by Michio Kaku
ROCKETS FOR WAR AND PEACE
In the first phase of rocketry, we had the dreamers, like Tsiolkovsky, who worked out the physics and mathematics of space travel. In the second phase, we had people like Goddard, who actually built the first prototypes of these rockets. In the third phase, rocket scientists caught the eye of major governments. Wernher von Braun would take the sketches, dreams, and models of his predecessors and with the support of the German government—and later the United States—would create gargantuan rockets that would successfully take us to the moon.
The most celebrated of all rocket scientists was born an aristocrat. Baron Wernher von Braun’s father was the German minister of agriculture during the Weimar Republic, and his mother could trace her ancestry to the royal houses of France, Denmark, Scotland, and England. Von Braun was an accomplished pianist as a child and even wrote original works of music. At one point, he might have become a renowned musician or composer. But his destiny changed when his mother bought him a telescope. He became fascinated by space. He devoured science fiction and was inspired by the speed records set by rocket-propelled cars. One day, when he was twelve, he unleashed chaos in the crowded streets of Berlin by attaching a series of fireworks to a toy wagon. He was delighted that it took off like, well, a rocket. However, the police were less impressed. Von Braun was taken into custody but released because of his father’s influence. As he recalled fondly years later, “It performed beyond my wildest dreams. The wagon careened crazily about, trailing fire like a comet. When the rockets burned out, ending their sparkling performance with a magnificent thunderclap, the wagon rolled majestically to a halt.”
Von Braun confessed that he was never good with mathematics. But his drive to perfect rocketry led him to master calculus, Newton’s laws, and the mechanics of space travel. As he once told his professor, “I plan on traveling to the Moon.”
He became a graduate student in physics and earned his Ph.D. in 1934. But he spent much of his time with the amateur Berlin Rocket Society, an organization that used spare parts to build and test rockets on a deserted three-hundred-acre piece of land outside of the city. That year, the society successfully tested a rocket that rose two miles into the air.
Von Braun might have become a professor of physics at some German university, writing learned articles about astronomy and astronautics. But war was in the air, and all of German society, including the universities, was being militarized. Unlike his predecessor, Robert Goddard, who had requested funding from the U.S. military but was turned down, von Braun got an entirely different reception from the Nazi government. The German Army Ordnance Department, always searching for new weapons of war, noticed von Braun and offered him generous funding. His work was so sensitive that his Ph.D. thesis was classified by the army and wasn’t published until 1960.
Von Braun, by all accounts, was apolitical. Rocketry was his passion, and if the government would fund his research, he would accept it. The Nazi Party offered him the dream of a lifetime: directorship of a massive project to build the rocket of the future, with a nearly unlimited budget, employing the cream of German science. Von Braun claimed that being offered membership in the Nazi Party and even the SS was a rite of passage for government workers rather than a reflection of his politics. But when you make a deal with the devil, the devil always asks for more.
RISE OF THE V-2
Under von Braun’s leadership, the scribblings and sketches of Tsiolkovsky and the prototypes of Goddard became the Vengeance Weapon 2 rocket, an advanced weapon of war that terrorized London and Antwerp, blowing up entire city blocks. The V-2 was unbelievably powerful. It dwarfed Goddard’s rockets, making them look like toys. The V-2 stood forty-six feet tall and weighed 27,600 pounds. It could travel at a blazing speed of 3,580 miles per hour and it achieved a maximum altitude of about sixty miles. It hit its targets at three times the speed of sound, giving no warning apart from a double cracking noise as it broke the sound barrier. And it had an operational range of two hundred miles. Countermeasures were futile since no human could track it and no airplane could catch it.
The V-2 set a number of world records, shattering all past achievements in terms of speed and range for a rocket. It was the first long-range guided ballistic missile. It was the first rocket to break the sound barrier. And most impressively, it was the first rocket ever to leave the boundary of the atmosphere and enter outer space.
The British government was so flummoxed by this advanced weapon that they had no words for it. They invented the story that all these explosions were caused by faulty gas mains. But because the agent of these horrific explosions clearly came from the sky, the public sarcastically referred to them as “flying gas pipes.” Only after the Nazis announced that a new weapon of war had been unleashed against the British did Winston Churchill finally admit that England had been attacked by rockets.
Suddenly, it appeared as if the future of Europe, and Western civilization itself, might hinge upon the work of a small, isolated band of scientists led by von Braun.
HORRORS OF WAR
The successes of Germany’s advanced weapons came at a tremendous human cost. More than three thousand V-2 rockets were launched against the Allies, resulting in nine thousand deaths. It is estimated that the death toll was even higher—at least twelve thousand—for the prisoners of war who built the V-2 rockets in slave labor camps. The devil wanted its due. Von Braun realized too late that he was in way over his head.
He was horrified when he visited the site where the rockets were built. A friend of von Braun’s quoted him as saying, “It is hellish. My spontaneous reaction was to talk to one of the SS guards, only to be told with unmistakable harshness that I should mind my own business, or find myself in the same striped fatigues!…I realized that any attempt of reasoning on humane grounds would be utterly futile.” Another colleague, when asked if von Braun had ever criticized these death camps, replied, “If he had done it, in my opinion, he would have been shot on the spot.”
Von Braun became a pawn of the monster he helped to create. In 1944, when the war effort was in trouble, he got drunk at a party and said that the war was not going well. All he wanted to do was work on rocketry. He regretted that they were working on these weapons of war instead of a spaceship. Unfortunately, there was a spy at the party, and when his drunken comments were relayed to the government, he was arrested by the Gestapo. For two weeks, he was held in a prison cell in Poland, not knowing if he would be shot. Other charges, including rumors that he was a communist sympathizer, were brought to light as Hitler decided his fate. Some officials feared he might defect to England and sabotage the V-2 effort.
Eventually, a direct appeal from Albert Speer to Hitler spared von Braun’s life because he was still considered too crucial to the V-2 effort.
The V-2 rocket was decades ahead of its time, but it didn’t enter full-time combat until the end of 1944, which was too late to stem the collapse of the Nazi empire, as the Red Army and Allied forces converged on Berlin.
In 1945, von Braun and one hundred of his assistants surrendered to the Allies. They, along with three hundred railroad cars of V-2 rockets and parts, were smuggled back to the U.S. This was part of a program, called Operation Paperclip, to debrief and recruit former Nazi scientists.
The U.S. Army scrutinized the V-2, which eventually became the basis of the Redstone rocket, and von Braun and his assistants had their Nazi records “cleansed.” But von Braun’s highly ambiguous role in the Nazi government continued to haunt him. The comedian Mort Sahl would summarize his career with the quip, “I reach for the stars, but sometimes I hit London.” Singer Tom Lehrer penned the words, “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department.”
ROCKETRY AND SUPERPOWER RIVALRY
In the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. government officials missed a strategic opportunity when they did not recognize the prophetic work being done in their own backyard by Goddard. They missed a second strategic opportunity aft
er the war, with the arrival of von Braun. In the 1950s, they left von Braun and his assistants in limbo, without giving them any real focus. Eventually, interservice rivalry took over. The army, under von Braun, created the Redstone rocket, while the navy had the Vanguard missile and the air force the Atlas.
Without any immediate obligations for the army, von Braun began to take an interest in science education. He created a series of animated TV specials with Walt Disney that captured the imagination of future rocket scientists. In the series, von Braun painted the broad outlines of a massive scientific effort to land on the moon as well as to develop a fleet of ships that would reach Mars.
While the U.S. rocketry program proceeded by fits and starts, the Russians moved ahead rapidly with theirs. Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev grasped the strategic importance of the space program and made it a top priority. The Soviet program was put under the direction of Sergei Korolev, whose very identity was kept top secret. For years he was only referred to mysteriously as “Chief Designer” or “the Engineer.” The Russians had also captured a number of V-2 engineers and moved them to the Soviet Union. With their guidance, the Soviets took the basic V-2 design and quickly built a series of rockets based on it. Essentially, the entire U.S. and USSR arsenals were based on modifying or lashing together the V-2 rockets, which in turn were based on Goddard’s pioneering prototypes.
