Chasing the Moon: The Story of the Space Race - from Arthur C. Clarke to the Apollo landings

David Lasser had concluded that there was a need for a book written for curious readers that explained in realistic, accurate, but understandable scientific terms the fundamentals of rocket science, why constructing an operational vehicle should be attempted, and what piloted space travel would mean to humanity. Lasser believed that once humans departed their home planet, a philosophical and political shift would occur throughout the world as people began to perceive the Earth as a small, fragile, isolated sphere in the emptiness of space. This change in thought, he concluded, would lead to the erosion of the dangerous nationalistic and tribal divisions that had brought about the recent carnage of the First World War. He wanted his book to provide the fundamental scientific concepts while forgoing the higher mathematics that might intimidate some readers.

Researching the book, Lasser gathered recently published technical papers from leading scientific journals and corresponded with rocketry activists around the world. He wrote it during the immediate aftermath of the Wall Street Crash, a time when he and many other Americans hoped for a better future. Lasser’s optimism colors his imaginary account of the moment when news from the first lunar space travelers is received on Earth: “We learn that wild excitement prevails all over the globe…. We cannot but feel now that this journey has served its purpose in the breaking down of racial jealousies.” Elsewhere he writes that space travel will result in a new planetary outlook, the realization that “the whole Earth is our home.”

Unfortunately, the early years of the Great Depression were not a good time to publish such a book. Lasser and members of the American Interplanetary Society financed the publication of The Conquest of Space, but sales were modest. The British rights were sold to a small but venerable publisher, which issued a few thousand copies. Serendipitously, one crucial copy found its way into the hands of teenage Arthur C. Clarke after being displayed in the bookshop window in southwest England.

WHEN HE READ Lasser’s book, Archie Clarke was already familiar with the world of American science-fiction magazines. Unsold copies returned from newsstands and drugstores were used as ballast in the holds of the great transatlantic liners sailing between New York and Great Britain. Once they arrived in England, the magazines were sold in shops for a few pence each, including the Woolworth’s store across the street from Archie’s grammar school, where he often searched through piles of American detective, Western, and romance pulps for the newest science-fiction issues. He soon amassed a substantial collection and compiled a catalog of his reading, scoring stories with a grade ranging from F (fair) to VVG (very, very good).

But when he read The Conquest of Space he realized for the first time that “space travel was not merely fiction. One day it could really happen.” Shortly before reading Lasser’s book, Archie had been fascinated by Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, an ambitious philosophical novel contemplating the evolutionary fate of the human race hundreds of thousands of years hence. Lasser’s suggestion that space exploration would signal the transformation of the human species was a provocative idea, and Clarke yearned to see it happen in his lifetime. He wanted to meet and exchange ideas with others who also shared these dreams of space and adventure.

A small, unelectrified, three-hundred-year-old stone farmhouse in a southwestern English village was the unlikely home where one of the twentieth century’s most visionary minds began dreaming about humanity’s destiny in the stars. Archie Clarke’s parents had both been telegraph operators at different branches of the General Post Office, where, prior to the First World War, they had conducted a covert courtship via Morse code when not under the gaze of their supervisors. Archie had been born while his father, a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, was stationed in France, later to return badly disabled.

Like many other curious boys, Archie had gone through an early fascination with dinosaurs, an interest sparked at age five when his father casually handed him a cigarette card illustrated with a picture of a stegosaurus. Clarke later attributed his passion for scientific subjects to that moment with his father. An intense interest in electronics, chemistry, and astronomy soon followed, and with the aid of an inexpensive telescope he began mapping the features of the Moon in a composition book. A private grammar school in a neighboring town awarded him a full scholarship, and although he was socially at ease with these more privileged classmates, he was aware he was different. In appearance and background, Archie’s modest bucolic home life set him apart. He usually arrived at school wearing unfashionable short pants and large farm boots, which often carried the lingering odor of the barnyard.

