To a Distant Day: The Rocket Pioneers

Preface and Acknowledgments

This book got its start in 2003 when Colin Burgess, editor for the Outward Odyssey series of books on the history of space exploration, contacted me to ask if I was interested in writing a history of space exploration leading up to the time of the first human spaceflight in 1961. I had never thought of writing such a book, but as I considered the proposition and looked into the available literature, I warmed to the idea. One big reason was that our understanding of the events covered in this book has changed significantly in the past few years. The fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of its archives were factors in these changes, but as I looked around, I realized that historians were also challenging the established views of the early space pioneers from other parts of the world. While writing this book, this recent scholarship caused me to reconsider my own views and understanding of many twentieth-century space efforts. I hope that readers of this book will gain a new appreciation of the events and individuals that led to the space race of the 1960s, and of the events that followed, which will be covered in other books in the Outward Odyssey series. I also accepted Colin’s commission because I had spent much of the past decade engaged in studies of the history of space exploration, first for a book I wrote on the Canadian and British engineers who joined the U.S. space program in 1959 when the Canadian government canceled a military aircraft program. When that book was complete, I began to pursue academic studies. During that time, I have been pondering a question that has as much to do with the future of space exploration as its past. In the 1960s, Apollo’s journeys to the moon seemed to be a natural part of human progress . Many other people took it for granted that humans would be colonizing the moon and walking on Mars by the end of the twentieth century. As we now know, things didn’t turn out that way. This turn of events inspires Preface and Acknowledgments questions about what really led to the space race of the 1960s. I invite readers to consider how the events and social forces discussed in this book have affected developments in space exploration in the 1960s and since. A key part of the story in this book is the wave of interest in space exploration that swept Europe and particularly Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Recent studies by Frank H. Winter and David Clary suggest that Robert Goddard’s biggest contribution to space exploration was not necessarily his creation of the first liquid-fuel rocket, but instead his being the first credible scientific figure to point to the rocket as the way into space. Goddard was soon followed by Hermann Oberth and Max Valier, who spread the word in Germany, and by many Russians, especially Friedrich Tsander, who publicized Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s contributions to spaceflight theory. The Frenchman Robert Esnault-Pelterie, who in my view stands together with Goddard, Oberth, and Tsiolkovsky as an important early theorist of space- flight, also helped fan the early flames of enthusiasm. As Goddard learned the hard way, progress in rocketry requires large teams of experts, not solitary inventors. In the 1930s, the German army assembled the first team of engineers and scientists dedicated to building large rockets. Even though their ultimate product, the V-2 rocket, proved to be of extremely limited value as a weapon, the German rocketeers continued to receive support from the government of Nazi Germany. Had the German army flagged in building the V-2, the subsequent history of space exploration would be very different. But it didn’t, and World War II ended with the creation of the V-2 by Germany and the atomic bomb by the United States. Soon the Soviet Union had its own nuclear weapons and began building rockets as a means to deliver these weapons to its Cold War adversary. The United States also developed its own rockets capable of delivering nuclear weapons. Soon both sides possessed rockets that were also useful for launching vehicles into orbit around the earth and into deep space. Barely four decades after rockets were acknowledged as the way into space, humans began using them for that purpose. While I did my research I came across many individuals who made huge contributions to space...