The Earth Gazers

Christopher Potter, Central 629.45 P866e 2018

My subjects, but this book was not written for readers like me. The author sums up his approach in a note following the bibliography:

• "This is not an an academic work; it is meant to be a narrative built on the expertise of others. In that spirit I have decided not to source every last quotation."

Ahem. The author is now free to make stuff up, and he seems to. The typos and grammar mistakes suggest weak editing and fact-checking.

The main thread through the book is Charles and Anne Lindbergh. Many of the quotes are paraphrased third hand,from her writing. telephone game?

p075 "When he was 15, von Braun (15th birthday April 1927) ... Wanting to know more, he sent off for a copy of Oberth's The Rocket into Interplanetary Space. He was disappointed to find the book was densely written and full of mathematical equations. Mathematics and physics were two subjects he had no interest in. It was at that moment that Wernher realized that his passion for rockets exceeded his loathing of maths and physics."

• Vivid writing, but what was the source??? Did von Braun actually say that, especially the strong words and the radical mental shifts? This may be POMA included for drama, not accuracy.

• An actual citation, from page 24 chapter 2 of Michael J. Neufeld's 2007 biography Von Braun:

• Not long after Wernher settled into his first term at Ettersberg, he noticed in an astronomy or nature magazine a brief mention of a little book called Die Rakete zu den Planetenäumen (The Rocket into Interplanetary Space). It was the second printing of a short treatise originally published in 1923. ... The yound Ettersburg astronomy enthusiast excitedly sent away for a copy in the mail. "When the precious volume arrived I carried it to my room. Opening it I was aghast. It's pages were a hash of mathematical formulas. It was gibberish. I rushed to my teachers. 'How can I understand what this man is saying?' I demanded. They told me to study mathematics and physics, my two worst courses."⁷

  • Note 7, page 481: WvB, "Space Man," 20.7.1958, 9. It should be noted that this quote, like the article, is ghostwritten by the interviewer, Curtis Mitchell, but it is one of the earliest versions of this oft-told anecdote and one of the closest to the source. As to the original mention of Oberth, WvB asserted in an interview with Kosmos that he had spotted it in an astronomical supplement, Das Himmelsjahr (The Year in the Heavens), to Kosmos, but I was not able to verify that the magazine issued such a supplement. See Interview with Zeithammer/Kosmos, 25.8.1966 WvBP-H, file 227-10.

  • Space Man points to page 561: "Space Man -- The Story of My Life." American Weekly (20 July 1958)

    • American Weekly was a sunday supplement in the Hearst newspapers (San Francisco Examiner, Seattle Post Intelligencer).
      • Microfiche probably at UC Berkeley and UW Seattle respectively, perhaps also Library of Congress.
  • WvBP-H is Wernher von Braun Papers, U.S. Space and Rocket Center, Huntsville AL

p179 "Four months later (1960), the American spy satellite Discoverer 14, orbiting at an altitude of 100 miles, took photographs of the Earth that were the first to be developed from film."

• According to NASA (copy at Internet Archive) the orbit was 116 to 508 miles. That is a very low perigee and a quickly decaying orbit; 100 miles would decay much faster.

• These were the first images from orbit returned on film, but not the first film images from space. In 1946, a V2 launched a movie camera to 65 miles (104 km, above the Karman line) and the film was recovered after impact.

p254 "After his space suit had been pumped up to the specified pressure it was so stiff he (Eugene Cernan, Gemini 9A) said 'it was like wearing a rusty suit of armor'" ... "Inside the pressurized clothing hs body was burning up huge amounts of energy carrying out the simplest task."

• weird phrasing. I would like to find a quantitative source, as well. This does suggest that a human driving "waldos" from a large shirtsleeve enviroment would be safer, more mobile, and more capable. The Gemini and Apollo spacecraft were too small for this, and the robotic technology before 2000 too primitive, but there is no good justification for balloon spacesuits in the 21st century.

p276 Apollo 7 crew was rebellious, and never flew again. But then, only eight of the 37(?) Apollo trained astronauts ever flew again, and only three flew on two Apollo missions (not counting Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz )

p375 Alleged Fermi quote "a chance in ten thousand it will be the end of the world", via an unnamed scientist at dinner with Charles Lindbergh, via Anne Lindbergh, via her diary, via a book, via Potter's interpretation. Gossip is not fact. A more interesting (and factual) story here.

p424 Charles Lindbergh "at the end of his life" said/wrote/?: "What sunbound astronaut's experience can equal that of Robert Goddard, whose body stayed on earth, while he voyaged through galaxies?" Ahem indeed.

I spent too much time reading and too little skimming.