SPACE AGE
But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.
—Daniel 12:4
5908 Satellites In Space
Since Sputnik I hurtled into space in 1957, more than 740 electronic birds have been sent aloft on a variety of tasks. These range in weight from a few pounds to over 5 tons.
Russia is believed to be the leader in total number of satellites in space. The U. S., Canada, France, West Germany, Japan and several other countries also have their own sky stations in operation.
5909 Space Shots Costs
The space exploration programs of the US and USSR are supposed to be the most expensive project ever attempted on earth.
The total cost of the U.S. manned space program—up to and including the lunar mission of Apollo 18—has been estimated at $25.5 billion. The cost of the U.S.S.R. from 1958 to 1973 had also been estimated at $45 billion.
Moreover, the space shuttle program is estimated to cost $42.8 billion up to 1990.
5910 Getting Back The Investments
The space program, however, has already returned 14 dollars for every dollar invested by the U.S.
Now, satellites do workhorse jobs in communications, weather reports, pollution control, secret military surveillance, transmission of TV programs, and many others.
Large-scale environmental management is now possible because of information supplied from space. Air and water pollution can be detected, first signs of forest fires spotted, new power plant sites discovered, wildlife inventoried.
Landsat satellites have dramatically improved the world’s agricultural forecasting. Food planners are given accurate, advanced information on harvests, while satellite weather warnings help abort massive destruction to crops.
5911 More Returns
Photos from Skylab and Landsat are used by mining and oil companies for explorations.
Low-cost direct-dialing in telecommunications to almost anywhere, video transmission of information, live news and sports telecasts from around the world—all these are already taken for granted.
Hurricane warnings from weather satellites have saved an estimated 100,000 lives.
5912 The Space Shuttle
The space shuttle being planned in the U.S. is intended to cut in half the costs of lifting payloads into orbit.
With its crew of as many as seven astronauts, the shuttle will blast off from earth under rocket power, go into orbit for a week or more and doing other space work, then return to earth, landing on an oversized runway.
The shuttle craft will have wings, and land as today’s planes do, except that it will have to glide in without the assistance of engines. Thus, a long, wide runway is required.
By mid-1975, work had begun near Cape Canaveral for the world’s longest runway. This super landing strip is to stretch 15,000 feet long—almost 3 miles—and 300 feet wide.
Space agency officials say that by the 1980s the Cape will be handling a shuttle launch and landing every 10 days.
5913 Shuttle’s Maiden Flight
The Enterprise, the first of the U.S.-projected series of reusable space shuttles had its maiden flight February 1977, attached to the top of a Boeing 707. The two crafts remained bound together, reaching an altitude of 16,000 feet and speeds up to 280 mph. It was generally termed a success by scientists. The shuttle would cut in half the costs of lifting a payload into orbit.
5914 Pioneer 10’s Pace Journey
Pioneer 10 was launched in early 1972 on a 21-month journey through the uncharted reaches of the solar system to the planet Jupiter. It plunged through Jupiter’s deadly radiation belts, swooped to within 81,000 miles of the planet and sent back precious pictures.
Such was the achievement of Pioneer 10 that astronomers are comparing its discoveries with those made by Copernicus.
The spacecraft plunges on its lonely journey, first to Saturn in three years. To Uranus in 6 years. Then Neptune in 10, and finally Pluto in 14. After an estimated 11 million years, mathematicians expect it to reach the constellation of Taurus.
Just in case Pioneer 10 should meet intelligent life, it carried a plaque on the side with diagrams of a human male and female, plus directions about how to locate Earth within the galaxy.
5915 Limited By Speed Of Light
As long as the speed-of-light limit lasts, we cannot expect to communicate between the stars in any way that we know about now. If we sent spaceships to the stars by any present system, it would take years to reach even the nearest star (Proxima Centauri), thousands of years to reach moderately distant stars, tens of thousands of years to span a galaxy, millions of years to reach even the nearer galaxies.
