S2E2: Getting There

It’s the age of Artemis! This means humanity is going back to the moon. And beyond! But where did this journey begin exactly? We’ve got a wild story that involves Nazis, bad novels, Walt Disney and the tyranny of the rocket equation. Listen as we explore the life and work of Wernher von Braun and the space race of the 1960s before looking to the present day Artemis programme and even the future of interstellar travel beyond the solar system. It’s time to back-up Earth, ready for a reboot.

Dr. Michael J. Neufeld is is a Senior Curator in the Space History Department at the Smithsonian and author of The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (1995), among other titles.

Avi Loeb is a theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology at Harvard. His newest book, Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars, is planned to be published in 2023.

LINKS

Space Scouts By Adam Phillipson 

For All Mankind on Apple+

Disneyland 1955 - Man in Space - Wernher Von Braun

Tom Lehrer’s "Wernher Von Braun"

www.twitter.com/TheLifeCyclePod
www.instagram.com/thelifecyclepodcast
www.thelifecyclepodcast.com
www.klang-games.com
Discord

Transcript

Getting There

John Holten: Plato started it: a long line of thinkers and dreamers who tell stories to get people on side, to dream big, to take humanity to places it’s never been before and where it thought it could never get to. Like the moon. Like outer space.

Eva Kelley: This is episode 2, season 2: Getting There

[Intro: The Life Cycle, a podcast about the future of humanity.]

JH: Hey Eva

EK: Hey John, what’s up?

JH: Well remember Dr Phil Kennedy from Season 1? How he wrote a novel to try and help advance the narrative around brain implants, make them part of popular culture?

EK: How could I ever forget! He’s one of my favorite people. A documentary about him came actually out in 2021 by the way, after I tracked him down in Atlanta. The documentary is called Father of the Cyborgs. I havent seen it yet, but it has really good reviews. And in case you haven't listened to our first season, we did a two part episode, I think it was episode four and five, called “Finding Phil”, about finding Dr. Phil Kennedy (the guy who implanted his own brain). So, if you haven’t listened to that yet, now’s the time. 

JH: Yeah and we should totally check out that documentary as well because he is an interesting guy, so it’s really no surprise that others have gone and tracked him down too. But I think I got an equally crazy story about a crazy scientist who tries to use popular culture - perhaps a bit more successfully than Dr. Phil - to try and get humanity to places it’s never been before, namely the moon. So if we want to get back to the moon, or to another planet, perhaps we should look at who started it all off and to look at rockets.

[Artemis I Launch to the Moon (Official NASA Broadcast) - Nov. 16, 2022. Broadcaster: And lift off of Artemis 1! We rise together, back to the moon, and beyond!]

JH: I think we should look at this rocket guy, Wernher Von Braun. He was born in 1917 in what was then Prussia, and he is invariably known as The Father of Space Travel. In Germany he pioneered rocketry weapons, the most famous of which was the V2, while after the Second World War he was head of the Marshall Space Flight Center and he was the chief architect of Nasa’s Saturn V. He is the person we have to look at if we want to understand how we managed to get to the moon.

EK: And how we might get back there …

JH: He did something similar to Dr Phil, but somehow his story is even crazier, and well, you know, one might not realize it, but has penetrated into the popular culture a lot more. Listeners may have noticed his appearance in the recent TV series produced for Apple TV, called ‘For All Mankind’. And while that show presents an alternative history of the space race, it does get some things right about this guy and his extraordinary life. So, to figure out fact from fiction, I went to speak with Dr. Michael J. Neufeld who is a Senior Curator in the Space History Department at the Smithsonian, and who conveniently enough is Von Braun’s biographer. 

Michael J. Neufeld: One of the points I make in the biography is that Von Braun was truly obsessed with space travel but and part of it was he was obsessed with going to the moon. He wanted to go to the moon himself personally, he wants to lead an expedition to the moon. That was his dream in the 1920s, you know, as he was a teenager absorbing this base culture of Weimar Germany, the early space advocacy and Weimar Germany. And he was still in his mind when he was building missiles for Nazi Germany. But I have to underline that he was also raised in a right wing nationalist household. He was a conservative junger in background, meaning he was actually a Prussian Baron. He actually had a title of Baron. He had no trouble building missiles for Nazi Germany and he also, later on, had no trouble building nuclear missles for the United States.

