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Weapons of Mass Prosperity
By David Glenn Cox
When the wheels of space shuttle Atlantis touch down, then that’s it. The US will have abdicated its position as the leader in space technology. Beginning in the passions of war and seeking a way around the Treaty of Versailles, the German scientists huddled. Yet even before that a fifteen-year-old Werner Von Braun wrote a letter to the German government about the possible uses for an orbiting space station.
In 1929 Fritz Lang’s film "Frau Im Mond" (Woman in the Moon) captivated a generation of young German minds. It was the “Star Wars” of its day and all over Germany rocket clubs full of young boys sprang up. Lang’s film was inspired by the writings of Hermann Oberth, a mathematician and physicist. Oberth wrote a book titled “Wege zur Raumschiffahrt” ("Ways of Achieving Space Flight"). That was the book that the high school-aged Von Braun began reading, but he was unable to understand Oberth’s mathematics. Von Braun took the book to his instructor who advised the young Von Braun that with his math skills he would never understand it.
Oberth himself claimed that his interest in rocketry came from his love of the works of Jules Verne. Fiction and fantasy became science fact. Far-out, imaginary tales inspire a scientist whose work inspires a young man to buckle down on his math studies, to chase a dream of things that never were, things so far from the realm of possibility as to be considered near insane.
Rocketry’s checkered past should be viewed much in the same light as that of the airplane, the submarine and the automobile. During World War One both sides built extensive railroad networks to the fronts. The British used London's double-decker buses to move troops and the French used Paris taxis. All technology will be considered for use in military applications. But it should be remembered that the night Von Braun’s team celebrated successfully test launched the first V-2 rocket they toasted not the creation of a weapons system but the creation of a space vehicle.
Robert Goddard was the leading rocket scientist in the United States and was a favorite in American newsreels, especially when his rockets blew up. In Germany his papers were read with reverence and respect while back at home he was viewed as a crank. With the success of the V-2 and the end of World War Two top German scientists became a hot property for US intelligence agencies. Von Braun was frustrated that his US employers only wanted him to build small rockets as weapons.
The V-2 was by far the most famous German rocket but the German rocket program also produced the first wire guided missile. They produced ground-to-air radar guided missiles, stand off missiles and even a crude missile with a television camera inside that was operated by a joystick. These were the only projects that the US was interested in. In the early 1940s Von Braun had proposed the A-10, a vehicle with the potential to place a payload in low earth orbit. Von Braun showed his plans to his American employers and was treated in much the same way as Goddard.
In 1949 when the Soviet Union acquired nuclear weapons, suddenly the fear of and the acquisition of larger rocketry became a priority. The 1960 presidential election centered around a perceived missile gap. Did the Soviets possess more and better rocketry systems? That depends on who you ask, but one thing was certain: the US Air Force and the US Navy were debating and contending and undermining the development of ICBMs out of a fear that they wouldn’t be able to control them or would lose other military funding.
Sputnik made the conquering of space a national military priority, but more than that it made it a public relation's priority and ignited the space race.
“First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. We propose to accelerate the development of the appropriate lunar spacecraft. We propose to develop alternate liquid and solid fuel boosters, much larger than any now being developed, until certain which is superior. We propose additional funds for other engine development and for unmanned explorations--explorations which are particularly important for one purpose which this nation will never overlook: the survival of the man who first makes this daring flight. But in a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon--if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.” (John F. Kennedy)
I remember as a small boy national television being preempted to show photographs taken by the first lunar probes. These small steps were stealthily changing the world. The first manned Mercury missions tested whether you could eat in space, would your eyeballs lose their shape and would your intestines still work up there. Today those are laughable ideas but at the time they were quite serious questions. The Mercury capsules used analog gauges, wheels with numbers on them.
“Third, an additional 50 million dollars will make the most of our present leadership, by accelerating the use of space satellites for world-wide communications.” (John F. Kennedy) This is what the young Von Braun had proposed to the German government in the 1920s.
There were no weather satellites; weather forecasting was done by telephone or by radio, calling ahead and asking “What’s the weather like over there?” Forecasting hurricanes meant somebody had to get in an airplane and go look and if you wanted to know again tomorrow, you did it all over again. In June of 1967 a television special titled “Our World” was the first live satellite-linked television program in history and was watched by 400 million people in twenty-six countries and featured the Beatles singing “All You Need is Love.”
It was revolutionary and a wonder of the age; today it’s just TV and we take it all for granted. When Apollo 8 took the famous Earthrise photo while orbiting the moon it was on the front page of every newspaper in the world. Humanity was thunderstruck by the revelation that we are, after all, just a tiny blue dot in the cosmos. The flight computer on the Apollo weighed less than twenty pounds and had the power of a hand-held calculator. Yet that computer is the basis for your computer. This is where it all came from. It is Edison reciting "Mary had a little lamb" into a wax cylinder. There was no need or market for small computers until they needed to fit one into a manned space vehicle.
Try to imagine the numbers of billions of dollars generated by that one contract, the fortunes made in all aspects of computers and space technology. The number of lives saved and lives enriched by GPS, Map Quest, satellite phones, satellite radio and TV, and thousands of other products and it’s only been fifty years.
At the beginning of the space program astronomers didn’t know much more about the universe than Galileo. Hell, pictures of the moon and Mars were considered a wonder, but in this small fifty-year window astronomers have learned more about the universe than in all of human history. The Hubble space telescope has given us pictures of the universe that make the Apollo Earthrise photo look like a cave paintings.
It is remarkable that dreamers built vehicles designed as weapons of war and mass destruction and they became weapons of peace and of science. It is a legacy that is as clear as is humanly possible. The future belongs to those who invest in it, to those willing to look over the horizon and to go there no matter the cost. President Kennedy in his famous speech said, "We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is difficult." He referenced his commitment by saying, “America has tossed its cap over the wall of space.”
Imagine if we had another such far-sighted President who said, “America has tossed its cap over the wall of green energy.” It took ten years of focus and funding to put a man on the moon, and for that ten years we’ve had our lives enriched, our knowledge expanded and our economies multiplied. Why would right-thinking individuals want to turn away from that legacy of building weapons of mass prosperity?
We have the technology to create a green energy grid in ten years. All we lack is the political vision.
"We came in peace for all mankind" - plaque on the lunar module.
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