5916 First Moon Landing
It was possibly the most prayed-for event in human history. And it succeeded! On Sunday, July 20, 1969, as hundreds of millions on earth watched over the TV, the first man set foot on the moon. They landed on the southwestern shore of the Sea of Tranquillity.
And when Neil Armstrong stepped down on the lunar surface, he remarked: “That’s one small step for man—one giant leap for mankind.”
5917 On Space Colonies
Mountain View, California (AP)—A glowing picture has been painted of a world where the air is pure, the water clean and the sun always shines.
The location: 240,000 miles out in space, halfway between the earth and moon.
A space colony, once built, could transmit solar energy to earth 24 hours a day and quickly construct new colonies cheaply by mining abundant aluminum, silicon and oxygen from the moon.
The space-city concept was originated by Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill, a Princeton University physics professor. The summer-long study of the idea was sponsored by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
The space colony envisioned by the scholars would look like a mile-wide wheel, with 10,000 inhabitants living in its outer rim in densities of about 60 persons per square acre.
Food enough for all the inhabitants would be grown on 111 acres, with crops bathed in continuous sunlight and gravity like that on earth would result from the spinning motion of the orbiting colony.
Residents would have a half-mile vista dotted with trees, and pure water would be recycled from sewage. The air, purified in filters, would be cleaner than that in any city on earth.
Construction could begin now, they said, with the first colony functional by the early 1990’s.
5918 New Kinds Of Living
Heart patients recovering in space hospitals where the absence of gravity gives them a chance of life they wouldn’t have on earth.
Permanent space laboratories where scientists go to learn more about the earth and about the universe beyond.
New York businessmen riding a space shuttle to Sydney, Australia, for an important meeting and then back home again, all in one day.
One scientist said the strength of metals and alloys could be increased a hundredfold or more by melting and molding them without the weakening effects of earth’s gravity.
Another Skylab experiment produced semiconductor crystals which were about 10 times larger and far superior to any formed on earth, says Ernst Stuhlinger, a Marshall spaceflight center scientist.
Use of crystal semiconductors in computers and communications systems is now “severely limited by smallness and imperfections of single crystals” produced on earth, he said.
After an initial period of experimentation using government astronauts, companies will develop their own corps of spacemen and technicians trained to operate experiments and manufacturing modules in space.
Space airline companies will also come into being, he said.
5919 Baseball Game In Space
Astronomers have often speculated about a baseball game on the moon. Each team would need dozens of outfielders, some stationed more than a-quarter-of-a-mile from the batter’s box, because when the batter connects the ball will fly 1500 feet or more.
Since the base-running batter is so light that he can take a 30-feet stride, it’s only three steps to first base and 12 for a circuit. The poor pitcher would have to rely on his straight ball, because there is no air on the moon, he couldn’t pitch a curve. On the other hand, his shortstop would be able to jump 20 feet into the air to snag an infield fly.
The average Dodgers’ fan wouldn’t have much fun at the moon baseball game; he couldn’t holler at the umpire.
For that matter, the catcher would have to talk to the pitcher in sign language even when they went into a huddle. Same old reason: there isn’t any air.
—Science Yearbook
5920 Space Sailboats
Long before the invention of the rocket, man dreamed of hoisting sail and traveling through space in wind-blown ships. In The True History, a tale written in the 2nd century A.D. by the satirist and one-time lawyer, Lucian of Samosata, a ship with a 50-man crew is caught in an Atlantic storm, carried aloft and sent, sail billowing, on a journey to the moon. Later storytellers launched ships with sails on even more fanciful space trips.
But none of these fictional voyages was as remarkable as the mission now being planned for NASA by scientists at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. If all goes well, they will launch an unmanned spacecraft guided with a giant sail to rendezvous with Halley’s comet when it next approaches the sun, in 1986.
A mission to Halley’s comet, which returns every 74 to 79 years, has long been one of NASA’s goals. But using conventional space-flight techniques to rendezvous and keep up with the glowing visitor reaching speeds of 198,000 kilometers (124,000 miles) an hour as it approaches the sun—would require enormous amounts of fuel and an impractically large and expensive rocket.