Despite his excellent grades, he knew there was little likelihood he could obtain a university education, due to his family’s financial circumstances. He loved reading stories in the American magazines that asked “What if?” and subtly questioned conventionally accepted assumptions and rules—both scientific and cultural. In particular, he was immensely impressed by one short story that sympathetically attempted to portray a truly alien “other” and prompted the reader to try to understand distinctly non-human motivations and thought processes. Clarke found within the pages of the science-fiction magazines an invigorating American sense of optimism and intimations of a future with greater opportunities. And before long they also provided a pathway to a community of like minds.

BY THE TIME Clarke read The Conquest of Space, almost all publicly sanctioned rocket activity in Germany was nearing an end. Max Valier, world-famous for his rocket-car exploits, was killed during a test of an experimental liquid-fuel rocket engine in 1930—the first human casualty of the space age. A rift had also developed among the Verein für Raumschiffahrt’s officers. One faction thought rockets should be used for scientific exploration, not as weapons, while others urged the society to partner with the German military.

© NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center

Members of the German rocket society Verein für Raumschiffahrt. Hermann Oberth stands to the right of the large experimental rocket, wearing a dark coat, while teenage Wernher von Braun appears behind him, second from the right.

As Europe entered the Great Depression, the society’s officers who favored ties with the military exerted greater control and obtained the use of an abandoned German army garrison near Berlin in which to conduct their experiments. Headquartered in an old barracks building, a dedicated corps of unemployed engineers built a launch area and a test stand—a stationary structure on which a liquid-fuel rocket engine could be tested under controlled conditions. All of the serious, highly dedicated engineers were unmarried young men who chose to live with military-like discipline. None either smoked or drank.

Among the most active of the young engineers, one man stood out. An intelligent, blue-eyed, bright-blond-haired eighteen-year-old aristocrat, Wernher von Braun had chosen to dedicate his life to making space travel to other planets a reality. At the old army barracks and rocket testing ground, he acquired valuable hands-on experience designing and launching prototype liquid-fuel rockets in collaboration with Oberth and the other engineers. Von Braun’s dedication and ambition soon caught the attention of a group of men who had arrived one morning to observe a test of one of the new rockets. Though dressed as civilians, they were officers from the German Army’s ordnance ballistics-and-munitions section, quietly conducting research into future weapons. The Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, had imposed restrictions on German military rearmament. However, since rocketry was a new technology not specified in the treaty, rocket-weapons development fell outside its constraints.

In all, the small group of young engineers conducted nearly one hundred rocket launches before the site was finally closed down due to police-imposed safety restrictions and the society’s own unpaid bills. But by the time the garrison was shuttered, von Braun had disappeared. Among his former colleagues, it was assumed that he was conducting research elsewhere, though occasional rumors suggested he might be involved in something highly secretive. The extent of the mystery did not become known to the world for another fifteen years.

In debt and its reputation in disarray, the Verein für Raumschiffahrt suffered further derision when some members attempted to use the society to promote pseudoscience and nationalist politics. Before his untimely death, Max Valier had endorsed theories about Atlantis, Lemuria, and other popular occultist ideas. One of the society’s remaining officers depleted the organization’s dwindled funds to finance a public rocket launch intended to prove the validity of the Hohlweltlehre—a bizarre doctrine that asserted that the Earth is actually the interior of a giant hollow sphere. Reputable scientists would have nothing to do with it, and the Verein für Raumschiffahrt came to an ignominious end just as the new Nazi government imposed prohibitions against any future public discussions about rocket technology or research.

The little news that trickled out of Russia indicated that nearly all interest in rocketry had subsided under the Five-Year Plan. And in the United States, by the time Clarke read The Conquest of Space, the life of the book’s author had changed dramatically as well. While promoting interest in space travel, David Lasser had discovered he had a natural talent for organizing people, planning events, and generating public attention. Not long after the screening at the Museum of Natural History, he began to devote a portion of his time to socialist politics and organizing to effect political change. Unemployment in the United States was approaching 25 percent; in Lasser’s Greenwich Village neighborhood, nearly 80 percent of the residents were out of work. He believed the most important question before the country at that time wasn’t human space travel but reducing unemployment. For the moment, space would have to wait.

