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Rockets and Revolution
A Cultural History of Early Spaceflight
By Michael G. Smith UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Michael G. Smith
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8654-2
CHAPTER 1
Envisioning the Biological Universe
By the late nineteenth century interplanetary travel was still a matter of imaginative visions more than of any actual machines. It was about grand lines of ascent rather than plotted trajectories. In these ways it shared some traits with revolution. Rocket science lined its arrows upward into space the way revolution lined its arrows forward through time. They both appreciated leaps and bounds. This marriage between rockets and revolution also returns us to the very origins of the term revolution in modern usage, to the astronomical innovations of Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. Their work displaced our planet from the center of the universe, transforming it into one part of the greater sum of celestial mechanics, one of many possible worlds. But their work also put the earth into motion. In some of its earliest scientific and political contexts, as in the case of Copernicus's classic On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies, revolution meant either the ordered trajectories of the heavenly bodies or the similarly ordered pattern of bodies politic. To the modern mind planets and people move according to the predictable laws of nature, joining the natural with the social, bound to "Newton's concept of absolute space and time," to the tension of "action and reaction" near and far.
Leo Tolstoi expressed the insight at the conclusion of War and Peace (1869), offering a Copernican revolution for historiography, displacing the notion of an absolute hero along with the fiction of a stationary earth. Newton's laws, he proposed, applied to human history as much as to the steam engine. The proper material of history writing was not any one king or conqueror, any one abstraction of power or progress, but the complex of coincident forces and circumstances. History happened within the dense relations between people, positioned within space and through time, balanced however precariously between "freedom and necessity." Free will was a human force like the natural force of gravity, holding people together and moving history in relative freedom, just as gravity held the planets together and moved them by the laws of attraction.
At the turn of the twentieth century, supported by the recent technical advances in telescopes and spectroscopes, along with the new field of astrophysics (the study of the chemical and physical properties of the planets), the Copernican Revolution and Newtonian universe were just becoming fully present to a mass readership. They were the intellectual foundations for a new planetary consciousness. The mechanical heavens and Earth joined within a well-ordered creation, guided by movements both traceable and sure. Yet the cyclical was also giving way to the linear, ancient revolutions to modern evolution, simple movement to complex progress. Within these contexts the academic and popular media began to debate the possibilities of alien life and space travel. This discourse was by no means neat or fixed. Commentators often confused images of cyclical evolution and linear progress, historical pessimism with revolutionary optimism. But through all of this the media consensus held that human beings were in some measure an integral and conscious part of the wider cosmos.
Narrative Arcs of Nature and Culture
Comets remained something of an exception in these scientific frameworks. To be sure, they were part of the elliptical revolutions of the planets and stars. They were at one with the cosmology that placed the earth within the dome of skies and heavens, mapping "the vault of the clouds and the stellar vault as parallel curves," as "flattened arches bending down to the horizon." But comets also strayed dramatically at all angles from the regular orbital planes of the planets. They flew above and beyond, "the Comet like a Rocket to be shot out of the Sun." Their lines of motion seemed to taunt us just as the vaulted lines of the stars seemed to imprison us. Publicists had traditionally assigned deep political meanings to comets, portents of divine intervention in the rise and fall of solar systems, dynasties, and states. Even Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley judged "comets as harbingers of cataclysmic events and World reform," as overturnings of either the heavenly or terrestrial. Calling up the traditional view of comets as signs of impending doom, Thomas Malthus wrote that the French Revolution of 1789, "like a blazing comet, seems destined either to inspire with fresh life and vigour, or to scorch up and destroy the shrinking inhabitants of the Earth."
Observers took in Halley's comet, and the associated "Great Daylight" comet of 1910, in much the same way, as a sign of coming catastrophe. Newspapers around the world (from London to Tokyo, New York to Moscow) reported scenarios of mass destruction, including death by poisoning and suffocation from the deadly potassium chloride gas of the comet's tail. The media frenzy peaked on 17 May, as Europe waited into the night for the earth to pass through the comet's wake. None of the worst ever happened, of course. Halley's comet was more a sign of land-bound events, namely the burgeoning global culture of popular science and media panic, fixed upon a phenomenon of worldwide dramatic scope from above, with many mainstream scientists joining the fray.
