finally, to complete the tripod turn the shouldered plug on a lathe from bar stock with top threaded for 3/8-16 and provide relief for the lock screw to retain it in the conduit.

Next cut the mirror cell out of 3/4-inch plywood (see detail A) and tracing its outer contour onto 1/4-inch plywood cut out the bottom. Glue and nail the bottom to the cell. For the mirror support bend the piano wire as shown with each apex bent up half-an-inch for spring action. Using galvanized clips screw the wire to the inside bottom of the cell. Cut out the mirror hold and drill three 5/32-inch clearance holes 120° apart. Drill corresponding holes in the cell 3/32 inches in diameter and screw in the 6-32 hold-down and collimating screws. Drill for and cement in the dowel plugs which take the screws anchoring the cell to the beam.

Mark out the beam on a piece of pine or fir and leave it long at the upper end until the exact position of the eyepiece has been determined. If the beam is cut out with a circular saw the slot for the steadier-clip can be cut exactly parallel to the beam edge. Alternatively a separate piece, 5/16 x 1-/14 inches may be screwed to the beam bottom and the slot eliminated. The extreme upper beam, carrying eyepiece, prism and finder is a separate piece held to the main beam with four screws through slots allowing a V2-inch adjustment. Cut the 1-5/16 inch eyepiece hole and line it with felt to fit a 1-1/4-inch eyepiece tube. Make a similar eyepiece storage hole in the lower beam. A surplus prism is fastened to a 3/4-inch tubing by two .040-inch dural clips held to the tube by 6-32 screws tapped in the tube. The other end of the tube is press-fitted into a hole in the plywood piece screwed opposite the eyepiece.

After the telescope is assembled the lengths of the dowels for the steadier can be determined. Cut to length, taper the ends and drill ends with a 3/32-inch drill. Bend the wire rest and feet as shown, file flat and press into dowels with glue. Bind together at the top and cement to insure triangulation. Drill tripod legs to take the steadier’s feet making sure the holes line up with each other and fit the feet snugly. A .045-inch piano wire clip fastens the steadier-rest to the beam. The clip should be exactly the beam’s width and when wrapped with a layer of rug thread, should fit the steadier rest without play.

The finder uses a surplus achromatic lens of 1 to 2 inches diameter, 5 to 8 inches F.L., with matching aluminum tube. Bind the lens to the front of the tube with tape. The finder eyepiece is a surplus, simple lens of 1/2 to 1 inch F.L. that fits the other end of the tube by means of the wooden adapter. The point of a straight pin, placed at eye lens focus serves as crosshairs. The aluminum strap which fastens the finder to the upper beam is held to the tube by a 6-32 screw as shown on the drawing.

The prism is mounted so that one small face is at right angles to the eyepiece cen-terline and the other at right angles to a line from prism center to mirror center. Fasten the mirror cell to the beam so that the distance from mirror surface to prism plus the distance from prism to beam center equals the mirror’s focal length. To find the latter project the sun’s image on a piece of paper until the smallest image is obtained, then measure the distance from paper to mirror surface. Mirror surface must be at right angles to a line from its center to the prism center. Removing the eyepiece, look into the hole and adjust the collimating screws until the prism appears in the center of the mirror.

In use a telescope with a steadier must first be pointed in the general direction of the object to be viewed. The beam can be moved nearly two inches either way across the steadier and up or down until the object is found. The prism and the low power eyepiece (1 inch F.L.) used for star clusters and nebulae were bought surplus from Edmunds Scientific Co., Barrington, N. J. For lunar and planetary work I use an 8mm eyepiece giving 180 power and on especially good nights one of 4mm giving 360 power.—William T. Thomas, Jr.

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Machines that “Destroy” the Earth

Intricate mechanisms at New York Planetarium show how celestial forces could burn, blast or freeze the world.

By HARRY SAMUELS

THREE times a day in five spectacular ways the earth “dies” in the Hayden Planetarium in New York.