JH: It’s one of those things that is surprising and confusing about history, the man who more than anyone else, helped get us and NASA to the moon was, in fact, a Nazi. 

MN: You know Von Braun was a German rocket engineer. He was the Technical Director of the v2 rocket programme. V2 was the missile that bombarded particularly London and Antwerp at the end of World War Two. It was kind of a breakthrough into spaceflight, but it's also a breakthrough for ICBM technology. What makes his Nazi career more troubling is that he's also at the same time involved with the use of concentration camp labourer to build the V2. 

MN: He was an SS officer, although reluctantly, he was a member of the Nazi party. So he had this record, much of which didn't even come out till after the space race was over and after he died in 1977, that he was much more deeply enmeshed in the Nazi regime and its crimes than we knew during the space race. 

JH: “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now”. These are the famous first lines of Thomas Pynchon’s pulitlzer prize winning novel Gravity’s Rainbow, and they describe the V2 bombs that terrorised London and Antwerp. And it’s a terrible irony, I find, that war has given us so much scientific advances throughout history.

MN: Of course, the second act of his life begins in 1945, the US snaps him up along with a bunch of other German rocket engineers, and also a lot of other engineers and scientists from aviation and other things. He comes over to the states and he starts working on army missiles. 

MN: He does not come over for a space programme, there was no space programme in 1945 in the US. there were launches of V2s in in New Mexico, quite a few of them to explore the upper atmosphere and the edge of space. But his job at that time was really to help the US Army so he moved from the German army to the US Army to try to help us army develop missiles. He really broke through in 1952. He appeared on Walt Disney programme in 1955, and 1957. So he became kind of TV star and publishing star in the United States before Sputnik.

EK: Wait, the Walt Disney programme? What’s that? 

JH: Don’t worry, we’re going to get to that. Like Plato and his Atlantis, Von Braun first wrote a novel to get his ideas across. 

MN: When he was in the US in the late 1940s, you know, they were living in the army base at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. And there was not much money for space and he was frustrated, there wasn't much money for space. And he got the fact that US public didn't really believe in it. There was a huge amount of pop culture at the time that was largely Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, kind of very fantasy, very technically incorrect or technically oblivious to. But it was completely in the fantasy realm. 

MN: And Von Braun said, we need to sell the United States public on a space programme. His idea was to sell the public on the idea of the feasibility of space travel by writing a novel about going to Mars, and in the back of the Mars novel would be this huge technical appendix, which would explain why all of the rockets and procedures that he talked about in the novel were technically feasible. Well, it wasn't a very good novel. He couldn't sell it, you know, at the beginning of 1950, he tried to send it to multiple publishers, and it failed. And it was rejected. 

EK: I mean, if he hadn’t been a Nazi, I’d feel kind of sad for him.

JH: Yeah. And speaking from experience, as both a novelist and a publisher: it is the sad, true reality: it’s hard to publish bad books.. But that’s not the end, obviously.

MN: So his first attempt to reach the general public was a failure. But in the early 1950s, you know, as the Cold War got deeper, but also, as you know, rockets developed, you know, space travel became a little more credible. 

JH: This is when things got going for Von Braun. He had spent his first years in the USA in a military camp, kind of like under house arrest. But by 1952, he started to get the chance to spread his message, eventually, as we’re about to hear, getting his ideas about space travel into almost every American living room. Dr. Neufeld told me the remarkable trajectory:

MN: And there were there was there was activity in terms of conferences that he could speak at, and so forth. But there was no breakthrough until 1952. And that's when, as a result of running into Cornelius Ryan, this journalist for Colliers magazine who later became famous for his book, The Longest Day, about D Day. He ran into Cornelius Ryan at a conference and he and several other space advocates campaigned with Ryan that space travel was not crazy that was actually coming soon. And that led to a series of articles in Colliers magazine starting in March 1952. And so in the March 1952 issue, there was like a whole issue devoted in Colliers to space travel with these beautiful paintings by the space artists Chesley Bonestell, the most important space artists of that time. 

