MAN INTO SPACE: THE STORY OF ROCKETS AND SPACE SCIENCE

Heat. Heat. [Music] The most exciting news of our time, as exciting as when Columbus discovered America, is the landing of men on the moon. The process that put men on the moon began a long time ago. And it's the product of man's sense of curiosity, his desire to explore the unknown and his need to explain his own existence. In these films, we're going to follow that process from prehistoric times when men first looked at the sky to the present day. The long slow steps of learning about the universe around us from superstition to scientific understanding and the fantastic stories of space travel. Fantasies that suddenly became real when our growing engineering skill led to the building of huge rockets. Science and engineering combining to take man on his greatest adventure. Since the beginning of recorded history, man has looked at the heavens in amazement and wonder. And since his first look, he has hoped to travel among the stars. Prehistoric man thought of the sky as a solid bowl which covered his world. The sun came up over the edge, traveled across the bowl, and descended on the other side. And as the moon moved across the night sky, he imagined powerful gods, mysterious and frightening, who observed him from the heavens, controlling his action and his world. [Music] was at the mercy of the elements. He explained the universe by myths and gave the stars human or animal forms. He based his religion on what he saw in the sky and depended on his priests to interpret his observations. Early astronomers were quite successful at predicting the movements of the heavens and people believed that they had some magical power to forecast the future. The most startling of their predictions was the solar eclipse. [Music] Even today, an eclipse causes a great deal of excitement. In ancient times, when the sun grew dark with no warning, people ran in terror. Whole armies threw down their weapons and retreated. Men were blinded. People believe that the lifegiving son had abandoned them or that it had been swallowed by an evil spirit. [Music] Early Egyptians and Babylonians recorded eclipses. [Music] Chinese astronomers were predicting them 22 centuries before Christ. Although remarkably accurate observations enabled men to predict the occurrence of eclipses, the study of the stars was still based on mythology and superstition. It was around 600 BC that the Greeks began to apply their knowledge of mathematics and physics to the old Babylonian observations and a more scientific approach began. [Music] The Greek had arrived at a new image of himself and his universe. Gods had been moved out of the sky and had taken on human form. Their actions were perhaps superhuman, but no longer supernatural, and the Greek was free to look at the sky in a truly scientific manner. The philosopher Aristotle placed the earth, an immovable object, at the center of the solar system and man along with it. Man was stable and secure at the center of his universe with the heavens revolving around him. In the thousand years after the fall of the Greco Roman Empire, all learning and science was carried on in the church and the church paid little attention to the sky. The heavens were reserved for God, and ancient ideas about the stars were accepted without question. In fact, no questions were permitted. When medieval Europe began again to turn toward astronomy, it looked to the Greeks. It was the astronomer Claudius Talamy who developed the theory most men believed. He started with Aristotle's picture, the Earth at the center of the universe. [Music] But he went further and invented an intricate set of circles moving on circles to describe observations that didn't fit Aristotle's old ideas. 16th century astronomers began to study and reproduce Tomy's instruments. [Music] They built observatories and moving models. As technology advanced and instruments improved, astronomy moved out of the church and became a science for layman and grew more and more popular. European scientists began to rely more and more on their own experiments and as they did they were forced to question Tomy's theory. In 1543, a Polish astronomer Nicholas Capernicus published a book which completely shattered Tomy's universe. He provided mathematical proof that the sun was the center of the solar system and that the Earth and other planets revolved around it in circles. Since Copernicus theory did not uphold the Christian doctrine, it was condemned by the church. But scientists were fascinated by these new theories and even the church could not stop a growing taste for knowledge and scientific fact. In Denmark, an astronomer by the name of Taiko Bray tried to compromise the Copernican and the Talomeic theories. His theory was that all the planets except the earth went around the sun and that the sun with its family of revolving planets went around the earth. But he could never make his excellent measurements support the theory. When Taiko Bray died in 161, he left all his measurements to his young assistant, the brilliant German mathematician Johannes Kepler. Kepler couldn't make his measurements fit Taiko's theory either. And they also didn't agree with Copernicus idea that the planets moved in circles around the sun. And so Kepler made the next great discovery about the solar system. [Music] All the planets revolve around the sun in wide ellipses. The closer a planet is to the sun, the faster it moves. Meanwhile, an Italian astronomer was seeing the heavens as never before. The great Galileo Galilee. In 169, Galileo built himself a telescope. It wasn't the first time anyone had built one, but it was the first time anyone had seen the mountains and craters of the moon in detail. And Galileo made quick sketches of what he saw. His observations supported Capernicus theory and he published his findings in a language that ordinary people could understand. He discovered that the planet Jupiter has moons revolving around it just as our moon revolves around the Earth. Galileo, one of the most popular figures of his time, had dared to challenge the authority of the church to suggest a better way to find truth through experimentation and observation. In 1633, Galileo was called before the Holy Inquisition in Rome and forced to retract his statements about the order of the universe. [Music] The church had managed to silence a great figure, but already his ideas had spread and were being developed by others. Galileo died in 1649 and the same year Isaac Newton was born. Newton became a mathematician and physicist, an engineer and astronomer. His discovery of gravity gave us the key to understanding how the solar system works. He explained that there is a force of gravitational attraction between all objects in space. The more massive an object, the greater its gravitational pull. The sun is the most massive object in the solar system and has the strongest gravitational force. The closer the objects are together, the stronger the force, which is the reason a planet moves more quickly when it's close to the sun and more slowly when it's further away. A fact discovered by Kepler and explained by Newton. By the beginning of the 18th