Lasser’s boss took a dim view of his political activism. Hugo Gernsback wanted him in the office every day, editing the latest issue of Science Wonder Stories, rather than taking time off to consult with the mayor of New York on unemployment issues. Exasperated, Gernsback summoned Lasser into his office and told him, “If you like working with the unemployed so much, I suggest you go and join them.” Fired by the world’s leading publisher of science fiction, Lasser’s short career as America’s first advocate for space travel came to an end as well. His career change took him to an important job in Washington, D.C., where he was tapped to run the Workers Alliance of America, a trade union for those temporarily employed by the Works Progress Administration of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

At nearly the same moment that he dismissed David Lasser, Gernsback made a second decision that would significantly impact the life of Archie Clarke, a continent away. Eager to increase customer loyalty for his magazines, Gernsback introduced a readers’ club, the Science Fiction League, the world’s first science-fiction fan organization. Within a few months it had close to one thousand members, spread among three continents. Not long after, they began publishing unaffiliated newsletters, engaging in private correspondence, and traveling to meet one another.

One of Gernsback’s competitors, Astounding Stories, started publishing readers’ letters in its pages, including the correspondents’ addresses. While poring through one of those issues, Archie Clarke read that a British Interplanetary Society had been founded in Liverpool a few months earlier. Now sixteen and having suddenly discovered a community of like minds, Archie wrote to the British society’s secretary, volunteering his services. “I am extremely interested in the whole subject of interplanetary communications, and have made some experiments with rockets.” To impress the society’s board, he added that he had “an extensive knowledge of physics and chemistry and possess a small laboratory and apparatus with which I can do some experiments.”

Within two years he had assumed a position of leadership as one of the society’s most influential board members.

ON ITS FINAL transatlantic voyage, in 1935, the Cunard–White Star liner Olympic arrived in New York City, a day late after encountering severe February winds. Journalists who met the ship at the pier reported that one of the passengers, Mr. Willy Ley of Berlin, age twenty-eight, would be spending seven months in the United States, working with Americans on a project to transport the mail by rocket.

One of the founders of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, Ley had studied astronomy, physics, and zoology at the universities of Berlin and Konigsberg, and by the mid-1920s he had become one of Germany’s leading advocates for human spaceflight. He was among the society’s strongest voices against rocket-weapons research, believing that rockets should be used for peaceful scientific and exploratory pursuits exclusively. Ley had been disdainful of Max Valier’s stunts with his rocket-powered car but was all for raising public awareness about spaceflight via popular entertainment. He worked with Fritz Lang during the making of Frau im Mond and had become the filmmaker’s close friend. Ley had even written a science-fiction novel, Die Starfield Company, an adventure in which the hero battles with space pirates that also includes an interracial love story and a parable about international cooperation.

In his leadership role with the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, Ley had been in contact with rocketry researchers and space-travel societies around the world, and he continued to do so until 1933, when the Nazis prohibited any exchange of technical and scientific information about rocketry with citizens of foreign countries. A strong believer in furthering intellectual inquiry through the free exchange of ideas, Ley was deeply bothered by what was happening in Germany.

He watched as scientists and researchers in many disciplines were purged from German academic institutions—primarily for racial reasons—and learned that selected scientific publications were being removed from library shelves. On university campuses, the Nazis conducted public book burnings. Besides scientific works by Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud and literature by Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, the Nazis had also consigned many classic works of science fiction to the bonfires.

As he read the news and talked with acquaintances, Ley was alarmed as things he had long opposed were gradually accepted as part of everyday life: a cult of loyalty and blind patriotism, militarism, anti-globalism, superstition, and pseudoscience. While Germany touted its reputation for excellence in the sciences, Ley observed how politics had begun to encroach on the scientific method, and positions formerly held by Jewish scientists were filled by less qualified opportunists. His friend Fritz Lang had already fled Germany, and Ley decided he had no other choice but to do the same. He would pretend to leave for a brief vacation in England but knew it likely he would not return home for years.

