Contemporary Worlds

Innovation in Orbit

Doug Millard

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781780237060
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

Right now, above our heads—nearly imperceptible to us but hugely important to how we live—are thousands of man-made objects that we have sent into space. Ubiquitous but mysterious, satellites are the technological infrastructure of our globally connected world, helping us do everything from orient ourselves on a map to watch our favorite television shows. Yet we rarely ever think about them. In this book, Doug Millard pays overdue tribute to the stoic existence of the satellite, tracing its simultaneous pathways through the cold silence of space and the noisy turbulence of the past century. 
            How satellites ever came to be is, in itself, a remarkable story. Telling an astonishing history of engineering experimentation and ingenuity, Millard shows how the Cold War space race made the earliest satellites—ones like Sputnik, Telstar, and Early Bird—household names. He describes how they evolved into cultural signifiers that represented not only our scientific capabilities but our capacity for imagination, our ability to broaden the scope of our vision to the farthest reaches. From there he follows the proliferation of satellites in the second half of the twentieth century, examining their many different forms, how they evolved, all the things they do, what they have enabled, and how they have influenced our popular culture. Ultimately, Millard asks what we can still expect, what sort of space age the satellite has initiated that is yet to be fully realized.
            Published in association with the Science Museum, London, this beautifully illustrated book will appeal to any fan of space exploration and technology.
 

1

SATELLITES OF THE MIND

An artificial satellite of the Earth is a difficult concept to conjure in the mind: a body launched into space, at a velocity so great – at least 8 km per second – that it circles the Earth continuously. There is an illustration dating from the eighteenth century depicting one of Isaac Newton’s thought experiments. He pictured a giant cannon placed at the top of a mountain from which its shot travels so fast and far it has no chance to fall to the ground. It becomes a satellite of the Earth. A satellite will only slow when some force opposes it, usually the gentle but steady resistance of gas molecules spilling away from the upper reaches of our atmosphere. Cultural images of satellites prevail, born of the time after the Second World War when it was believed that science and technology would deliver all. Satellites hurtling endlessly around our Earth like electrons around a nucleus, the launching of rockets and missiles through billows of smoke and flame – these images are quintessentially of the space age. Such imagery conjures up modernity and a break from the past, but the idea of a space satellite had been around in various shapes and forms for centuries, and certainly well before the launching of the very first one – Sputnik – in 1957.

A body in space can be said to be a satellite when captured by the gravity of a larger body, typically a planet, but with the motion of the smaller body (a moon, for example) counteracting the gravitational pull of the larger one. The gravitational pull of each acts on the other, but it is the smaller of the two that circles the larger. Our Moon is Earth’s natural satellite, trapped by Earth’s gravity but moving sufficiently quickly to avoid being pulled into Earth’s atmosphere.

The etymology of ‘satellite’ shows very terrestrial origins. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the Latin satelles, meaning an attendant or guard, and suggests a reproachful connotation when such a term might have been used: ‘implying subserviency or unscrupulousness in the service’ offered by the individual. The earliest celestial application of the word was by the astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler in 1611 when referring to the moons of Jupiter recently discovered by Galileo (who had called them Sidera medicæa – the Medici Stars – in homage to his patrons). In 1666 the English scientist Robert Hook wrote of ‘satelles’ when describing his own observations by telescope of Jupiter’s moons. And in 1732 the poet Alexander Pope, when musing on humanity and its place in the universe, sought to calm his readers by suggesting we might just as well ask of Jupiter, ‘Why Jove’s satellites are less than Jove?’, implying their subservient relationship to the great planet. Two years later, in his ‘Examination of Dr Burnet’s Theory of the Earth’, John Keill, a Scottish mathematician, included a translation of Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis’ exposition of Cartesian and Newtonian systems, which speaks of the Moon as ‘Earth’s Secondary or Satellite’.

Artist unknown, Johannes Kepler, 1610, oil on canvas.

ISAAC NEWTON

It is perhaps no surprise that it was indeed Isaac Newton, in his tireless quest to rationalize God’s creation, who was the first to imagine and set down how an artificial satellite of the Earth would be possible. He was not thinking of a satellite as we would understand it: as a vehicle constructed and launched into space with a practical purpose in mind – relaying telecommunications, surveying weather systems, fixing the locations of cars, trains and even pedestrians on Earth. Newton was merely considering what would happen were a body, at some great height above the surface of the Earth, to be accelerated to a sufficiently high velocity for it to be able to travel all the way around the Earth before falling to the ground – for it to be in a perpetual fall.