One of the major goals of both the United States and USSR was launching the first artificial satellite. It was Isaac Newton himself who first proposed the concept. In a now-famous diagram, Newton noted that if you fire a cannonball from a mountaintop, it will fall near the base of the mountain. Following his equations of motion, however, the faster the cannonball travels, the farther it will go. If you fire the cannonball fast enough, it will circle completely around the Earth and become a satellite. Newton made a historic breakthrough: if you replace this cannonball with the moon, then his equations of motion should be able to predict the precise nature of the moon’s orbit.
In his cannonball thought experiment, he asked a key question: If an apple falls, does the moon also fall? Since the cannonball is in free fall as it goes around the Earth, the moon must also be in free fall. Newton’s insight set into motion one of the greatest revolutions in all of history. Newton could now calculate the motion of cannonballs, moons, planets—almost everything. For example, using his laws of motion, you can easily show that you must fire the cannonball at eighteen thousand miles per hour in order to have it orbit the Earth.
Newton’s vision became a reality when the Soviets launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, in October 1957.
SPUTNIK AGE
The immense shock to the American psyche upon learning of Sputnik cannot be underestimated. Americans quickly realized that the Soviets led the world in rocket science. The humiliation was made worse when, two months later, the navy’s Vanguard missile suffered a catastrophic failure on international TV. I vividly remember, as a child, asking my mother if I could stay up and watch the missile launch. She reluctantly agreed. I was horrified to witness the Vanguard missile rise four feet into the air, then drop back down four feet, tip over, and destroy its own launchpad in a huge, blinding explosion. I could clearly see the nose cone at the top of the missile, which contained the satellite, topple over and disappear in a ball of flames.
The humiliation continued when the second Vanguard launch a few months later also failed. The press had a field day, calling the missile “Flopnik” and “Kaputnik.” The Soviet U.N. delegate even joked that Russia should give aid to the United States.
Trying to recover from this huge media blow to our national prestige, von Braun was ordered to quickly launch a satellite, Explorer I, using the Juno I missile. The Juno I was based on the Redstone rocket, which in turn was based on the V-2.
But the Soviets had a series of aces up their sleeve. A sequence of historic “firsts” dominated the headlines for the next several years:
1957: Sputnik 2 carried the first animal, a dog named Laika, into orbit
1957: Lunik 1 was the first rocket to fly past the moon
1959: Lunik 2 was the first to hit the moon
1959: Lunik 3 was the first rocket to photograph the back side of the moon
1960: Sputnik 5 had the first animals returned safely from space
1961: Venera 1 was the first probe to fly past Venus
The Russian space program reached its crowning achievement when Yuri Gagarin safely orbited the Earth in 1961.
I distinctly remember those years, when Sputnik spread panic throughout the United States. How could a seemingly backward nation, the Soviet Union, suddenly leapfrog ahead of us?
Commentators concluded that the root cause of this fiasco was the U.S. education system. American students were falling behind the Soviets. A crash campaign had to be mounted so that money, resources, and media attention could be devoted to producing a new generation of American scientists who could compete with the Russians. Articles at the time declared that “Ivan can read, but Johnny cannot.”
Out of this troubled time came the Sputnik generation, a cohort of students who considered it their national duty to become physicists, chemists, or rocket scientists.
Under enormous pressure to let the military wrest control over the U.S. space program from seemingly hapless civilian scientists, President Dwight Eisenhower bravely insisted on continued civilian oversight and created NASA. Then President John F. Kennedy, responding to Gagarin’s orbital trip, called for an expedited program to put humans on the moon by the end of the decade.