Members of both the British Interplanetary Society and the American Rocket Society—the new, more serious-sounding name of the American Interplanetary Society—came to Ley’s aid by securing him a visa and writing letters of support. Although he arrived in New York with little money, Ley was a recognized expert regarding recent rocket development in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. He was embarking on a new life, believing he would now assume a similar role in the United States.

Ley’s initial business venture in the United States generated publicity for collectable rocket-mail postal covers, but unfortunately it returned little income. He next attempted to find employment as a rocketry engineer but was surprised to encounter pervasive skepticism that a rocket could operate in the vacuum of space. Far more welcoming was the small community of science-fiction magazine editors and publishers, and out of necessity Ley began to support himself through his writing.

By the time Ley had arrived in the United States, Robert Goddard had become increasingly reclusive, having moved all his research to a secluded desert testing facility in Roswell, New Mexico. Noted aviation philanthropist Harry Guggenheim had stepped in to provide funding for his rocket research, thanks to the intercession of famed airman Charles Lindbergh as well as one of Goddard’s former students at Clark University, an aviation pioneer named Edwin Aldrin. (Aldrin was to become famous a little more than three decades later as the father of astronaut Buzz Aldrin, one of the first two men to land on the Moon.) Goddard’s continued secrecy aroused the suspicions of Ley, who considered the professor’s reputation in America overrated and unequal to the stature of Oberth. As he began to publish freelance articles about the current state of rocket development for American periodicals, Ley seldom gave Goddard’s work equal attention.

NO LONGER IGNORED in his homeland, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was celebrated as a national hero upon his death at age seventy-eight in 1935. One of his last projects was serving as the scientific adviser on a Russian feature film about the first trip to the Moon, Cosmic Voyage (Kosmicheskiy Reys). Little seen outside the Soviet Union, the adventure film was conceived as socialist-realist entertainment intended to interest young moviegoers in space science. It featured a spaceship named after Stalin, a launch system that used a massive ramp that towered over downtown Moscow, and cinema’s first depiction of a flag-raising on the Moon’s surface.

Had Cosmic Voyage been released in British cinemas, there is little doubt Archie Clarke would have been among the first to buy an admission ticket. Instead, his attention was focused on another film released at nearly the same time as Cosmic Voyage. Not long after turning eighteen, Clarke attended a screening of the new British film Things to Come. It was a rarity for its time: a serious science-fiction film with a screenplay by a major author, H. G. Wells. Things to Come presents a chronicle of the next hundred years, beginning with a devastating second world war that commences on Christmas Day 1940, followed by an extended second dark age and a subsequent technological renaissance in the mid-twenty-first century. In the film’s concluding sequence, preparations are under way for the first trip to the Moon. After decades of warfare and barbarity, humanity turns toward outer space to express its innate aspirational yearning. The camera focuses on actor Raymond Massey in the final scene, as he looks heavenward and asks, “All the universe, or nothing. Which shall it be?”

Clarke often spoke of Things to Come as his favorite movie of all time. But when the film appeared in English theaters during 1936, audiences would have seen it bookended by newsreels showing labor strikes, militarism in Germany and Japan, and the Italian Army at war in Ethiopia. A glimpse of a technologically advanced future that Clarke yearned for was envisioned on the movie screen, but Wells’s screenplay implied that rockets to the Moon would only happen after a devastating world conflagration and a second dark age.

The world was in crisis, but Arthur Clarke sustained his optimistic belief in a better future with a growing library of American science-fiction magazines. His network of science-fiction and rocketry enthusiasts continued to expand, and even Ley became one of his correspondents, not only offering firsthand information about recent rocketry development in Germany but also serving as Clarke’s American source for the latest magazines. No longer would he need to haunt the back tables at Woolworth’s.

The summer that Things to Come was playing in cinemas, Arthur Clarke moved to London to begin his professional life as a junior auditor for the board of education. He had aced the civil-service exam with a perfect math score. “I prided myself on having the fastest slide rule in Whitehall, so I was usually able to do all my work in an hour or so and devote the rest of the day to more important business.” The more important business was assuming an active role with the British Interplanetary Society, where he had risen to secretary/treasurer.