century, Tomy's universe had disintegrated. In its place was our present concept of a vast solar system, vast yet predictable. The Earth was but a planet among other planets cruising along in space. [Music] But how mysterious these other planets seemed. Did they have mountains like the moon? Were there rivers and valleys like the earth? People wondered, and stories of somehow crossing the ocean of space and finding out became more and more popular. [Music] The popular writers still didn't know much about the nature of space or the distances involved. So their methods of crossing space were still very unrealistic. In one story, a man was pulled to the moon by wild swans, though years before Galileo had explained that space is a vacuum. Sirino de Berserak wrote of traveling in space using bottles of dew which would be drawn up into the sky as the sun rose in the morning. These stories relied on fantastic methods of propulsion. [Music] But a real possibility not considered by fiction writers already existed. [Music] [Music] The Chinese invented rockets and used them as fireworks on holidays and weapons in wartime. Once Westerners had discovered the invention, it began to spread. By the 18th century, every European army had its special rocket division. Some of the rockets shot along the ground and some were fired into the air, but all produced the same result. In India, young men carried rockets for the army. In Arab countries, there were mounted rocket brigades mounted on camels instead of horseback. Around 1500, a Chinese scholar, Juan Hu, had thought of riding to the moon on a chariot mounted on 47 powder rockets. At a signal, 47 waiting coolies lighted the 47 rockets. There was a flash and one who was never seen again. [Music] The idea was temporarily abandoned. Although the thought of rockets for space travel had occurred long ago, people didn't really know the scientific principles of rocket flight. Now in 1687 Isaac Newton explained the whole process. He had discovered a very important law of physics called Newton's third law of motion. And this says that for every physical action there is an equal and opposite reaction. And now we can see how this works with a little toy dump truck. I'm going to drop marbles into the dump truck as if I were putting rocket fuel into a rocket. and the marbles will come out like the exhaust gases coming out of a nozzle. That is the action. And if Newton's law is right, the truck should move forward in reaction. Of course, the truck is heavier than the marbles, so it won't move forward as rapidly as the marbles are moving back. So now, let's add the fuel to the rocket and see what happens. Well, we've seen this happen in everyday life. When a cat jumps off of a rocking chair, that's the action. And when the rocking chair rocks backwards, that's the reaction. Or when a cannon shoots a shell, that's an action. And when the cannon itself recoils, that's the reaction. But how does Newton's law work with rockets? The action happens at the burning end of the rocket. And the reaction happens to the rest of the rocket as it moves forward. Suppose you have a combination of chemicals that will burn inside a completely closed tube. no opening at all. The heat from the burning will cause the gas inside to press against the edge all the way around. Now perhaps it will explode if the pressure gets high enough, but it won't go anywhere. But then suppose we make a opening in one end of the tube. Now the gases can rush out through this opening. They'll still be pressing against the rest of the tube, the closed portion. And this unequal pressure between the closed portion and the open end will make the tube move forward as the hot gases rush out the opening. And that's the process called reaction propulsion. The action is the downward rush of exhaust particles. The reaction is the upward movement of the rocket. But few people understood the potential of rockets. The war rocket disappeared from the battlefield because guns and cannons were more accurate and more powerful military weapons. It wasn't until the 19th century that the rocket began to get bigger and more complicated and more powerful. Then came William Congre. Congre built a military rocket with an iron case, an explosive charge at the front end, and a long guiding stick to keep it flying straight. This rocket could go a mile and a half, which was considered quite a bit in those days. England used these congre rockets very successfully against Napoleon and against the United States in the War of 1812. In fact, when you sing about the rocket's red glare in our national anthem, you're singing about a Congre rocket. Some years later, another English inventor, William Hail, changed the look of the rocket again. He got rid of the long guiding stick. Instead, he used the rocket's own exhaust gas to make it spin and so keep it on course. In this design, there was a special nozzle that made the rocket spin. Then there was another rocket he built which had small nozzles at the front up here which caused the rocket to spin in flight. This particular rocket was used in the Civil War and was found near Chattanooga. Other inventors rushed to patent designs of all kinds of rocket driven machines. [Music] A steam reaction car. An airship with a rocket exhaust nozzle. Strange rocket powered flying machines. [Music] Impractical ideas, but no longer sheer fantasy. By now, the storytellers were beginning to pay attention to the scientists using scientific concepts instead of magic. One in particular wrote the most famous space travel story of the century. It was called From the Earth to the Moon, and the author was Jules Vern, king of science fiction. In the story, three men went to the moon in a spacecraft made of aluminum, which looked a lot like today's Apollo ship. The craft was shot into space from a launching site in southern Florida. [Music] He knew the travelers in the ship would be weightless on their journey. One astronaut performed some extra vehicular activity wearing a space suit and tethered to the mother ship by a flexible line. [Music] [Music] Jules Vern foretold moon missions still 100 years in the future. The one major detail he left out was the idea of rocket power propelling the spacecraft into space. [Music] Then in the last years of the 19th century, a Russian mathematician Constantine Zilkovski figured out that with the right fuel mixture, a rocket would go very fast and very high and even travel in space. He was the first modern rocket scientist. Silkovsky's work was largely ignored, but it was a landmark just the same. It marked the end of 100 years of dreaming about space travel, and it marked the beginning of learning how to do it. Other scientists working separately developed similar ideas. It was a time for combining the rocket with the dream. We had thought about space travel for all these years, and for all these years, we'd had a vehicle that might do it. We had just never seen the connection between them. But this was the beginning of an age when we would understand. A time when engineering skill would catch up with our imagination. We were coming to a day when big rockets, new rockets, would put man into space. [Music] [Music]