Galaxy Magazine (May 1953) by Galaxy

Author:Galaxy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 1953-05-08T16:00:00+00:00

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By WILLY LEY

THE BIRTH OF THE SPACE STATION (II)

1AST month, I told how the concept of the manned _J rocket in an orbital path around the Earth and its possible subsequent development into a space station was evolved and presented by Hermann Oberth in 1923. After that, very little happened for about six years and the

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GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

reason was a popular book.

Oberth's original work, while not long, was very hard reading for practically everybody. There were pages upon pages of massed equations and the "clear text" which followed after such a discussion made very little sense unless you had waded through the mathematics preceding them.

Oberth was approached by his own publisher with the suggestion of writing a popular version of his work. He was not opposed to the idea in principle, as many other German scientists of that time would have been, but he did not have the time to write it. Once or twice, I believe, he actually started to, but each time a new and unsuspected and most interesting mathematical relationship turned up which, of course, had to be investigated first.

Then, one day, a professional writer came to Oberth, suggesting that they do the book in collaboration. Oberth was to supply the information and the writer—his name was Max Valier—was to do the writing.

TT did not work out well. Valier -*• was not able to follow Oberth's mathematical reasoning on many points. He suggested "improvements." Oberth tried to explain why these suggestions, far from being improvements, would not

work. Sometimes he convinced Valier, generally he did not, and he had to explain later that Va-lier's book was, after all, Valier's book and not his. His problem was that many other people began writing about "Oberth's ideas," but took their information from Valier.

As for the space station, Valier had not mentioned it at all. He had simply skipped that portion of Oberth's work. I am not sure whether he failed to understand the concept or just what prompted him. At any event, instead of discussing the space station concept, he described a base on the Moon. When I questioned him about that once, he declared that he could not see why anybody should bother to build a space station when we have a ready-made natural space station in the form of the Moon.

I tried to reason with him that hauling anything to the Moon is obviously much more difficult than hauling the same thing to a height of, say, 1000 miles and providing it with a lateral push so that it would take up an orbit and stay there.

Valier replied that hauling something to an orbit would require a velocity of about 5.5 miles per second (including air resistance and a safety factor) while hauling something to the Moon would require "just 1.5 miles per

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second more." ('Tain't so. Seven miles per second will merely get you through the Earth's gravitational field. Then you need additional fuel to brake your fall and to adapt to the orbital velocity of the Moon.

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