JH: So just to jump in and say Colliers Magazine was a magazine famous for investigative journalism. 

EK: It pioneered it even!  It was founded in 1888 and actually stopped running quite soon after the period we’re talking aboutright now, its last issue coming out in 1957. It was known for pushing for social reform and the covers were all, super Americana. 

MN: And the issue was such a hit it led to a book, and then Colliers said let's do articles about the moon. So there were two issues about going to the moon and the fall of 52. And there were more issues in 53 and then into 54. So So you know, he became much better known as a space advocate in that 52 to 54. 

MN: Just as that was wrapping up and Colliers had a lot bigger than the loss interested in the whole thing, Walt Disney was starting a new television series. And the reason for that was that he was building Disneyland in Anaheim. He needed funding and one of the ways he got funding was to make an agreement with ABC to have a TV series called Disneyland. And one of the areas of the park was called Tomorrowland. It was a future section. And Disney wasn’t sure what to do about that, and one of his key people Ward Kimball said, well look at the Colliers magazine series. You know, could we could be all about space. So you know, the Disneyland series had a

MN: Shows how little Disney cared about kind of ex-Nazis. As three his spokespeople were German, two out of the three were they had been ex- Nazis. The other one, Willy Ley, was actually escaped from Nazi Germany.

MN: So yeah, the TV series came out in I think the first episode was in March 55. The second episode was in December 55. And the first one was about just building a rocket and putting humans in orbit. And describing the physics of that and what we could do.

JH: The first of the three Disney episodes was titled Man in Space, which first aired on 9th of March 1955, drawing 40 million viewers.

MN: And then the second episode was about a space station and then going to the moon. So so all of his ideas, he kind of laid out in Colliers. At first we had to build a space station, then we then we go to the moon and then we go to Mars, that kind of that trajectory. He first sold that and Colliers. Then he did another version of it for Disney on TV. And so he was really successful. 

[Excerpt from “Disneyland 1955 - Man in Space - Wernher Von Braun”]

JH: It wasn’t just Von Braun and Disney. At the same time Frederick Ordway III, a top level colleague of Von Braun at NASA, became chief technical consultant and scientific adviser for “2001: A Space Odyssey,  the masterpiece. Keeping in mind that it came out 1968, a year before the first moon landing.

EK: So you have this mix between NASA and engineers and popular culture all working together. Even though no one had actually been to the moon yet? 

JH: Right. And even if these tools us humans were making, have their origins in violence and war, they are still somehow being popularised in the culture to become agents of discovery and wonder. And so moving forward after the Moon landing, It doesn’t really take long for Von Braun’s reputation and past to come to light, and it kind of leads to widespread mockery:

MN: You know, and a little later on the 60s Tom Lehrer wrote his famous song "Wernher Von Braun". The picture of Von Braun in those jokes, in the song, that he's was a total unprincipled opportunist who would worked for anybody as long as it was rockets. It wasn't really that he was kind of a Nazi officer or war criminal or anything like that. The culture has always been divided over  Von Braun, even today, I would say that remains to some extent true, because it depends on where in the United States you go. Like in Huntsville, Alabama there’s still a kind of hero worship.

[Tom Lehrer’s "Wernher Von Braun"]

JH: It’s interesting because now we’re in the era of Artemis, the next planned series of manned spacetrips by NASA. The Artemis 1 mission, with robots and crash test dummies aboard, launched successfully in November 2022. And according to the current timetable, the crewed Artemis 2 launch will take place in 2024, the Artemis 3 crewed lunar landing in 2025, and the Artemis 4 docked with the Lunar Gateway in 2027. And thereafter there will be yearly manned spaceflights. 

MN: Now, we seem to be serious enough about launching astronauts back to the moon. And we have a programme to do that 50 years after Apollo. So there's been a long interlude where we just stayed in low Earth orbit. In many ways we had to come to grips with how hard it is to travel space with humans, particularly to go into deep space with humans even going to the moon isn't that easy. 

JH: So one person who does believe in getting there, to deep space, is Avi Loeb. I first came across the name Avi Loeb on the SEED blog actually, in a post written by a friend of the podcast, Adam Phillipson. 

EK: Yeah, was that the article titled Space Scouts? Right, I think I remember, Adam wrote about ‘Oumuamua’, the object that was first spotted in 2017 by the Pan-STARRS telescope, which located on Maui in Hawaii. So this object, it has been theorized, that it could have in fact have been an alien scout. And Oumuamua translates into “scout” in Hawaiian. 

JH: Right, which is a super exciting idea. And it’s a really good read actually, that article, so we can link to it. Yeah Loeb is lots of things right: he’s got a lot of theories. He’s a theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology at Harvard. And when I got a chance to talk to him, I asked him about what we can hope for the future with regard Artemis and rocketry in general. And he really kind of went with it:

Avi Loeb: Okay. So, so far, we launched the chemical rockets. And the problem with them is that they have to carry their own fuel. And the problem with that is, the way they are propelled is that they throw the gas, the burnt up fuel, through an exhaust backwards and the rocket cannot develop a speed that exceeds by more than roughly a factor of 10, then the speed of the burnt up gases from the fuel that comes out from the exhaust. That is called the tyranny of the rocket equation, in the sense that the amount of fuel you need to carry in order to increase the speed of the of the rocket, the terminal speed, grows exponentially with the value of the terminal speed. So it's really not practical to reach more than 10 times the the speed of the of the gases that come out of the exhaust and that that speed is a few kilometres per second. So that's why all the spacecraft that we launched with chemical propulsion reached around 30 kilometres per second since Sputnik, nothing went much faster than that. And the question is, how do we avoid the tyranny of the rocket equation? And how do we reach much larger speeds? 

JH: It’s worth jumping in here to say that besides the Artemis programme and other initiatives like SpaceX, which are all trying to break the tyranny of the rocket equation, Avi Loeb also is an adviser for something called ;Breakthrough Starshot’, which is the most ambitious effort yet to travel from our solar system to another star system and exoplanet.

EK: And so, specifically this exoplanet is called  Proxima Centauri, and the star system it’s located in is the Alpha Centauri system.

JH: Right. Avi told me how he got involved in the project, and what it’s trying to do exactly. 

AL: And in fact, in summer 2015, an entrapreneur from Silicon Valley named Yuri Milner came to the to my office at Harvard and sat on the sofa in front of me and said that we would like to establish a new initiative to reach the nearest star within our lifetime. Would you be interested in leading that? And I said, of course, but let me think about it, because the nearest star is four light years away. And if we want to reach it in our lifetime, which is, let's say 20 years from now, it needs to move at a fifth of the speed of light. 

AL: And that means that it's 1000 times faster than chemical rockets we're able to achieve. So how do we get 1000 times faster payload? And then it took took me six months to with my students and postdocs to realise that the only way to accomplish that is not to carry the fuel. That in fact, you want to use light in order to push on a sail just like the sail attached to a sailboat that is being propelled by wind, except here is the reflection of light that pushes it. 

AL: So very thin film of material, if it weighs a few grammes, and the laser beam is 100 gigawatt, and the laser is shining, let's say for a few minutes on such a sail, that is this roughly the height of a person, it can push it to a fifth of the speed of light across a distance that is five times the distance to the moon. And that's the concept of the initiative that we ended up announcing in April 2016, in the company of Stephen Hawking, in New York City. There was a funding level of $100 million allocated for this initiative. 

AL: And we're still pursuing the challenges in this concept that involve the design of the sail, so that it will ride on the beam of light in a stable fashion and also will be a good reflector. The design of the laser beam, the, what we call the photon engine. And then finally, the communication four light years away with Earth is non trivial at all. So it's a challenging project, but it's off the beaten path. And it's worth pursuing because it could represent the future of humanity.