Flammarion's popular novel The End of the World (1893) had fed the expectation of doom, in a captivating story about a "green-colored comet" come "from the depths of space" to boil the seas over their banks, bury millions of people alive, or suffocate them to death with poisonous fumes. Set in a twenty-fifth century of magnificent progress, in a sense mirroring Flammarion's own world, the pathos of the story was that humanity could not avoid political cataclysms of its own creation, the wars and revolutions of its past, any more than it could avoid natural cataclysms, the return of a comet too close to the earth. Readers of the French popular science magazine I Know All (Je sais tout) were treated to such scenarios: how even progressive political revolutions on the planet were eclipsed by the destructive powers of inscrutable cosmic revolutions. One enterprising Russian writer, S. Bel'skii, borrowed from Flammarion's timeline in his own fantasy, Under the Comet (1910), to warn that all the hopes of European civilization, present and future, could not escape the comet's impact. In the ensuing panic and mass destruction "all of humanity would be scattered into its basest living parts, like grains of sand torn about by a storm." "The fate of humanity," after all, "follows the orbit of the Earth and of the stars." According to one testimony, many people came to believe these prophecies. During the partial eclipse of the sun in April 1912, visible in St. Petersburg and adjoining provinces, bystanders from every walk of life gathered on the streets as if on a "religious pilgrimage," enshrouded in darkness, witnesses to a "mystical" event: "doomsday."
By the time of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the term revolution also suggested an event of singular transformative depth, not so much a catastrophe from above as an upturning of political power from below. The new meanings spoke to the power of human agency through history, humanity made new, as its own kind of natural cause. For Russian Social Democrats, nature enabled culture; the laws of historical materialism were the necessary precondition for human action. Or as one revolutionary put it, paraphrasing Newton on the "parallelogram of historical forces": the "wheel of history" moved within and along the path of two parallel lines, right and left. The model presumed that for every action there was possible an equal and opposite reaction. This demanded a maximal program of revolutionary will and action: revolution against counterrevolution. People and parties needed to force historical change. For all the influence of G. W. F. Hegel's complex dialectic (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) upon Russian revolutionary thinkers, Newton's theories offered a simpler push and pull.
Marxist historical determinism posed a scenario of movement and process, of expectation and result. The French Revolution offered Russians a classic trajectory. Its events were a distant horizon for Russian revolutionaries, more of mythic weight than of any tactical or strategic significance. The symbols did count, however, as in the case of the "solar myth" of the revolution, expressing the millenarian victory of light over dark, new over old, life over death. It had astronomical scope. It was pristine: part natural science and protoreligion, part Isaac Newton and Maximilien Robespierre. After the revolution, according to the myth, "what emerges is empty space, a free horizon.... Homogenous and 'isotropic' like the space of the new celestial mechanics, open in all directions to the universal force of gravity." The young Georgian radical I. V. Dzhugashvili (Stalin) tapped into the myth in 1905, when he wrote that "the Russian revolution is inevitable. It is as inevitable as the rising of the sun." This was just a few years after he had been looking up to the heavens by night, as a meteorological recorder and astronomical observer at the Tiflis Geophysical Observatory, meanwhile conspiring for the overthrow of the tsar by day. "We had to keep awake all night and make observations at stated intervals with the help of intricate instruments," remembered one of his comrades. "The work demanded great nervous concentration and patience." Until his appointment as commissar of nationalities during the October Revolution of 1917, this was Stalin's first real job: as meteorologist and astronomer. The message from his future biographers was clear enough. He began his career as something of a scientist, so they claimed, with all the virtues of a patient watcher of the skies.
Stalin's choice of reading material to prepare for his job was telling. He had probably read Flammarion and other mainstream popular science texts, perhaps while watching the skies from his post at the observatory. We know that he read one of J. Norman Lockyer's old classics, Astronomy (1876), an international best seller, translated into German and French, Italian and Russian. Stalin could have purchased something much less challenging, one of the dozen or so lowbrow astronomy texts on the market. But he chose a scholarly treatment, his introduction to the truths and timelines of the "Cosmos." Lockyer's was a comprehensive and readable survey of recent findings: including the spectral studies of the sun and planets and stars; their magnitudes and positions and kinds; the facts of the solar system; the measurements of time and the predictability of eclipses and cosmic phenomena. Here was a prideful inventory of humanity's latest discoveries about the planet and its place in the universe around it.
All of this new knowledge must have been intellectually thrilling to the young Stalin, only recently liberated from his rote studies and ritual devotions in the Orthodox seminary. For many Social Democrats, propositions about alien worlds helped to shatter the authority of the Russian Orthodox Church and Tsarist state. Popular astronomy meant progressive astronomy with a political-philosophical edge. Romantic youth and political radicals shared a self-professed "faith" in science and politics as the means and ends of transformative change. Stalin was joining the thousands of Russians interested in this "leap" in human consciousness.
All varieties of the political spectrum entertained this leap. The progressive Auguste Comte entertained it with his positivist take on contemporary astronomy, what he considered as the most modern of sciences and a convenient weapon against Christian theology and the church. The astronomer Ormsby M. Mitchel entertained it as well: with his lecture series and popular book The Orbs of Heaven (1851), translated into an influential Russian edition. Mitchel took his readers on a grand "journey" through the "blue ocean of space." Earth was the planetary shore upon which humanity gazed out at the planets, through which man "boldly wings his flight to the star-lit vault." The human being was, thanks to the latest science and technology, already becoming something of a comet, a wanderer in space. Like us, comets moved in willful ways. "They come up from below the plane of the ecliptic, or plunge downwards towards the sun from above, sweep swiftly round this their great centre, and with incredible velocity wing their flight far into the fathomless regions of space." Astronomy, Mitchel taught, was essentially a science of the revolutions of the planets and comets and stars, the mathematical computation of their orbits and motions through the "four beautiful curves" of circles, ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas. These were not yet rocket trajectories, but they were already pathways for human calculation and imagination about the great "island universes" and other worlds of the cosmos. The trend in human history was in fact pointed toward these plural worlds. The "onward, steady, triumphant march of mind," was even "godlike" in applying its "highest energies" in the quest to "unfold the mysteries of the stars." Human history took the shape of a "self-built pyramid" pointed toward outer space.
Like many of their colleagues in astronomy, Lockyer and Mitchel were appealing to a new paradigm of magnification. It was the perfect device for Flammarion's "plurality of worlds" thesis. The microscope and telescope offered science new perspectives on inner and outer spaces, on atoms and solar systems. Lockyer and his colleagues now placed a metaphysical scope upon the earth, transfixing this insignificant planet into something truly grand. It was but "a small planet traveling round a small star." The "whole solar system," wrote Lockyer, was "but a mere speck in the universe—an atom of sand on the shore, a drop in the infinite ocean of space." Yet as David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University, later put it, that universe was "so finely put together, so delicately adjusted, so eternally interdependent, that the smallest of all its parts is as large as the largest." F. S. Gruzdev's popular astronomy adapted such an approach for Russian audiences, if with a tone of excessive optimism. Although "just a speck of dust in comparison with the whole universe," we were well along the way to becoming "complete masters" of nature.
Science was beginning to draw lines outward to an infinite panorama of planets and stars. They were joined together in a sequence of creation seemingly within human understanding and reach. More and more popular science and science fiction stories now took their readers toward the planets, with the common scene of Earth receding from view, Mars or Venus coming into focus on approach, whole new continents and landscapes seen for the first time from space. Human beings suddenly became "inhabitants of the terrestrial globe," wrote one Russian journalist. We became planetary beings, or "earthlings." This new relativistic view shrank the human being and earth into mere specks of existence. But the space voyage ennobled as much as it humbled. Its parabolic itineraries set people on course, gave them depth perspective, a new field of vision. It magnified us as approaching travelers, diminished us as receding ones, always a function of accelerated movement. Humanity became a measure of the universe's distant spaces, of its existential orders of magnitude, carried along in a spacecraft, a new microcosm amid the macrocosm of outer space.
According to this paradigm, to magnify was to delimit and enlarge, all with one sweep of the scoping eye. Outer space was a function of optics before it was a function of rockets. The French artist Odilon Redon captured this truth in his sketch The Eye, like a Strange Balloon, Moves toward Infinity (1882), an eyeball balloon peering and rising toward the heavens. Innovative planetariums and observatories, such as Berlin's Urania (1888), literally screened the heavens, offering panoramic views of the actual sky as well as dramatic spectacles on the origin and evolution of the universe. Louis Bonnier turned our gaze earthward with his massive globe exhibit for the Paris World's Fair (1900), encased in a spiral ramp around which we human beings were meant to orbit and observe, as if from space. Charles Woodridge graced his "perfect" city (1902) with a massive parabolic dome, housing a hall of astronomy and observatory aligned to the planets and stars; celebrating Copernicus, father of the new sun-centered astronomy and "unity of space." All these spheres were artificial planets of a kind, emblematic of humanity's conquest over the elements. They were human-made terrestrial envelopes, precursors to the artificial envelopes of balloons and dirigibles that soon enabled us to overcome the natural envelopes of gravity and air.
As the plurality thesis took greater hold among mainstream scientists, dissenters took exception. Most notably, Alfred North Wallace's Man's Place in the Universe (1903) asserted that the earth was rare. Our solar system was located at the center of the universe, ours the lone inhabited planet within it. The chances for life elsewhere, given Earth's unique circumstances and the delicacy of life itself, were small indeed. From Russia the conservative Nikolai N. Strakhov had already launched such a critique some thirty years earlier. His thoughtful book The World as One (1873) argued against the "plurality of worlds," argued for this terrestrial "world as a whole," a singular, interdependent, structured world unto itself. Humanity took up the "central role" in all of nature. "The human being is the summit of all nature, the node of all existence," wrote Strakhov, "the principal essence and principle phenomenon and principle organ of all life." The human being, in other words, was the "thinking organism," the sum product of natural history.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rockets and Revolution by Michael G. Smith. Copyright © 2014 Michael G. Smith. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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