Strix
On Going to the Moon
SPACE! The challenge of the wheeling and unconquered planets, the awful immensities of the ionosphere, the ultra-violet light stabbed unpredictably by cosmic rays, the tight-lipped men in scientific hats crouched over instrument panels in hurtling cockpits, the sheer grandeur of the inter- planetary conception—the whole business leaves me, for some discreditable reason, absolutely cold. When I read of the American project for launching satellites into the upper atmo- sphere, I was not even ashamed of my inability to understand anything at all about any of the factors involved. I was not conscious of vistas opening, of horizons expanding. My atti- tude was one of flaccid and reprehensible indifference.
The news about the satellites did, however, remind me that a lady I knew had booked a passage to the moon two or three years ago, and I rang her up to find out how matters stood in this context. She confirmed that she had answered an advertise- ment in a respectable newspaper offering accommodation for a limited number of passengers on the first rocket to the moon. It was, she vaguely remembered, to an address in America that she had sent her application for a seat (or whatever it is you take your ease on in a rocket), and she had never had a reply. As far as she could remember, the advertisement had implied that the rocket's ETD, or estimated time of departure, was several years ahead, but she had more or less given up hoping to be aboard it.
She had, nevertheless, done her best; she had jumped at a chance of getting to the moon, and I think this showed a good spirit, contrasting markedly with my own spineless, un-Eliza- bethan attitude to the remoter regions of the Universe. How many of us would take passage to the moon if we were given the opportunity of doing so? Supposing, my gentle readers and fellow-planetmen, you saw this week in the middle of some more serious page of the Spectator the following advertise- ment: 'The Moon. Commodious Space-ship leaving February 1956, for above destination. Safe arrival guaranteed. Return passages available, if desired, at six-monthly intervals. Refer- ences,' what thoughts would pass through your minds while you decided whether or not to answer the advertisement?
I can only answer for myself. 1 am the sort of person who finds it difficult to dismiss improbable projects out of hand, and I should certainly not have written this one off on sight. When weighing up the pros and cons I should have numbered among the former the fact that I have actually seen the moon with my own eyes on a large number of occasions. Its existence is not in doubt, as was the existence of the American continent until comparatively recent times. There is no question of traipsing off to some obscure and practically invisible planet which nobody has ever heard of.
(The saddest of all stories about voyages of discovery is the old story about the Turkish squadron which, in the latter days of the Ottoman Empire, set out from Constantinople to pay a good-will visit to Malta. Weeks passed. At length the ironclads made their overdue return. The adthiral in command looked more haggard and weather-beaten than might have been ex- pected after a .mainly social expedition. 'Well,' they asked him, 'how did you get on at Malta?' The admiral's features regis- tered exhaustion and disgust. 'Malta yok !' he said. `There is no such place as Malta.') I know that I should be less interested in the rocket's flight plan than in her passenger-list. Who else would be going? 1 have a horror of organised travel, and something tells me that a fairly high degree of organisation would be thought desirable on the first trip between the Earth and the Moon. Who would do this organising? I feel instinctively that I should submit with an ill grace to being ordered about by a brassy-voiced man in a space-suit. It is all too probable that I should sulk.
It would undeniably be a stimulating experience to step out of the rocket on to the surface of the moon. If, however, the moon in any way resembles our own planet a good deal would depend upon which portion of its surface one landed on. A party of moon-men who arrived in the middle of the Gobi would form a very different impression of the Earth's amenities from that formed by a similar party which descended near Slough. I cannot help feeling that, in the present state of our knowledge about the moon, sheer luck might play a dispropor- donate part in the final, and very important, phase of the flight-plan. * * Then what about these moon-men? We do not, I think I am right in saying, know for certain whether they exist or not. If they do not, what are we pioneers going to do all the time? We can go, if conditions permit, for some good long walks, we can collect specimens of whatever there is to collect specimens of, we can make a little map, we can organise discussion groups about the affairs that were current when we took off. -But something tells me that, when the excitement of actually find- ing ourselves on the moon wears off, time is going to hang heavy on our hands.
It will be better if the moon is inhabited, provided of course that the inhabitants are decent sort of people who do not knock us on the head or put us in the zoo. I am quick at picking up languages, and I rather see myself coming into my own during the early stages of the pourparlers. `Glug took,' I shall say. 'Earthmen tot rum muck eigg, uist ni kafka ?' The moon-men will giggle and cry, 'Ho chok! Ho chok!' or words to that effect. `What arc you telling them?' the man in the space-suit will ask suspiciously. 1 shall silence him with an impatient gesture. It will be at about this stage that the balance of power within the expedition will begin to shift decisively.
* * * People are saying that it is a good thing that the West is ahead of the Communist world with its plans for the conquest of space. I rather doubt whether this is true as far as the moon- men are concerned. They are bound, as I see it, to question the first arrivals closely about what conditions are like on earth, and from a Russian expedition they will get the sort of simple. consistent, unanimous answers which will enable them to form a clear, coherent, black-and-white picture of our planet.
It will be quite otherwise if Earth's first envoys to the moon are British. From the irreconcilable convictions, the disparate opinions, the varied backgrounds and the diverse tastes to be found in any rocket-load of my compatriots, how the deuce are the poor moon-men going to make head or tail of the nature of the society to which their visitors belong? It will be far kinder to let them learn the facts of life from good, solid Party men; it may even deter them from coming down here and falling into the clutches of the British Council; and it will give me a valid excuse for not being on the first rocket to the moon.
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