Space race

The History of the Space Race

Elementary-school students studying the space race asked this set of questions:

How long did it take to build the Apollo rockets?

The rocket which was used to launch each Apollo mission was the Saturn V: according to Wikipedia, the construction of this rocket was begun in 1962, and was ready in 5 years.

How directly involved was JFK with NASA?

Not at all. It is true that NASA is a department in the Executive Branch of the US government, and as such, the Administrator of NASA is nominated by the President. But apart from that, JFK would have had no more contact with NASA than he would have had with (say) the US Department of Agriculture: JFK had no background in either science or agriculture , so he had no expertise which would allow him to intervene meaningfully in NASA operations or in the USDA. JFK’s decision to authorize the Moon program was not based on his scientific views: it was a political one, made at the height of the cold war with the Russians, who were themselves working on a rocket program as a method of delivering nuclear weapons to distant targets.

Was there a lot of pressure from the government to complete the manufacturing of the rockets?

“Pressure” does not seem to be the right word here to describe the government’s role: the US Congress, fulfilling its constitutional role, went through the process of voting to approve funding to build the rockets and the space capsules. Once the funds were available, the engineers went to work. If there was “pressure” to finish the job, it certainly owed a lot to the personal ambitions of the engineers who were given this chance of a lifetime. At least it was a chance of THEIR lifetimes: once the last Apollo astronauts returned from the Moon in December 1972, the days of Saturn V usage were numbered. There are now no longer any functional Saturn V rockets. It is ironic that nowadays, USA has LESS technological capability to send people to the Moon than it did more than 40 years ago.

Did you personally hear any interesting stories about the space race program?

Here are 2 examples:

(i) As one aspect of the Shuttle program, NASA invited foreign astronauts to be a part of the crew. In November 1983, a German (Ulf Merbold) was the first to take advantage of this offer. Merbold’s background as a physicist enabled him to serve as a payload specialist on shuttle flight #9. I heard Merbold speak at a scientific meeting in Austria in June 1984, some months after he had returned from his week-long trip into space. He told us that one of the things which had impressed him on the flight was to be able to look down from space, and see the shapes of the land forms, including Europe. But then he added “But I could see no obvious boundary between any two countries: they all look the same from space. I suggest that when politicians are working on signing a treaty between two countries, they should go up into space and look down on their countries from the vantage point of space: there they will see that differences which seem to be large and important on the ground seem much less important when viewed from orbit”.

(ii) A prominent scientist in the Russian space program, Dr Konstantin I. Gringauz, visited the University of Delaware in the 1990’s. He told us that his earliest role in the space program was to design radio sets to allow communication between a station on the ground and a satellite in orbit. Launching a satellite puts tremendous stresses on the cargo, arising from vibrations and accelerations. How can a radio be best designed to withstand these factors? As it happened, during World War II, Gringauz had served in the tank corps, and in those conditions, it was a matter of life or death to have reliable radio communications between one tank and another. When a tank is racing across uneven ground in battle, the conditions inside the tank also subject the radio to serious stresses. With a background in physics, Gringauz helped to design radios which operated in these hostile conditions. With this experience, Gringauz worked successfully after the war ended to obtain radio transmissions from an instrument on board a satellite. His instrument measured for the first time electron densities in the Earth’s radiation belts. He published this work in his PhD thesis in 1958, and then he continued to work with the Russian space program for another 40 years.

How did they come up with the design of the rockets; factoring in aerodynamics and durability in space?

The design of rockets is based on solving the Navier Stokes equations of aerodynamics in the presence of turbulent fluid flow. Many of the theoretical concepts had been developed in the first half of the 20th century by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Theodore von Karman and Hermann Oberth. The practical work of building a rocket which would actually fly in space was done in Germany during World War II under the leadership of Wernher von Braun. In that work, rather than relying only on traditional solid rocket fuels, the rockets were designed to work with liquid fuels: liquid oxygen was carried along to provide the oxidizer in the combustion chamber. For the first time, a man-made object was given enough thrust to rise over 100 miles up, reaching the edges of space.

How has safety of rockets changed over time?

Improvements are constantly being made. But it still remains a dangerous field of work: there were two shuttle disasters, and as recently as October 2014, a rocket exploded during launch from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia.

How did the space race impact the field of physics?

Astrophysics has benefitted greatly from the instruments which have been flown in space. For the first time, we now have first-hand knowledge about conditions in places which were completely inaccessible prior to the space age. 12 American men have actually walked (and driven) on the Moon, bringing back hundreds of pounds of Moon rocks and dust for analysis. Instruments from various countries have landed on Venus, on Mars, on an asteroid, on a comet, on Titan (a satellite of Saturn), and have radioed back information about local conditions. By placing telescopes above the atmosphere, astronomers have been able to detect electromagnetic radiation spanning the entire spectrum, from gamma rays to X-rays, to ultraviolet, to infrared. This has allowed astronomers to study a broad range of environments: from the coldest (where new stars are forming), to the hottest (in the neighborhood of a black hole), to the most detailed view of magnetic processes on the surface of the Sun, to the detection of almost one thousand planets in orbit around other stars. It’s a great time to be an astronomer!

-Dermott Mullan