Thomas Barlow, Isaac Newton, 1863, oil on canvas, after the original by Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1689.

Isaac Newton’s thought experiment picturing an ever more powerful cannon on the top of a mountain, accelerating projectiles around the world at orbital velocity. ‘Newton’s Cannon’, from Principia mathematica (1687).

In his Principia mathematica, published in three books from 1687 to 1726, Newton illustrated his theorizing by imagining a cannon firing a shell from the top of a very high mountain. The projectile would leave the barrel at high velocity and travel a certain distance before eventually falling to the ground. He then pictured a more powerful cannon being used. Its shell would move faster and travel further before once again falling to the ground under the influence of Earth’s gravity. Newton then supposed ‘either that there is no air about the Earth, or at least that it is endowed with little or no power of resisting’ and pursued his model once more with a cannon so large that its ball ‘would reach at last quite beyond the circumference of the Earth, and return to the mountain from which it was projected’. He went on: ‘when it returns to the mountain, [it] will be no less than it was at first; and, retaining the same velocity, it will describe the same curve over and over, by the same law.’

Newton extended his thinking out into space, reasoning in his A Treatise of the System of the World, the third book of the Principia, that:

bodies to be projected in the directions of lines parallel to the horizon from greater heights, as of 5, 10, 100, 1000, or more miles . . . will describe arcs either concentric with the Earth, or variously eccentric, and go on revolving through the heavens in those trajectories, just as the Planets do in their orbs.

Newton’s intuition – supported mathematically – formed part of his treatises on the laws of motion and gravitation that revolutionized people’s understanding of how the universe worked. Yet his notes on how a satellite of the Earth could be created remained an intriguing concept which lay dormant, in so far as putting such an orbiting body to practical use, until the nineteenth century.

People had long wondered about reaching and travelling in outer space, but such musings were concerned mostly with reaching other worlds, rather than circling their own. Galileo’s pioneering use of the astronomical telescope in 1609 and his published observations of the Moon and discovery of the large moons of Jupiter had demonstrated very clearly the existence of other worlds in the night sky. Here were real destinations to ponder. Francis Godwin (1562–1633), while studying at the University of Oxford, was influenced by the visiting Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno and his then revolutionary beliefs of an infinite cosmos containing distant stars with planets orbiting them. Godwin’s story of The Man in the Moone: Or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither (1638) employed flights of geese to loft him heavenwards. Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) chose instead, in The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Worlds of the Moon and the Sun (1687), to harness himself to phials of morning dew so that the morning sun might draw him towards the Moon. (Eventually he resorted to rocket power!)

A skein of geese lift the Spanish traveller Domingo Gonsales ever higher, eventually reaching the Moon. ‘The Voyage to the World in the Moon’, in Francis Godwin, The Strange Voyage and Adventures of Domingo Gonsales to the World in the Moon (1768).

THE FANTASTIC AND THE SCIENTIFIC

In the mid-1800s the minds of those imagining journeys through space were informed also by the scientific method. The result was an archaic science fiction or ‘scientific romance’ in which authors’ imaginations were informed increasingly by the swiftly evolving sciences and technologies of the day. Principal among them was Jules Verne, well versed in mechanics, who penned a tale of explorers being blasted on a trajectory to the Moon from the muzzle of a gigantic cannon. His science was fallible, or subject to artistic licence – his intrepid travellers would have been crushed and flattened to the floor of their ballistic shell by its violent acceleration – yet he anticipated elements of NASA’s Apollo programme of a century later: he had located his cannon in Florida (NASA’s main launch site was built at Cape Canaveral on the Florida Atlantic coast) and the travellers’ shell returned from the Moon to splash down in the Pacific Ocean (all Apollo missions did so in the Pacific for retrieval by U.S. Navy vessels).

In one of his less-celebrated stories the main protagonist, Max Bruckmann, describes how he watched as a similar projectile – once again fired from a huge gun but this time as a weapon of war – overshot its target only to carry on and circle the Earth in the manner of Newton’s thought experiment. Bruckmann declares in a letter to Professor Schultze, who is menacing Europe and is the owner of the gun, that Schultze’s scientific works and inventions are ‘odious designs against everything I hold most dear’, and, of the shells fired from his super-gun and aimed at ‘Ville-France’, that

They will fall nowhere . . . A projectile, animated with an initial speed twenty times superior to the actual speed, being ten thousand yards to the second, can never fall! This movement, combined with terrestrial attraction destines it to revolve perpetually round our globe.

