Dr Space Junk vs the Universe by Alice Gorman

Author:Alice Gorman [Gorman, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262043434
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2019-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

By which he meant, of course, American spaceships. Albro T Gaul was an entomologist who recorded insect sounds, including ‘butterflies and dragonflies in flight, flies caught on flypaper, Japanese beetles on a rose, and insects walking and chewing’. Who knew mild-mannered Albro was harbouring such bellicose thoughts? He chose to write about space because he had an unusual perspective. In the introduction to the book, he says ‘space travel is also a biological problem, even perhaps to a greater extent than it is an engineering problem’.

And indeed, the role of the Moon in human affairs is intensely biological. The Moon is essential to life on Earth, controlling light, tides and time. There is no living thing which has not been influenced by it; no person on Earth, from our hominin ancestors to the present day, who has not looked up at the Moon in the night sky, experienced lunar cycles, or felt the effects of the tides. The Moon has always been a huge part of terrestrial ecology and of human culture. It's the inspiration for stories, myths and science about how the heavens and Earth came to be. And of course, speculation about how we might reach the great pearl of the night.

In earlier periods of science, we didn't know the extent of Earth's atmosphere. For all we knew, it could have reached as far as the Moon, so there was no reason a living being could not travel there. That the space in between Earth and the Moon was inhospitable to life was not obvious until the 17th century. In 1648, the French scientists Blaise Pascal and Florin Périer built a mercury-filled barometer to measure air pressure, and climbed the highest mountain they could find. As they ascended, the mercury expanded, indicating that the weight of air above them was decreasing. Pascal reasoned that there was a vacuum above the atmosphere.

The Montgolfier brothers’ invention of the hot air balloon in 1783 enabled further exploration of the higher reaches of the atmosphere. Low pressure and lack of oxygen had terrible effects on the human body, but from the 1890s, when weather balloons were invented, it was possible to get data from even higher up without risking death. It became clear that Pascal was right. The atmosphere became thinner and thinner and the air pressure lower and lower, until the brain could not get enough oxygen to support consciousness. No-one would be able to breathe in space. The problem wasn't just getting to the Moon, it was staying alive during the journey.

However, the numerical distance to the Moon is not always the same as the conceptual distance. This was something that I discovered when a ‘Super Moon’ event occurred a few years ago. A Super Moon is when a full Moon coincides with its closest approach to Earth, resulting in a very large and luminous appearance. I received a few media enquiries wanting comments about how the full Moon affected human emotions – madness, lust, menstruation, werewolves, and so on.

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