|
 May 26, 2000 -- The space shuttle Atlantis
has spent much of this week docked to the infant International
Space Station (ISS), zipping around the planet at 17,000 mph
in the airless space 200 miles over our heads. Astronauts are
delivering batteries and supplies to the Station in the fourth
of more than 40 missions that will soon make an occupied permanent
station in space a reality.
Long before such an extraordinary project was actually underway,
a permanent space station where people live and work existed
in the minds of science fiction writers and the imaginations
of those who read their books.
Above: Orbiting 1,075 miles above the Earth, a 250-foot-wide
inflated "wheel" of reinforced nylon was conceived
in the early 1950s to function as a navigational aid, meteorological
station, military platform, and way station for space exploration
by rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun. [more
information from NASA/Goddard's Astronomy Picture of the
Day]
Among those fascinated by tales of women
and men living in space was a teenage boy growing up in Germany
in the 1920s. Young Wernher von Braun was so inspired by the
dream of space travel that he devoted his life to space science
and rocketry. After a circuitous path that led through Nazi Germany
(the SS and the Gestapo once arrested von Braun for crimes against
the state because he persisted in talking about building rockets
which would go into orbit around the Earth and perhaps go to
the Moon), Wernher von Braun went on to become one of the leaders
of the American space program and a celebrity for his early predictions
of the coming Space Age.
In a groundbreaking 1952 article in Collier's
magazine -- five years before Sputnik -- von Braun wedded fantasy
to physics in his vision of how then-existing technology could
be used to put a permanent space station into orbit around the
Earth.
Soon after, von Braun appeared in a three part Disney television
show, which he helped to produce, on the future of space travel.
The shows -- "Man in Space," "Man and the Moon"
and "Mars and Beyond" -- were enormously popular.
 Left: Wernher
von Braun (right) poses next to Walt Disney (left). [more
information from NASA Liftoff]
The public enthusiasm sparked by the shows and the Collier's
article, which ran 4 million copies, is considered a turning
point in the American pursuit of space travel by some historians.
"Von Braun (caused) a great shift in public opinion in terms
of space flight," said Mike Wright, historian for NASA's
Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., where von Braun
conducted much of his work.
"(He moved) that view of peaceful space exploration -- the
idea of going to other planets -- into the realm of a potential,
of a reality," Wright said.
People took von Braun's predictions very seriously, Wright said.
After all, von Braun was the technical director for the Army
Ordnance Guided Missiles Development Group at the time, and later
became the director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.
In other words, he knew what he was talking about.
Still, von Braun's space station concept looks considerably different
from the International Space Station's design.
 While the ISS resembles something constructed
from an Erector Set, the paintings in the Collier's article look
more like the space station in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Shaped like a wheel with two spokes, von Braun's space station
would spin like a carnival ride to create centrifugal force that
would act as a false gravity. Inside the wheel, three decks would
provide room for the communications equipment, earth observatories,
military control centers, weather forecasting centers, navigational
equipment, living space and mercury-vapor power generating turbines
that would facilitate the many functions that von Braun imagined
the station would perform.
Right: This digital artist's concept shows the International
Space Station passing above the straits of Gibraltar and the
Mediterranean Sea after all assembly is completed in 2003. [more
information from spaceflight.nasa.gov]
Many of these details were devised by von Braun, but the concept
of a spinning wheel-shaped space station had been thought of
before.
In the 1928 book The Problem of Space Travel, Herman Potocnik
laid out detailed plans for a wheel-like space station that he
called the "Habitat Wheel."
In 1926, when he was 14 years old, von Braun found inspiration
in German physicist Hermann Oberth's The Rocket Into Planetary
Space. (Just four years later, von Braun would be working
as an assistant to Oberth in his rocket program.) The science
fiction works of Jules Verne, such as From the Earth to the
Moon, also inspired the young von Braun, according to Wright.
That story was published in English in 1873.
 Left:
Duane Hilton's recollection of the famous space station from
the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Viewing the film in the
late 1960's inspired Hilton to become a space artist later in
life.
Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001: A Space Odyssey popularized
the idea of space stations in the Apollo and post-Apollo eras,
but fictional accounts of a space station appear as early as
1869, when Edward Everett Hale published a story called The
Brick Moon. In that story, Hale depicted a manned satellite
that functioned as a navigational aide to ships at sea. Before
that, fantasies about traveling in space date back as early as
the second century, when the Greek rhetorician Lucian wrote an
account of a voyage to the Moon.
But while space travel and space stations had appeared frequently
in writings of science fiction and scientific speculation, von
Braun brought charisma and political savvy to the cause.
"He was revolutionary in his science and his engineering,
but he was also revolutionary in this approach of going directly
to the public," Wright said. "Von Braun said we (scientists)
can publish scientific papers and treatises until hell freezes
over, but if we don't get the attention of the tax payer, we're
not going anywhere."
The first sentence of the 1952 Collier's article certainly got
people's attention. In the shadow of the growing Cold War, von
Braun began his space prophecy:
"Within the next 10 or 15 years, the earth will have a new
companion in the skies, a man-made satellite that could be either
the greatest force for peace ever devised, or one of the most
terrible weapons of war -- depending on who makes and controls
it."
Certainly von Braun would have been happy to see that one of
his dreams -- the International Space Station -- is finally becoming
a reality. Best of all, the space station of 2000 is not a weapon
of war, as von Braun feared, but an unprecedented cooperative
effort of 16 nations including the United States and Russia.
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