This call galvanized the nation. By 1966, an astounding 5.5 percent of the U.S. federal budget was going into the lunar program. As always NASA moved cautiously, perfecting the technology needed to bring a moon landing about in a series of launches. First, there was the one-manned craft called Mercury, and then the two-manned Gemini, and finally the three-manned Apollo. NASA also carefully mastered each step in space travel. First, astronauts left the safety of their spaceships and made the first spacewalks. Then astronauts mastered the complex art of docking their spaceship with another ship. Next, astronauts orbited completely around the moon but did not land on the surface. Then, finally, NASA was ready to launch astronauts directly to the moon.
Von Braun was called in to help build the Saturn V, which was to be the biggest rocket ever built. This rocket was a truly marvelous engineering masterpiece. It stood sixty feet taller than the Statue of Liberty. It could lift a payload of 310,000 pounds into orbit around the Earth. Most important, it could send large payloads past twenty-five thousand miles per hour, which is the escape velocity of the Earth.
The possibility of a fatal disaster was ever on the minds of NASA. President Richard Nixon had two speeches prepared for his TV announcement of the results of the Apollo 11 mission. One speech was to report that the effort was a failure and that American astronauts had died on the moon. This scenario actually came very close to happening. In the final seconds before the Lunar Module was to land, computer alarms went off inside the capsule. Neil Armstrong manually took control of the spacecraft and gently landed it on the moon. Analysis later showed that they had only fifty seconds of fuel left; the capsule might have crashed.
Fortunately, on July 20, 1969, President Nixon was able to deliver the other speech, congratulating our astronauts for their successful landing. Even today, the Saturn V is the only rocket ever to carry humans beyond near-Earth orbit. Surprisingly, it performed flawlessly. A total of fifteen Saturn rockets were built, and thirteen were flown, without a mishap. Altogether, the Saturn V sent twenty-four astronauts to either land on or fly by the moon, from December 1968 to December 1972, and the Apollo astronauts were rightly hailed as heroes who had restored our national reputation.
The Russians were also heavily involved in the race to the moon. However, they ran into a number of difficulties. Korolev, who had directed the Soviet rocket program, died in 1966. And there were four failures of the N-1 rocket, which
was to take Russian astronauts to the moon. But perhaps most decisive was the fact that the Soviet economy, already stretched by the Cold War, could not compete with the U.S. economy, which was more than twice its size.
LOST IN SPACE
I remember the moment that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon. It was July 1969, and I was in the U.S. Army, training with the infantry at Fort Lewis, Washington, and wondering if I would be sent to fight in Vietnam. It was thrilling to know that history was being made right before our eyes, but it was also disconcerting to know that if I died on the battlefield, I would not be able to share my memories of the historic moon landing with my future children.
After the last launch of the Saturn V in 1972, the American public began to be consumed with other matters. The War on Poverty was in full swing, and the Vietnam War was devouring more and more money and lives. Going to the moon seemed like a luxury when Americans were starving next door or dying abroad.
The astronomical cost of the space program was unsustainable. Plans were made for the post-Apollo era. Several proposals were on the table. One prioritized sending unmanned rockets into space, an effort led by the military, commercial, and scientific groups that were less interested in heroics and more interested in valuable payloads. Another proposal emphasized sending humans into space. The harsh reality was that it was always easier to get Congress and the taxpayer to fund astronauts into space, rather than some nameless space probe. As one congressman summed up, “No Buck Rogers, no bucks.”
Both groups wanted quick and cheap access to outer space rather than costly missions that were years apart. But the end result was a strange hybrid that pleased no one. Astronauts would be sent along with freight and cargo.
The compromise took the form of the space shuttle, which began operating in 1981. This craft was an engineering marvel that exploited all the lessons and advanced technologies developed over the past decades. It was capable of sending sixty thousand pounds of payload into orbit and then docking with the International Space Station. Unlike the Apollo space modules, which were retired after each flight, the space shuttle was designed to be partially reusable. It was capable of sending seven astronauts into space and then flying them back home, like an airplane. As a result, space travel gradually started to seem routine. Americans became accustomed to seeing astronauts waving at us from their latest visit to the International Space Station, which itself was a compromise between the many nations paying the bills.
