Like the Industrial or the Einsteinian Revolution, the Space Race is a trope, or way of organizing
historical events into a story that makes sense.
In this story, the two great powers that emerged after World War Two—the United States and
Soviet Union—competed to send communications satellites, dogs, and people into outer space…
And also to intimidate the other side with the prospect of nuclear war.
But before humans could send anything into space, first they had to get into earth’s atmosphere.
[Intro Music Plays]
Folks dreamed about flying up into the heavens for centuries. You might have seen Leonardo
Da Vinci’s sketches for personal flying machines, for example. But these didn’t
work. Starting around CE 220 in China, people have
used unmanned sky lanterns—hot air balloons—to help messages escape the ground for everything
from military signaling to festivals.
And human hot air balloons became popular in Europe in the late 1700s, starting in France.
But these devices didn’t travel fast; they couldn’t handle strong winds; and they weren’t
very safe. So historians tend to start the history of
air travel with two dudes from a large family, Orville and Wilbur Wright.
These bros ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. Actually, let’s be clear, their sister Katherine
ran the household and handled their business finances.
But the brothers wanted to build a flying machine. And at the end of the Second Industrial
Revolution—they did! Orville and Wilbur made lots of gliders, and
eventually a powered plane. They used wood and fabric, with a petrol-powered internal
combustion engine and some bicycle parts. And keep in mind, the bicycle itself was only
twenty-five years old! But first, they collected tons of data about
wing shapes and air flow using a small homemade wind tunnel.
People had tried to build flying machines, sure. But the Wrights used physical data to
design one. And then the brothers took off on the first
heavier-than-air flight on December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk in the Outer Banks of North
Carolina. They made four flights on that first day. None was very long or high by modern
standards, but all were extraordinary in 1903. The Wrights wanted to commercialize their
fliers. But it took a while before people—other than the aviation-obsessed French— to believe
that they had actually flown. Eventually, however, the Wrights conducted
more demonstrations and convinced the U.S. military to invest. Aviation took off for
war, but also for mail and passenger services. With a more advanced engine, Charles Lindbergh
flew across the Atlantic in 1927. And by the early 1930s, well-off passengers could ride
commercial airlines. This revolutionized the whole tourism and cargo industries. And global
culture: it made the world feel smaller.
In terms of technical effects, air travel spawned whole industries. Think about the
many integrated technologies that allow you to fly: fuel refining, baggage processing,
ticketing, air traffic control, and so on. And, despite our angry tweets, commercial
air travel is one big, highly functioning, and safe system today.
But air IS NOT space. Flying using a jet engine in a plane with
fixed wings can get you high—into the cold, oxygen-low strata of the atmosphere. But to
escape the pull of earth’s gravity, you need more power.
The solution? A really big chemical reaction. Basically: an explosion. The inspiration for
the solution? Science fiction. In 1865, French adventure writer Jules Verne
wrote a book called From the Earth to the Moon. In it, members of a gun club decide
to go the moon by creating—wait for it—a giant gun!
Verne saw American settler-colonization as a great adventure. Why not head to the moon
and exploit the Mooninites!? So science fiction matters! It influences
how we, including real-life scientists and engineers, think about what the future can
be. In this case, Verne was notable for trying to imagine a pretty dang realistic plan for
space exploration, given nineteenth-century technology.
Still, real-life giant gun-making, AKA rocket science, didn’t take off immediately. Between
Verne and World War Two, the discipline of chemistry took off, especially in Germany.
Scientists had access to new materials that had simply never existed before.
So leading up to the war—and directly inspired by Verne’s novel—Nazi physicist Doctor
Wernher von Braun developed chemical reactions that could propel a weapon far, far away.
And late in World War Two, the Nazis launched his V-2 rockets—the first long-range, guided
ballistic missile—against England, killing civilians.
But after the war, guess who forgave this Nazi’s crimes to make use of his engineering
genius? Yup: the U S of A. Von Braun became Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center
at NASA. Like airplanes, rockets changed warfare forever.
Missiles replaced long-range bombers for delivering nuclear weapons. And thus the Cold War began:
Russians and Americans could now strike anywhere in the world. Apocalypse was only a button
away.
(By the way—this is still the case!) It’s good to think about how we tell the
history of the invention of weapons. For example, one curator at the Smithsonian argued that
rockets on display there should be pointed down, so that visitors would be confronted
with destruction—rather than pointed up and away, which implies victory without consequences.
With new German-designed rockets, Soviet and American engineers competed to fly farther.
Much of the Cold War relates to this Space Race.
It began when the USSR launched the first satellite, Sputnik, on October 4, 1957. This
shocked the world and terrified many in the United States.
Only a few years later, in 1961, the Soviet Union sent the first human into space. Yuri
Gagarin made one whole orbit of earth in a Vostok spacecraft, becoming the first cosmonaut—or
“space sailor.” Like Sputnik’s launch, Gagarin’s flight
was utterly mind-blowing. It symbolized just how far the Soviet physical sciences had come,
very quickly. Out of an empire of serfs, the USSR had evolved into a scientific leader
capable of breaking new ground—including cultural ones.
In 1963, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova piloted Vostok 6, bringing womankind to space.
She’s still alive, by the way—and has offered to take a one-way trip to Mars!
So how did the Americans respond to all this? In 1961, U.S. President John Kennedy publicly
threw down a major scientific challenge: “to land a man on the moon before the decade is
out.” Bam! Verne strikes again! The Mercury program of the early 1960s put
Americans into space. But the Apollo program successfully landed humans on the moon.
ThoughtBubble, show us the wonder of moon travel:
This program was complex, but it boiled down to a few components: Using advanced computers
to chart a course to get to the moon, crossing thousands and thousands of miles.
Training pilots to be astronauts—or “star sailors.”
Designing a command module that could land on the moon and then take off again.
And building a rocket to leave the earth with enough force to carry not a small satellite,
but astronauts, in a module. The launch vehicle that got humans to the
moon was the Saturn series, designed by Wernher von Braun’s team. Like other giant liquid-fuel
rockets, it worked by mixing chemicals that would react violently, creating tremendous
force that was directed straight down, sending the vehicle up in the opposite direction.
In this case, the chemicals were liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen, and “rocket propellant
one,” or RP-1. Which is basically kerosene that has a bunch of dangerous chemicals added
to make it super explosive. After several missions, and a few disasters,
NASA felt they could safely send humans to the moon and back in 1969.
So on July 16, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins took off
from Merritt Island, Florida, on the eleventh Apollo mission.
On July 20, their Eagle lander touched down in the moon’s Sea of Tranquility. Neil Armstrong
became the first human to set foot on a planetary body other than earth. He was joined by Buzz
Aldrin. As young men on vacation will do, Buzz and
Neil planted the flag of the United States, took some moon-selfies, called President Nixon,
and stole some moon-rocks. Total hooligans! And then they returned to earth, four days
after landing on the moon. Thanks ThoughtBubble. There are lots of movies
about the Apollo program’s numerous successes and even one of its terrifying failures, Apollo
Thirteen. Which was arguably the most successful mission, by the way, because NASA was able
to correct the disaster! And the Apollo program was as much a managerial
success as it is a technical one. It’s a great example of big science—research projects
so big that no individual lab can do everything from beginning to end, so work is broken off
into chunks. Like the Manhattan Project. But not all big space science has been about
winning wars. Take the Hubble Space Telescope, Mars rover, or Cassini-Huygens satellite.
The epistemic value of these missions is incalculable. Their practical utility, almost zero.
Alas, space exploration is super expensive, and Congress has to choose how to spend taxpayers’
money. On the same day that they cancelled funding for the revolutionary physics experiment,
the Supercollider Superconductor, in 1993, they approved funding the space shuttle. This
was a big loss to particle physics, but a win for astronauts.
The shuttle program itself was retired in 2011. One response to this lack of public
funding has been an explosion of private space agencies, developing space tourism.
Another solution has been international collaboration: despite persisting political tensions, Russia
and the United States collaborate on space science today!
Perhaps most notably, since 1998, Americans, Russians, Japanese, Europeans, and Canadians
have worked together to run experiments on the International Space Station.
It’s above us right now—humanity’s only outpost beyond the safety of the atmosphere,
and a physical symbol of how the quest to understand our universe can bring us together.
All this space travel has given us new epistēmē—such as better understandings of the age of the
universe AKA everything. And new technē—including solar cells, freeze drying, digital cameras,
GPS, and better weather prediction. It’s also given us modern communications technologies.
And, oh yeah, spy satellites.
But space science has also filled space with tons of junk, including rocket parts, dead
satellites, and human waste. Which raises the question of whose job is
it to clean up? That is, who owns space!? Well, space law generally says that no one
gets to own space. But that becomes problematic for geosynchronous
orbits, or circular paths, 35,786 kilometers above sea level, that follow the rotation
of the planet and so are fixed above specific points on earth. You can only have so many
satellites at useful geosynchronous points. The US, Russia, China, and EU already have
many of the best spots. This is another way that equatorial countries face an unequal
landscape in science. So space science raises tough questions about
power and knowledge, shared resources and competitions between nations. But there’s
only one earth, and space science also provides some good models on how to share.
After all, the Apollo project was named after the Greek god of music, truth, and healing—not
war. As President Kennedy said in 1962: “…We
shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of
knowledge and understanding.” Next time—we’re coming back to solid ground,
with a new perspective on earth’s place in a vast universe. It’s the birth of ecology
and earth systems science!
Crash Course History of Science is filmed in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney studio in Missoula, MT and it's made
with the help of all these nice people. And our animation team is Thought Cafe.
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