First performed in 1939, the Planetarium’s sky drama was shut down by the war in 1941 and was not resumed until recently. The new “End of the World” show is considerably more vivid than its prewar predecessor because of added startling effects and more authentic background material worked out by the Planetarium technical and scientific staffs. The pictures and captions on the accompanying pages explain how these effects are obtained.

Scientists and others—mostly others-have predicted a possible end to the world in the near future as a result of chain reactions set off by the use of atomic energy.

The varieties of cosmic destruction depicted in the Planetarium show are, however, many millions of years distant by estimates of most astronomers.

The Planetarium audience, seated under a huge dome, is transported through time and space to the center of Central Park in New York on a day billions of years in the future.

The earth comes to its end the first time as the result of the misbehavior of the sun. The sun bursts into a nova, or new star, something that more than 10 other self-illuminated, gigantic heavenly bodies do each year (PSM, July ‘46, p. 108). The sudden, cataclysmic flood of heat and energy generated by the blast shrivels the earth to death.

Next, the Planetarium onlookers watch the other, but equally final, extreme—the eventual cooling of the sun to a degree where our globe becomes bleak and frozen and can no longer sustain life.

Gordon A. Atwater, Planetarium chairman, says this cooling of the sun is an almost certain eventuality unless it has some unknown and inexhaustible means of renew-ing its energy.

In the third preview of doom, the earth and all the other planets of our solar system are innocent victims of a celestial hit-and-run accident. The sun explodes as the result of a collision with a star from far out in space.

The fourth possible end of the world occurs when a mysterious wanderer from space, a comet with a flaming tail, appears on the celestial stage. It approaches the earth at bewildering speed. Closer and closer it comes until it strikes with a terrible impact. Where the earth was a fraction of a second before there is now only space. Though not probable, a collision between the earth and a comet is possible.

Astronomers know that some remote day the earth will pull the moon within the so-called “Roche’s limit,” a distance from the earth roughly twice the earth’s diameter. What will happen then is shown in the awesome finale at the Planetarium.

Moving slowly at first, but gaining momentum as it approaches the New York skyline, a huge and terrifying moon soon fills half of the sky. There is a shattering crash as the moon explodes in the southeast horizon, breaking up into thousands of flaming meteors that bombard the mother planet. The skyline that rims the Planetarium becomes a circle of blazing buildings. As the flames die down, pieces of the shattered moon circle the earth similar to the moons of Saturn—a halo for a dead world!

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Instrumenting an Earth Satellite

Prize-winning Science Fair model reels off space secrets of the push of a button

WEBSTERS DEFINITION of Argus is incomplete. In Greek mythology, Argus has another connotation – it denotes the starry heavens. In all respects, it is a fitting name for a model satellite – “Argus I” -built by Ronald Michael Benrey and entered in the National Science Fair.

The satellite took second prize at the Fair and took first prize inn the Air Force’s Awards Program, as well as receiving other citations. While it doesn’t have the 100 eyes of the mythological Argus, it does have seven “eyes” – sensors designed to “see” such things as temperature, ultraviolet light and micrometeorites—as well as two “voices”—transmitters to relay the information to receivers.

The satellite shell is made of Plexiglas, 18″ in diameter, in two hemispheres. Most of the components are mounted in plastic boxes within, for visibility.

With the antennas in place, “Argus I” measures 54″ in diameter and weighs 20 pounds. With batteries, it weighs 30 pounds. It is completely transistorized, using 15 transistors in all. Total cost of the project was about $200.

Ground Control. When set up, the ground control equipment consists of a modified radio control transmitter operating on 27.255 mc. and three receivers, one tuned to the constant frequency of satellite transmitter Number I (820 kc.,) and the other two to the frequencies of transmitter Number II (1220 and 1300 kc). To conserve battery power, one of the satellite’s transmitters is silent until keyed by the ground transmitter. The satellite carries a two-transistor receiver to pick up the R/C ground interrogation signal, automatically keying the “Brain” into its in-strumentation cycle.