The unsophisticated Schultze had failed to do the correct calculations. Nevertheless, Bruckmann goes on to say that this error, ‘endowed the planetary world with a new star, and the earth with a second satellite’.

Again, Verne’s character – like Newton’s mind experiment – is stating how an object accelerated to sufficient speed, altitude and towards the horizon will continue on its way around the Earth ad infinitum. He is not concerned with what function this putative satellite might actually be able to carry out. One of the first to suggest a use for man-made satellites was Edward Everett Hale in his story ‘The Brick Moon’, first serialized in 1869. Its narrator recounts how, after reading about historical attempts to divine the longitude of a ship while at sea, his brother – known by the nickname ‘Q’ – described an ingenious plan for launching, over the poles, an artificial moon of the Earth.

The plan was this: If from the surface of the earth, by a gigantic peashooter, you could shoot a pea upward from Greenwich, aimed northward as well as upward; if you drove it so fast and far that when its power of ascent was exhausted, and it began to fall, it should clear the earth, and pass outside the North Pole; if you had given it sufficient power to get it half round the earth without touching, that pea would clear the earth forever. It would continue to rotate above the North Pole, above the Feejee Island place [sic], above the South Pole and Greenwich, forever, with the impulse with which it had first cleared our atmosphere and attraction. If only we could see that pea as it revolved in that convenient orbit, then we could measure the longitude from that, as soon as we knew how high the orbit was, as well as if it were the ring of Saturn.

‘But a pea is so small’, Q’s brother quite reasonably points out. ‘Yes’, said Q, ‘but we must make a large pea.’ He suggests further that it be made out of brick, which would offer the necessary strength and would ‘stand fire well’ during the heating of its passage through the air. This brick moon would have a diameter of 60 m (around 200 ft) and be launched by giant spinning flywheels positioned either side of it. As the moon rolled to them down a massive wooden incline the wheels would whip it up into space and over the Earth. Once orbiting in space it would act as a visible navigational aid for mariners – an elevated Greenwich meridian, traced out periodically by the orbiting brick moon, from which they could chart more easily their passages across the oceans. Hale’s invention, it might be said, was a progenitor for the navigational satellites of the twentieth century.

Hale was renowned for the level of detail he included in his stories, instilling them with an authority that suggested the rational. Matters did not go entirely to plan for the heroes of Hale’s ‘Brick Moon’, however. One day the narrator and his friends find the moon gone. It appears that the ground beneath the chute’s supporting timbers had subsided, tipping the moon from its securings and allowing it to roll down the gradient to a premature launch. Worse still, some of those constructing and fitting out the moon, and their families – all of whom had moved into the shelter of its quarters during the cold winter months – had presumably been launched too while inside it. There was no news of the moon having crashed to Earth. The whole episode had apparently ended in mysterious tragedy.

Months pass until one day the narrator spots in a recently published astronomical record observation of ‘a new asteroid, with an enormous movement in declination’. Weeks later a St Petersburg observatory reports sightings of a new heavenly body moving through the night sky. Encouraged that this may indeed be the lost moon, the narrator and his family set about searching for the object with a telescope, his wife Polly one night suddenly exclaiming, ‘It is there! It is there, a clear disk, gibbous shape, and very sharp on the upper edge. Look! Look! As big again as Jupiter!’ ‘Polly was right! The Brick Moon was found!’ the narrator chimes. Better still, so too were its inhabitants: the workers on the sphere and their families, all of whom had been hurled into space during its premature launch, are visible through the telescope. At first they had been assumed lost, the brick moon their celestial tomb. The narrator then notices movement on its surface and realizes the passengers are alive, even appearing to jump up and down in his field of view. Further obs...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 SATELLITES OF THE MIND
• 2 THE SATELLITES ARE COMING
• 3 SATELLITES FOR REAL
• 4 SATELLITES FOR ALL
• 5 SCIENCE OF SATELLITES
• 6 SCIENCE WITH SATELLITES
• TIMELINE
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX