Good Guys and Space Rats
By JOHN D\HILLABY FOR a day or two the whole affair seemed rather a waste of time. It was a congress in Zurich which ended recently. The subject was astronautics, a vague term covering most aspects of rockets and travel in space. There were certainly one or two professional rocketeers among the speakers but they were unable to say anything of consequence about what they were doing for obvious security reasons; the rest of the astronauts, an assemblage of physicists, engineers, aeroplane designers and lay interplanetarians, either juggled dextrously with physical constants or speculated in a most uninhibited fashion about achieving a velocity in excess of seven miles per second. The. figure seven expressed as miles per second has an almost mystical significance among the space men. It represents " escape," the attainment of a considerable fortune in kinetic energy. At such a velocity a rocket can go on and up and out of the earth's atmosphere into free orbit. Technically the atmosphere extends upwards for a distance of about 250 miles, a zone already pierced by the " birds " and " beam- riders " on the American proving grounds. Yet at altitudes of 150,000 feet and more the " air " is virtually a vacuum and offers little resistance. The difficulty is thrust. To " escape," the machines have to be thrust up to a point where the resistance of the air and the gravitational pull of the earth are weak enough for the rocket motors to be turned off. Thereafter the machine, if travelling fast enough, will fly on freely, silently and, if desired, for ever, in' that little understood realm called space—or so- the professional rocketeers believe.
- There are few doubts that unmanned machines will at least be capable of leaving the earth in a few years' time. But they will be military machines designed by men with no particular desire to encircle Mars or visit the moon. Their targets are uncomfortably nearer home. Space flight, there- fore, is an elegant by-product of military rocketry and there was a feeling at ,ZUrich that the professionals were only too glad to talk about the more fantastic aspects of astronautics if it kept inquisitive minds away from serious military matters. ■ The Congress, nevertheless, was' remarkable for several reasons. It was held in the famous Technische Hochschule which gave the lay rocketeers a certain amount of academic status denied them in other places. Former congress secre- taries were embarrassed by the fact that many scientific institutions were apt to regard astronautics as an extension of science-fiction.
It was remarkable, too, for the number of Germans who were present. Most of the designers of the V2 and the Wasserfall are now mercenaries employed by the Russians, the Americans, the French and, presumably, by us. Dr. Werner von Braun, one of the most famous of them, was not present, but he wrote a paper for the Congress and it was read by one of the Americans who employ him. He seemed to be very cheerful and very confident about the past, the present and the future. Londoners, for instance, were interested to hear that he had had doubts about the eventual success of the V2 in • 1943. He said they used " to gaze up at the ogive of its lofty nose and wonder whether the prototype would do what the calculations said it would." However, it " confounded the gloomy pessimists and lived up to all expectations."
Thus von Braun, the German expatriate and founder mem- ber of the Space Research Society. Another German recounted how the Russians had rebuilt Peenemunde and were flying " their " Wasserfalls. A third had some facts about rocket plant on the Russia-Finland border. The Swiss were proud of an excellent rocket which they had built at the Oerlikon works. It may be tested in America. But not for pur- poses of peaceful space exploration. These rockets are designed for war: However, the International Astronautical Federation has faith if not works,, and WA'S° has a following of some four or five thousand members among its eighteen member societies.
The most important are the American, the British and the German. The Federation's secretary is a Swiss who seemed to lack confidence in ordinary terrestrial affairs. He may have been better at higher levels. The Americans apparently lacked nothing, certainly not assurance, and a contingent of them joined Congress on Monday and left it on the following Friday with an American president in the chair as well as an American vice-president and an abundance of duplicated copies of all the American speeches.
This prompted a certain amount of speculation. Rocketry is both an advanced science and big business in America. Was it their intention to dominate the field ? There seemed to be some evidence in favour of it. The president was an aeronautical consultant and the vice-president had, as he put it, " a law business in Washington." He had also built up a corporation primarily interested in high altitude flight. Were these men idealistic pioneers in a new field or had they less honourable designs on the Federation of rocketeers ? This point has been more tersely expressed in the language of science-fiction, where extra-terrestrial voyagers are often designated as " good guys " or else as " space rats." The good guys are the challengers; the carriers of the torch of science, the defenders of freedom and all the rest of it. The rats are there to knock them down. They lurk in the void and use ray-guns and world-wrecking robots at the slightest provocation. It so happened that President Frederick C. Durrant and his legal friend, Mr. Andy G. Haley of Washington D.C., were undeniably good guys and may yet make some kind of worth- while organisation out of the loose association of rocketeers. The fact that they had managed to make some of their motives misunderstood may reflect the over-sensitivity of poor Europeans. It is reasonably certain that what money there is to be made out of the hardware of rocketry is unlikely to come from the International Federation.
In six days the delegates managed to range around almost every aspect of astronautics. Dr. Eugen Sanger and his wife, both competent German physicists now working for the French Government, had faith in a rocket propulsion unit which worked by the pressure of light waves. It also needed a reactor which was virtually a hydrogen bomb in slow motion. The notion was accepted as something fit for the year 2053, perhaps a little later. Others described how space travellers would blow their gear into the sky and assemble it at a point some five hundred miles above the surface of the earth where they could take off for an elliptical orbit round the moon. Dr. von Braun said he believed it would be possible to dispatch manned satellite rockets round the earth in permanent orbit in a matter of ten or fifteen years. Others disagreed passionately. They seemed to be in the position of business men who decide to plan for the future without knowing what staff, stock or know-how they possess at the moment. The future may be as bright as the astronauts say it will be. but whether for good guys or space rats it is by no means clear.
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