Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...heavy, bulky, ineffective and delicate to pay their way in the space vehicles of the near future. Instruments will do much better with far less demand for accommodation. Best of all, the black boxes need not get home alive. If they have radioed their findings back to earth, they can vaporize in a planet's atmosphere or wander into space never to return...
...space art improves, instrumented vehicles will make soft landings on the moon, braked gently to the airless surface by retrorockets. Once they get there, they can look around with television eyes, telling the earth what they see. When the probes get good enough to tackle the planets, they can swoop into the atmosphere of Venus for a look at its unknown surface, swing around Mars looking for signs of life...
...passed the moon. Radio signals can cover any desired distance if given sufficient power, but the only power sources now available are heavy, short-lived chemical batteries or feeble solar batteries. To tell its story properly from the distance of Mars, a probe needs as much power as an earth-side radio station. One possibility is a nuclear battery getting its energy from radioactive materials. Another (one form of which was invented by Professor Gold) is a solar battery of gossamer-light plastic film whose large area will catch several kilowatts of solar power...
...Space. But instruments can never bring back as much information as a spaceship with a human crew. The difficulties of manned space flight are still enormous, and they seem to increase the longer they are studied. The recently discovered belt of Van Allen radiation that rings the earth is a serious hazard that was not dreamed of a few months...
What is the motive for the push into space? This question gets many sharply conflicting answers. Some military strategists believe that a U.S. rocket base on the moon, which could never be destroyed by surprise attack, would provide the supreme deterrent to any earth aggressor. Most scientists do not agree. Nor do they think much of the idea of armed satellite bases. They see little reason to shoot from a satellite when a rocket shot from solid ground can hit any target on earth. But satellites may prove to have value as "eyes in the sky" over enemy territory...