Telemetering System. If “Argus I” were put into orbit, it would telemeter the following information back to earth:

• Skin temperature at two points (at the satellite’s pole and equator)

• Internal temperature

• Number of strikes by micrometeorites at two points on satellite pole and equator

• Ultraviolet radiation

In addition, it shows the “solar aspect” (whether the sensor faces or turns from the sun, indicating the satellite’s attitude toward the sun).

The basic circuit in the telemetering system is shown in the schematic. The pulse rate of the unit (a metronome, in effect) is varied by using a resistance changing sensor in place of a variable resistor. Such sensors include a thermistor for temperature, photocell for ultraviolet rays, and erosion gauge for micrometeorites.

The erosion gauge is a mirror with the paint backing carefully removed with a cotton pad dipped in nail polish remover, or it can be a photocell with an opaque coating. In the case of the former, the “sandblasting effect” of micrometeorites erodes some of the silver from the back of the mirror, changing the resistance; in the case of the latter, the erosion allows more light to get through to the cell. In this way the sensor-pulser unit’s pulse rate is a function of the phenomenon measured.

Instrumentation Cycle. The output of these units is amplified and each pulse keys the transmitter via a keying relay. Each . pulser is turned on, hooked to the proper sensors and connected to the transmitter by the “Brain.” This consists of a “timed” 22-position five-deck stepping relay which advances one position every five seconds, giving “Argus I” a programmed instrumentation cycle. By “turning off” the Brain timer by means of radio control, the cycle can be stopped at any point for prolonged observation of one physical phenomenon.

A second transmitter is included to allow the listener to know when the instrumentation cycle is starting and when the Brain is advancing. Both transmitters are one-transistor c.w. oscillators with a power input of 15 mw., and are fed by a 15-volt hearing aid battery.

A separate ultraviolet photocell changes the capacitance of the tuned circuit of transmitter Number II. As this sensor alternately faces and turns from the sun, the frequency of the transmitter is changed, switching from 1220 to 1300 kc. The frequency difference is relatively large so that the natural Doppler shift doesn’t affect the solar aspect indication. Sensitivity is low, so starlight, moonlight or earth glow doesn’t affect the sensor.

The radio control receiver in the satel-lite is tuned to a frequency of 27.255 mc, and is powered by two 1.5-volt penlight cells and a 22.5-volt battery. The transmitter, a typical radio control unit, has a 3.2-watt input.

Pulses of the instrumentation cycle, varied by the sensors from five beats to one-half beat per second, sound like short, staccato “beeps” typical of the Sputniks.

The cycle is as follows: recognition signal—10 seconds; equator mic. meteorite— 20 seconds; polar mic. meteorite—15 seconds; equator temperature—15 seconds; equator UV radiation—35 seconds; polar temperature—10 seconds; internal temperature—5 seconds; and solar aspect—1/3 second every 5 seconds. Total—117-1/3 seconds. Duration of the cycle is variable from about 40 seconds to about 235 seconds.

Decoding. Equipment needed to decode the cycle includes three receivers, Doppler-effect correction devices, a graph-type recording counter with device for noting solar aspect, and interferometer (if desired). The beep rate is counted by the graph counter and notations are made by the operator regarding which phenomenon is being recorded. The number of beeps per time unit is then plotted against a prepared graph.

The satellite’s power supply consists of an NT6 (Willard) 6-volt storage cell for the Brain, and eight 15-volt hearing aid batteries in addition to the 22.5-volt battery and two 1.5-volt penlight cells.

There is provision in the Brain for the use of cosmic ray detectors, and the versatility of the satellite is further enhanced by universal connections which allow change of instrumentation simply by changing sensors.

If “Argus I” were to be set in orbit, a vertical axis spin would be imparted by the last stage of the rocket. Chances are it will never see the undiluted light of space. However, in its earth trials, the satellite performs its mission perfectly. Perhaps it will serve as a prototype of things to come. The satellite’s designer lives in the Bronx, New York, and has just entered Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ronald plans to major in physics and expects to go on and make his career in the field of electronics.