Tag Archives: Lester Del Rey

04.11.23
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Space Cadets

Last week, NASA revealed the four astronauts who will fly on Artemis II, the first crewed moon mission since Apollo flights ended fifty years ago. 

NASA group photo of the Artemis Four. Public Domain.

U.S. astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Hammock Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, posed in their spiffy orange spacesuits, offering visual proof they are diverse as well as handsome. Their resumés show that three of the four also come densely packed with traditional test pilot skills.

Exciting as this news is, I had to stifle a yawn. 

We have stood on this threshold before. The first astronauts, the Mercury Seven, were Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton. When they were introduced in a Washington, D.C., press conference on April 9, 1959—sixty-four years ago—America stood enthralled.

I was thirteen. It was an electrifying moment. These seven would be the world’s first spacemen. They would transform science fiction into history. 

The Pre-Space Era

Commando Cody title frame grab, 1952. Public Domain.

I can’t say how the moment seemed to adults. For us kids, the Mercury space-flight program was both exciting and satisfying. It was the due fulfillment of a long-held dream. We had been reared and nurtured on science fiction. 

Frankie Thomas as Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Radio-TV Mirror 1951, public domain.

On radio and TV, we had ventured into space with Commander Buzz Corry and his sidekick, Cadet Happy, on Space Patrol; with Tom Corbett, Space Cadet; with Captain Video, Commando Cody, and Flash Gordon. These shows had wildly fluctuating production values, but some of their writers would appear in the enduring pantheon of the science fiction genre—Damon Knight, James Blish, Jack Vance, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Cyril M. Kornbluth, among others.

Meanwhile, at the Streator Public Library, we checked out books like Step to the Stars and Mission to the Moon, by Lester Del Rey; Rocket Ship Galileo and Citizen of the Galaxy, by Robert A. Heinlein; Islands in the Sky and Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke; and I, Robot and Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. These writers and others informed us of scientific facts and expanded our horizons beyond comic-strip space operas. 

Yeager in front of the Bell X-1 rocket plane. USAF photo, public domain.

While all this fiction intoxicated us, we were well aware of the real-life space heroes who were making science fiction come true. Men like Robert Goddard, Wernher von Braun, Colonel John Stapp, and Chuck Yeager. How could we not know about key developments when they were chronicled by such hardy publicists as Willy Ley? 

Galaxy magazine cover featuring space station article by Willy Ley. Public Domain.

The Leap Into Space

A significant subtext of all these books, stories, and articles was the blithe assumption that Americans—who else?—would pave the way to the stars. Which is why, on October 5, 1957, we kids were so well-prepared to be keenly disappointed by the news that Russia, not the United States, had launched the first man-made satellite, a healthy 184-pound baby named Sputnik.

It shocked us to learn that the much-maligned Soviet Union had the physical and intellectual wherewithal to beat the United States into space. Our whole nation had egg on its face. 

Yuri Gagarin in Finland, 1961. Finnish Museum of Photography. Public Domain.

There ensued a furious campaign to raise up more scientists and engineers, on the quick. By the time rocketry had been developed to the point where humans could ride on the front ends of the darned things, we had almost caught up.

Alan Shepard in 1961. NASA photo, public domain.

Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin rode into space on a Soviet rocket less than a month before American astronaut Alan Shepard did the same. Still, the Russians were ahead.

Later that spring, on May 25, 1961, our new president, John F. Kennedy, laid down a marker he thought America stood a good chance of redeeming: Set foot on the moon, and return safely, before the end of the decade—and, incidentally, before the Russians. 

JFK addresses a joint session of Congress May 25, 1961, and proposes the goal of a moon landing. In background, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and House Speaker Sam Rayburn listen. NASA photo, public domain.

The Mercury and Gemini manned space programs laid the groundwork for this achievement, and the Apollo program did it, with months to spare, by landing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon July 20, 1969. 

The Big Letdown

Once science fiction had become fact, the wind went out of NASA’s sails. 

Five subsequent Apollo missions landed people on the moon, for a total of twelve men. Further programs like Skylab, the Space Shuttle program, and the International Space Station have kept us in space almost continuously. But these programs have the feel of a turning inward. Since reaching the moon, we have not ventured beyond.

This has come as a bit of a surprise to us children of the Fifties. Most of the science fiction we read plotted space flight as a continuous progression from the moon to Mars, and from Mars on to interstellar space. Certainly latter-day science fiction vehicles like Star Trek and Star Wars have taken that long line of development as a given.

Human affairs, however, are always a start-and-stop thing. There are wars. There are recessions. There are hesitancies and second thoughts. Funding is re-allocated. Things happen.

Now, NASA has its sights set on Mars. Establishing a permanent continuous presence on the moon will be a big first step. The Artemis Four will have their work cut out for them.

Time will tell.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

10.04.22
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Sputnik–A Remembrance

Sixty-five years ago today, the Russians fired Sputnik into the October sky.

Sputnik. NASA photo. Public Domain.

Of all people to kick off the Space Age—the Russians!

“Humiliation” does not capture the angst of a twelve-year-old American boy, which is what I was at the time. 

“Disaster” would be closer. 

Some adults may have been startled that humans had flung a projectile into space—a basketball-sized object that immediately took up a patrol of the heavens, blinking and beeping its way across the sky once every ninety-six minutes.

No twelve-year-old boy—as I was, at the time—batted an eyelash at the fact of space travel. Robert Heinlein, Lester Del Rey, and other fiction writers had conditioned us to expect it with confidence. But it was to have been done by Americans.

That the Russians launched the satellite was wrong on four counts. 

First of all, the Russians were Bad Guys. They were communist dictators. They mocked everything we, the Free World, stood for. They tried to undermine us. They were evil.

Second, everybody knew the Russians could not invent anything. A-bombs and H-bombs, they had acquired by trickery. Spies like the Rosenbergs had given them our secrets. Virtually all  goods in Russia—cars, airplanes, telephones—were copies of American models.

Third, since Russia was our enemy in a colossal struggle for world power, having their hardware pass over the United States sixteen times a day raised the specter of a surprise attack from outer space—maybe in the near future. This was a big-time worry for Pentagon planners.

My Own Nemesis

The fourth consideration was peculiar to me. Sputnik arrived on a day that was already my downfall. We were moving from Streator, Illinois (population 17,500), to Kenosha, Wisconsin. Kenosha was a much larger city: It was industrial, foreign, and most of all, it was not Streator, where I had oodles of friends. 

I was hardly in a mood to understand the great advantages of my father’s upward job change. 

On Saturday morning, October 5, the one appliance that had not been packed in the moving van was a small table radio. Mom was about to unplug it to put in the car with the other odds and ends when the CBS Radio News announced the launching of Sputnik. They even played a recording of the new satellite’s strange, plaintive beep. 

That beep signaled that not only had my parents betrayed me by uprooting me from my accustomed home, but the treacherous Russians were piling on. The failure of America’s Vanguard rocket a few months later only added to the misery.

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Now that it’s sixty-five years past, I’ve learned to be philosophical about it. I even have some good memories of Kenosha. But the emotions of a star-struck young lad still resonate after all those years.

I hope all your orbits, Gentle Reader, will be happy ones.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer