Word: moons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...moon would be a poor, dismal place to start a colony. It has no detectable atmosphere, certainly no water. Other planets are not much better. Mercury is fiercely hot on the side that it keeps toward the sun and fiercely cold on its sunless side. Outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) are cold worlds with hostile atmospheres of methane and ammonia...
Poor Neighbors. In spite of imaginative efforts to make the planets sound attractive, scientists consider earth's neighborhood rather slummy. But the space planners are optimistic. Colonists on the airless moon, they say. could erect Plexiglas domes and fill them with any atmosphere they liked. They could grow bumper crops in the unfailing sunlight, could extract metals and oxygen from the rocks. Arthur C. Clarke in The Explora, tion of Space argues that man might thrive under such conditions better than he does on earth...
Oversold Public. A large public, happily mixing fact & fiction, apparently believes that space travel is just around the corner. Two years ago New York's Hayden Planetarium whimsically offered "reservations" to the moon and planets. It got 25,000 requests, many of them deadly serious, from all over the world. Every military guided missile center has to chase "space volunteers" away from its guarded perimeter...
...practical rocket men fear that their gradual march toward space may disappoint the oversold public. All the necessary, cautious first steps (a small missile shot into an orbit, a hit on the moon with a small payload. etc.) are a long way from manned space ships. But Dr. von Braun (of the V-2s), who would hurry the cautious missile men along, says that manned space flight "is as sure as the rising of the sun." He tells just how the U.S. military can establish a "satellite space station" in an orbit around the earth, and he insists that such...
...work freely in a vacuum for long periods of time. Dr. Fritz Haber of the School of Space Medicine believes that the whole space-suit idea will have to be abandoned. If space men want to float around outside their space ship (as they did in the movie, Destination Moon), they will have to stay inside rigid cylinders and do their work by remote-control devices operated from inside...