Can Man Colonize the Stars?

Man's sole hope of soon becoming able to roam the expanses of space lies in his use of a rocket craft descended from the German winged bombs known by the name "V-2," with which the Nazis poured a great deluge upon the city of London in 1944.

There is no machine that can launch itself with ease and surpassing speed through the empty expanses between the stars save this wondrous machine. Nor has man been able to build any machine but this that can yield the power of eighty horses for every single pound of its weight, including the weight of the fuel required. The winged bomb known by the name "V-2" contains nearly fifty times the driving power of any jet-propelled machine man has been able to invent up to now.

This German missile attained a range of two hundred miles at a speed of three thousand miles an hour; as for its British sisters, built on its pattern and tested in Australia this year, their makers claim that the range of each is three thousand miles, at a speed that is still a secret among secrets. Yet it may be said that the world will soon hear of a missile of this type whose speed has reached thirty thousand miles an hour.

When man succeeds in making a missile with a speed of thirty thousand miles an hour, it will become possible to send it off from the earth with ease, like a stone flung from a sling, needing no further driving force; for as soon as it passes outside the zone of the earth's gravity, it will press onward through the expanses of space to infinity, consuming fuel to govern its motion only when it nears the end of its course. It will be able to cover the distance from the earth to Venus in the space of two months, and will alight there

with the same ease with which it alights upon the surface of the earth; for journeys to Venus will, in the near future, be among the other ordinary journeys that man will make in the boundless expanses of space. But travelers to Venus must be fitted out with special apparatus for breathing, since this planet, for all its strong resemblance to our earth, has no oxygen gas in its atmosphere.

Among the first chief difficulties that must be overcome is the difficulty of finding the necessary fuel capable of driving this machine, with surpassing speed and tremendous power, beyond the range of the earth's gravity. For the winged bombs the Germans used that mighty fuel which ranks second in power among the fuels man has known so far — namely, alcohol mixed, at combustion, with liquid oxygen gas. But there is a danger of this liquid's exploding on account of its low temperature, its point of boiling and vaporizing being 180 degrees below zero.

Yet though this problem appears exceedingly difficult, man may, after a short time, be able to master it by using atomic energy in place of this kind of fuel; it would then become possible to use a few grams of this atomic fuel to drive an airship the size of the steamer "Queen Elizabeth" — the largest steamship in the world today — to the moon, and from there back to the earth.

As for the passengers, they will lie upon their backs in supremely comfortable seats at the head of the rocket, fitted out with radar apparatus and with the devices needed for breathing and for easing the pressure during the first five minutes of the journey; and the nose of the rocket will be covered with a shield of heat-resistant material, so that the temperature of the ship's nose will not rise from its violent friction with the air when its speed is about nine thousand miles an hour.

As soon as the ship enters the empty space beyond the range of the earth's gravity, the protective shield is cast off automatically, just as the rear sections were cast off one after another while the ship was still within the range of the earth's gravity. It is worth mentioning that these sections must fall back to earth with a tremendous roar and great destruction; their descent must therefore be arranged to occur on the open seas, where there are no steamships.

And as soon as this ship of ours enters the expanses of space empty of air, its speed rises to thirty thousand miles an hour by virtue of its first impetus, and there is no longer any danger to the passengers and the crew from the shock of speed or the rise of temperature, since with the absence of air there is no more fear of friction. The ship then travels at this tremendous speed, swimming through space without a sound, while the passengers' natural feeling returns to them, as though they were still upon the surface of the earth in an ordinary motorcar.