On a chilly winter morning a few months after his arrival in London, Clarke and a few friends caught a train out of St. Pancras station to attend a conference in Leeds. The event, held in the city’s Theosophical Hall, brought together a handful of young men interested in spaceflight and science fiction for what was later recognized as the world’s first scheduled science-fiction convention. The entire attendance was fewer than twenty people. They heard Clarke announce that the British Interplanetary Society planned to move its center of operations from Liverpool to a branch office in London, which shortly thereafter became the society’s official headquarters. The new London address was, in fact, a small flat that Clarke shared with the society’s publicity director, another aspiring science-fiction writer, William Temple.

© Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM 9A12591)

Eighteen-year-old Arthur C. Clarke photographed himself using an automatically timed camera shutter in his childhood home in southwest England. The shelves of one bookcase held his extensive collection of American science-fiction magazines.

But within a few months, the society suffered a major setback. Like their American counterparts, the British society occasionally conducted public demonstration launches of small experimental rockets. While these events proved an effective way to generate publicity, little attention had been given to safety, and during a demonstration in Manchester three spectators were hit by pieces of an aluminum rocket that exploded on the launchpad. Subsequently, all experimental rocket launches in England were subject to prosecution under a nineteenth-century explosives act. The society had to find a different way to capture media attention. Even though they had limited resources, they chose to shoot for the Moon.

It was a purely intellectual exercise but one that no one had attempted before. Working as a team, the core members of the society outlined the many scientific, engineering, and intellectual challenges that a group planning a piloted expedition to the Moon would need to address. They even tried to construct a few working instruments, including an inertial guidance system that would indicate the spaceship’s position in space. Assuming they had an unlimited budget, the society’s team proceeded to design a launch vehicle with a combined crew cabin and landing craft. The entire budget the society could actually allocate to their research project was roughly one hundred twenty dollars.

Undaunted, the society’s team exploited their available resources: youthful enthusiasm, free time, and a smattering of knowledge in a variety of professional disciplines. One member was an expert on turbine engineering; another was a chemist; a third an accountant. There was an interior designer, who envisioned the spacecraft’s living quarters. Not one was a full-fledged scientist, but several had some engineering experience. Clarke oversaw the necessary higher math and the astronomical calculations.

Once a week the society’s “technical committee” gathered in the evening to dissect details of the proposed two-week lunar mission, with a brief break for fish and chips from the local pub. For their launch system, they decided to use a series of six solid-fuel stages of diminishing size, which were designed to fire in sequence. The committee had ruled out using liquid propellants, having assumed that moving the fuel through a series of mechanical pumps would be nearly impossible in such a massive vehicle.

When the project was completed, the results were published in the January 1939 issue of their newsletter, the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. The entire print run for that issue filled two cardboard boxes, which Clarke retrieved from the printer and walked back to his flat. But their modest journal generated publicity that reverberated around the world. Initally Clarke and other society members were interviewed by London newspapers and on BBC radio. Next, the Journal received attention in the prestigious science magazine Nature, which summarily dismissed the moon ship as pure fantasy. The scientific community thought it necessary to silence these starry-eyed young troublemakers before someone took them seriously.

Undismayed, Clarke and his companions returned every instance of public criticism with pointed and sarcastic rebuttals—whenever the publications deigned to give them space to reply. The criticism from the scientific establishment inspired the creation of the first of Clarke’s Three Laws: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

News about the society’s rocket ship spread internationally. In the United States, Time magazine reported on the controversy, and English-language newspapers as far away as India included it in their world-news summary. The society’s journal noted with pride that one account “stole half the photo-news page of a national Sunday newspaper from Herr Hitler.” During the flurry of publicity surrounding their moon rocket, Clarke and Bill Temple met one foreign-language journalist who made an enduring impression. Early in the interview, Temple began to wonder whether the tall quiet-voiced German might be a Nazi spy, especially when he showed particular interest in their collection of clippings about rockets as weapons. Clarke and Temple agreed that in this instance it was probably wise to avoid impressing their visitor with their knowledge of astronautics. Instead, they pretended to be merely a couple of harmless science-fiction fanboys.