Instead, the J.P.L. scientists proposed taking advantage of a free and virtually inexhaustible source of power: the pressure of sunlight. Moving at 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) a second, the photons from the sun would exert force on the large sail—just as a handful of sand, thrown against the sail of a toy boat, can push it through the water.
—Time
5921 Astronaut Felt Small
One schoolgirl wanted to know, following James McDivitt’s walk in space, if McDivitt had felt any closer to God during the four-day orbit.
“Not really,” he said. “But let me tell you there is nothing to make you feel so infinitesimal and insignificant as to see the earth pass below you, so you can see a continent at a time. Everything is so vast and you are so small.”
5922 Spacemen’s Concept Of God
Three young astronauts at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas, were asked if their concept of God had changed because of space exploration.
Major William Pogue: “I wouldn’t say changed but expanded to give me a better perspective. As a kid I was told the earth was sphere-shaped. Later I heard it was an oblique sphere. Now we are told it is a pear-shaped oblique sphere because there are fifty-foot dips in certain spots. My first understanding was correct, but it didn’t go far enough.”
Major Jack Lousma: “What I’ve learned about the universe has certainly enlarged my concept of God. I never realized how vast the universe was before. Why, every man, woman, and child on earth could own many galaxies of his own if they were divided up.
5923 Apollo-8 Stamp Features Bible
Washington, D.C. (EP)—The U.S. Post Office Department in Dec. 21, 1968, revised its Apollo-8 commemorative stamp to include the words from Genesis, “In the beginning God …”
Originally the stamp was to show the earth from a lunar position, with the simple designation: “Apollo 8.”
But, in response to numerous requests from across the nation, Postmaster Blount ordered the stamp revised to include the first phrase of the Bible.
He explained that the reading from outer space on Christmas Eve by the astronauts has “become closely associated with the Apollo 8 flight in the public mind, and it seems eminently appropriate that (the quotation) should appear on the stamp commemorating the event.”
“We believe,” he said, “that the use of the suggested language will enhance the effectiveness of a stamp with which we are marking one of the most significant and dramatic events of our time.”
The stamp was issued from the Space Center at Houston on May 5. It features a reproduction of a photo taken by the astronauts.
—Gospel Herald
5924 “Heavy Mail Backs Bible Theme
In 1969 a truckload of letters was delivered to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration headquarters. The letters endorsed the messages broadcast to earth by the Apollo 8 astronauts while they orbited the moon on Christmas Eve.
It will be remembered that the self-proclaimed atheist, Madalyn Murray O’Hair protested the Christmas messages in space, and claimed to have obtained 20,000 signatures to the protesting statement.
The letters were gathered by “Project Astronaut,” a venture inaugurated by Family Radio Stations, Inc., of San Francisco. The project at first was to gather 100,000 signatures of persons approving the Bible in space. The response was overwhelming. Within a short time 300,000 letters had been received, and the project goal was raised to half a million, then a million.
On Christmas Eve, from the Apollo 8 spacecraft orbiting the moon, Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders read the first ten verses of Genesis, starting with “In the beginning God.…”
—Christian Victory
5925 Her “Fast” Astronaut-Husband
Sue Bean, wife of astronaut Alan Bean, got a better idea of space speed when she went outside her Houston home to see Skylab II—with her husband aboard—pass overhead. “When I walked back into the house,” she recounted, “the special radiophone box they install in astronaut homes was ringing. When I picked up the phone, it was Alan, saying he was over Madrid, Spain.”
—Washington Post
5926 Epigram On Space Age
• An old Indian stood on a hilltop with his son, looking over a beautiful valley below them. After a period of silence, the old Indian spoke: “Someday, my son, all this land will belong to the Indians again. White man all go to moon.”
—T & Topics
See also: Technology ; Heavenly Phenomenon.