Word: porters
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...talk about space travel comes from the engineers who design the rocketships for the future. All they need for a trip to the moon, they say, is sufficient funds ($4 billion) and an all-out engineering effort like the one that produced the Abomb. To British Astronomer J. G. Porter, writing in the scientific monthly Discovery, "some element of doubt creeps in." His engineering brethren, he says, have overlooked some basic difficulties obvious to any stargazer...
Bucket on a String. The general idea of space travel, Porter concedes, is "sound enough." Using the pull of gravity-allowing the spaceship to "fall freely"- would permit small fuel loads. Five thousand miles from earth, a satellite way station could be established, revolving continuously around the earth at 1,400 m.p.h. like a bucket on an invisible string. Moored alongside, the spaceship would require only 50% increase in speed to take it out to an elliptical orbit swinging half a million miles to the moon and back...
From here on, Porter implies, the engineers have little cause for optimism. With the moon, earth and spaceship all moving at high speed in their respective orbits, there could be no arrow-straight courses. The spaceship would have to be directed and launched so that its orbit coincided exactly with the moon's passing; an error in initial speed of a thousandth of a mile per second (5 ft.) might mean missing the moon altogether. For the moon's gravitational pull to take effect, the spaceship must first exactly match the moon's 2,278-m.p.h. speed...
...would have to be even more exacting and constant than during a trip to the moon. There is no known way that its crew can determine the direction and actual speed of a rocketship traveling in space. Speed cannot be changed without affecting the direction and the orbit. As Porter sees it, a "free fall" rocketship would trace a "sort of zigzag in space," running out of fuel long before its objective was reached...
What hope is left for the space enthusiasts? Using present fuels and the free-fall orbit, says Porter, they may be able soon to set up a man-made earth satellite. But only a compact atomic-powered rocket could build up enough speed without excessive fuel loads to enable men to ignore intricate navigation and steer through the heavens as they choose...