EK: The future of humanity, that’s our tagline, basically! So Loeb really wants get out there, he’s ready to bounce. 

JH: Yeah he really thinks that the way to do this is to preserve ourselves and our civilization, going forward. Which reminds me of the Romans and how they left Britain in the 4th century, and by the dark ages, the whole 400 years of them being there, their entire civilization in a way, were totally forgotten. It has happened throughout history. Loeb has a characteristically far out, forward thinking idea as to how we can preserve our civisilation and collective human knowledge:

AL: I think one of the big tasks ahead is to preserve what we find precious today and staying on Earth, on this rock that we were born on, you know, is not necessarily the best strategy because there might be an asteroid impacting it, like we discussed. We might create a catastrophe like climate change, pandemics, you know, so far, we were lucky, but we might not be lucky in the future. 

AL: So we need them to make copies that will go elsewhere. You know, just like the Gutenberg Printing Press made copies of the Bible. Originally, it was handwritten, and each copy was precious, and you know, a stain on such a copy was a disaster. But once the printing press was created, you could make many copies you won't worry about the fate of one of them. And so that's what we need to do to humanity. What we find precious. And, you know, the initial thing we need to do is we're planning a human base, NASA is planning a human base on Mars. It's called the Artemis programme and within a few months, the the first launch of an Artemis spacecraft will take place by NASA. It was supposed to happen, but the weather prevented it. Well, there was a leak also. So the point is that once we have a human base, we can put a recovery system or recording system on the moon. 

AL: You know, I bought a laptop a month ago, and together with it, I bought a backup system that is a small box, the size of a cell phone, that basically records all the information on the cell phone. And if something bad happens to it, I can buy a new, a new laptop and recover all the information. And so the same thing you can put on the moon, a system that will communicate with Earth, where you can download, you can upload actually all the books, all the music, all the DNA information about all life forms on Earth, you just keep it on that thing. 

AL: If something catastrophic happens on Earth, the humans on the moon could potentially reconstruct everything that was precious, and in fact, reboot the earth so to speak, it will give you an opportunity to get rid of the bad things, the bad traits.

JH: Do you have a Do you have a term for that? Do you have a nickname that you give such an idea?

AL: Rebooting earth! Now you might say, we have to wait for a catastrophe to do that. But maybe not. Maybe it's time to get rid of the bad traits. And reinvent the earth. I don't think it will happen spontaneously, because humans have a tendency of preserving the bad things of doing the same thing over and over again, even if it's not good for them. So maybe a catastrophe is needed.

AL: Once we have such a spacecraft, or even with chemical propulsion, we can just like the biblical story of Noah's Ark, we can put things on it that represent Earth, that preserve what we find precious. It doesn't need to be animals as in the case of Noah's Ark, it could be the DNA of life, as we know just information encoded in electronic form. And that would be a way to preserve what we find precious.

EK: So like, a digital Noah’s Ark. That’s wild. 

JH: Storing the data of our species on the moon, like interstellar DNA banks, a Noah’s Arc of all we know and love…

EK: ...it’s pretty exciting, but to be honest, I find it kind of depressing at the same time. Can we end this episode on a joke maybe? Do you have one up your sleeve? 

JH: Umm, you know like a shovel? Like a spade? 

EK: Yeah?

JH: They’re really groundbreaking technologies.

EK: [laughs] That’s really stupid.

JH: But we’re into the tools of humans. The technology that we make. Especially when it’s groundbreaking.

EK: Good one.

JH:  Thanks for listening, and thanks to our guests Dr. Michael J. Neufeld and Professor Avi Loeb. 

EK: This episode was written and produced by John Holten with additional writing by me, Eva Kelley. 

JH: Sound design and sound editing was done by the magnificent David Magnusson

EK: Mundi Vondi is our executive producer, and he also created the artwork for this episode in collaboration with Midjourney.

JH: Additional research, script supervision, and fact-checking was by Savita Joshi.

EK: Follow us on social media and subscribe wherever it is you listen to your podcasts. Have a great rest of your day.

JH: Or night.