The best-informed members in both the American and British rocket societies continued to assume that all rocket-related research and development in Germany had come to an abrupt end following the rise of the Nazis. Living in the United States, Willy Ley had heard nothing from his homeland to make him believe otherwise. The Third Reich appeared more concerned with rearming its land army and rebuilding its air force than with funding scientific rocket research, which few believed had any practical application as a weapon of war. Ley logically assumed that transporting a small explosive payload via a rocket would be a waste of money, and he was certain that other military strategists would agree. Meanwhile, he hoped he might eventually find a full-time position with an American company interested in developing rockets for scientific purposes. He continued to advocate for space travel, writing articles on a variety of scientific subjects for popular magazines in the hope that an informed public in the United States would avoid being seduced by the pseudoscientific and mystical fads that had become popular in Germany recently.

While on a trip to Los Angeles, Ley was delighted to reestablish contact with Frau im Mond’s creator. Fritz Lang’s sudden departure from Germany had come shortly after Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, banned his latest film, in which Lang had put the words of the Nazis in the mouth of an evil criminal mastermind. Lang was now working for MGM, where he had directed his first American film, Fury, starring Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sidney. It was a provocative thriller that addressed the scourge of lynchings in the United States, though told through the eyes of an innocently accused white man. In it, Lang depicted American vigilante mob justice with visual comparisons to what he had witnessed in Nazi Germany.

Sitting on a veranda under a starry California sky, Lang and Ley discussed the impending war in Europe and mused about travel to the Moon and the planets. However, if they had wanted to revisit their earlier cinematic collaboration, finding a copy of Frau im Mond would have been impossible. Hitler’s Gestapo had confiscated every exhibition print a few years earlier. The film had disappeared.

Not long after the Third Reich’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, Britain entered the war against Germany, forcing Clarke and Bill Temple to vacate their Bloomsbury flat and shut down the British Interplanetary Society’s headquarters. Should the British forces in Western Europe fail to prevent France from falling, Germany’s Luftwaffe bombers were expected to appear in the skies over the heart of London within days. Londoners with the opportunity to do so sought out alternative lodging with friends and relatives in the city’s less vulnerable outskirts or moved to the countryside. When Clarke and Temple locked their door, they left behind Clarke’s almost-complete run of American science-fiction magazines, a collection numbering in the hundreds that had taken him nearly a decade to assemble. He would never see them again.

The worst of the Blitz didn’t come to London until the fall of 1940, when the city was bombed continuously for nearly two months. Arthur Clarke saw none of it; now working for the Ministry of Food, he had been relocated to a seaside resort in North Wales. Sometime in the early spring of the next year, their Bloomsbury flat took a direct hit, destroying everything except the outside walls.

CLARKE SPENT THE early months of the war processing paperwork that documented the precise location of each ton of imported British tea. His position in the civil service gave him a temporary deferment from military conscription, but by the end of the year, service in one of the armed forces was unavoidable. He joined the RAF in the hope that he might be able to acquire a valuable education in the fundamentals of celestial navigation, but instead he was assigned to a technical unit devoted to a new utilization of radar to assist aircraft during poor-visibility landings. It was Clarke’s first opportunity to collaborate with another group of trained scientists, a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that had worked on the invention’s development.

Corporal Clarke was then assigned to an RAF training center in Wiltshire, not far from Stonehenge, where he taught night classes on the fundamentals of radar. However, the subject of the corporal’s classroom lectures frequently turned to astronautics, prompting his students to nickname him “Spaceship Clarke.” During a lecture a student might mischievously ask the instructor how a rocket functions in space, setting off a long discussion about multi-stage rockets and reaching the Moon, complete with diagrams and basic calculations. During his off hours he wrote technical articles for journals such as Electronic Engineering. His career as a published science-fiction author was yet to come, though just prior to joining the RAF he had completed the preliminary draft of his first novel, Against the Fall of Night.