Call It What It Is

I’ve seen several posts along the lines of “The Wright Brothers first flew in 1903; 66 years later man walked on the moon” the point being how fast we progressed in 2/3 of a century.

Yeah, we did…but not in a linear evolution.

Space travel (I first typed “space flight” then realized that was wrong) is not a direct offspring of aviation though there has been some cross pollination.

It’s not even related to submarining, even though there are more points of similarity between the silent service and space travel than with aviation.

Space travel is artillery.

You aim at something, you compute speed and time and motion and a host of other factors, and you take your shot.

Flash Gordon and Space Patrol and Star Trek and Star Wars not withstanding, there are no hairpin turns or sharp banks in space travel.

Oh, you can adjust any number of factors, but like a human cannonball, you’re still traveling forward in the direction you were fired.

And the effort that went into space travel of any kind -- including sounding rockets and the first simple Sputnik -- took massive investments of time and money.

Robert H. Goddard’s 1926 launch of the first liquid fueled rocket required research grants from the Smithsonian Institute and the U.S. Army Signal Corps; while many would prefer to liken it to the Wright Brothers’ early experiments, the truth is it was more like Samuel Langley’s ill-fated Aerodrome project insofar as it relied on a fairly hefty investment from a major scientific institution to be possible.

And to denigrate neither the Wright Brothers nor Langley, what they sought to achieve was nowhere near the complexity of what Goddard was (quite literally) shooting for.  Generations of glider enthusiasts and researchers put the basic theory of flight in anyone’s hands, and the technology involved -- wood and wire and cloth -- were easy to fabricate.  

The biggest challenge to crewed flight was the propulsion system (i.e., the engine) and for that everybody needed to wait until the engineers succeeded in making more efficient gasoline engines (Langley had successful test flights of steam powered models, but the square-cube law being what it is, steam engines of the era could not provide enough power to lift themselves and a larger crewed aircraft into the air).

Basically the earliest airplanes could be easily manufactured by anybody with an adequate workshop and a lightweight gasoline engine, Goddard’s liquid fueled rocket required metallurgy, engineering, manufacturing, and chemistry skills far beyond the level of the average mechanic of the era.

(And there were a lot of people trying to fly heavier than air machines in those days and once the Wright Brothers proved it could be done an astonishing variety of flying machines took to the air.  Juvenile sci-fi to the contrary, nobody was building successful manned spacecraft in their backyards.)

Aviation in its earliest days was a quite literally seat-of-the-pants effort, the Wright Brothers’ singular achievement being not the first to successfully fly a crewed heavier than air machine but rather the first to successfully land one!

The physics of conventional flight were far more forgiving than the physics of rocketry and artillery.  This seems counterintuitive at first since missiles in the form of cannonballs and catapult stones and arrows and spears and rocks had been used by humans all the way back to prehistory, but their physics removed all control once the missile left the launcher, be it a musket or a human hand:  The course was set, all one could hope for was accuracy of aim and a correct guess regarding possible interference.

Even today, space travelers are riding a giant bullet, no matter how it gets into space.  They are committed to a single general direction, they cannot alter course except through the application of even more artillery principles.

They can’t turn around and head back, they can’t hover motionless.

They’re always falling (“zero gravity” is a misnomer; the proper term is freefall).

The trick is, to be falling towards the target aimed at.

As mentioned, there’s been cross pollination with aviation, and the earliest astronauts and cosmonauts tended to be recruited from military and civilian test pilots.*

And certainly an overlap exists between the technologies of aircraft and the technologies of spacecraft vis electronics, life support, etc.

But except for fine tuning pitch & yaw or occasionally firing retrorockets manually, astronauts are basically just along for the ride.

They can and have saved troubled missions from disaster on several occasions, but they’ve also suffered catastrophes no amount of piloting could avert; indeed, catastrophes doomed to occur before their rockets even left the launch pad.

This is no slighting of their courage or skill, just an honest assessment of how much that applies to the challenge of space travel.

The new generation of orbital spacecraft are self-automated to the point human control is superfluous.

Artillery.

Hitting a moving target.

In WWI pilots were quite deliberately referred to as “knights of the air” and this simile to the age of chivalry continues to this day, celebrated in print and pixel as “the right stuff.”

But chivalry as we think of it today is a romanticized fantasy, not the grim reality of history.

Those who travel into space do show great courage.

But the barnstormer days of space travel and exploration need to draw to a close.

The false equivalency of Wright Brothers to moon landing needs to be put aside.

Space travel is not the result of flying higher and higher, faster and faster until we at last entered the realm of space.

It was a literal cold war artillery duel between two superpowers playing Can You Top This? on the world stage, because if they could put a satellite in orbit they could damn well drop a hydrogen bomb in your backyard.

If we hadn’t been trying to dominate and threatening to kill one another, the path to the stars might still be untrod. 

If we mean to expand human presence further out -- either in person of via robotics -- we need to be more pragmatic and honest in what we’re doing.

The old superpower struggles will be played out in other arenas.

We can take what we learned from them and use it to expand humanity.

But let’s leave the attitude behind.

© Buzz Dixon

* Valentina Tereshkova being the major exception, selected primarily on the basis of being female and an enthusiastic amateur parachutist, thus proving the point that space travel is more artillery ballistics than winged atmospheric flight.  This is not to knock her gender but to demonstrate the USSR’s desire to obtain as many space firsts as possible in the early days of the space race; when they couldn’t find a qualified pilot they grabbed the first available female willing to take the chance.  Ура, товарищ Терешкова!