BOOK REVIEW: “Your Trip into Space” by Lynn Poole (1953)

I mean, who the hell chooses a movement name based on how trendy they are? "We're hip! We're hippies! We're down with the latest ephemeral trends, and not much else!"

In the future, humanity will scorn their name and marvel that anyone ever listened to them.

I think I'll bang out some music for the lyrics, just for the hell of it, if you don't mind.

It was the deadline. We had to get someone on the moon before the end of the Decade, so we went for quick-and-dirty, and didn't built a lot of infrastructure. The concept was that we'd get to the moon, and then develop more support stuff derived from Apollo/Saturn technology (Such as Skylab, and a half-dozen other neat things), but then they just ended up throwing all that stuff away. The shuttle was supposed to be an infrastructure builder - first the shuttle, then the space station, then build more reasonable moon ships and mars ships in orbit, just like people had been saying since the 1950s, but, of course, the shuttle turned out to be mostly useless, and although Von Braun and the rest never quite realized it, there is a big inherent design flaw in any reusable space-plane: High parasitic weight.

F'rinstance: The shuttle fully loaded weighs, let's say, 90 tons, 30 of which is cargo, 60 of which is shuttle itself. Thus for every 30 tons you leave in orbit, you've got to put 90 tons of spacecraft up there, bring it back, put it up again, bring it back. Essentially, the inherent design flaw is that it costs 3x as much fuel to put up 1 ton of cargo with a shuttle as with any other disposable system.

So much for economy.

It's not a song. Someone else (Unicorn, to whom I've never spoken) wrote the first stanza and posted it at a few blogs I read (Dr. Sanity and American Digest among them); I read a few of his other posts and wrote the other three stanzas based on the general theme he kept hammering on.

My only regret is that I wasn't able to find anywhere to explicitly fit the word "Vietnam" into the poem -- Unicorn basically said that, to the hippies, it was as if the carnage in Vietnam proved that the human race didn't DESERVE to go into space.

I bought that book at a little used book store in a trailer on the side of the road in Lenoir NC, which is about 12 miles north of Hickory. They had boxes and boxes of unopened used books from both closed book stores and from outdated school libraries that purged old crap. This was in the piles of school books and I saw it just as I was about to leave, and knew immediately when I saw it that I had to grab it.

What struck me as the most interesting part of the book was the total assumption that building a space station was the first step, the absolute required way, to start space exploration. They specifically stated that going directly from Earth to a Moon landing with one rocket was completely impossible, and even if it might someday be done, the space station way was so much simpler, easier, and cost effective as to make it ludicrous. So of course we chose the ineficient one-off way later on, and that skipped the infrastructure of making a permanent stepping stone for space. This let us easily quit going to space without leaving lots of costly bits hanging up there reminding us of how much money and effort we would be abandoning. You say the space shuttle still goes to space? Not really, it just goes to orbit, technically space, but not really progress in the way pf previous efforts.

I remember when you posted this on threedonia a while back. I frackin' love that! Is it a song or a poem or what? I'd love to cover that if it's a song...

First we’d walk upon the Moon,
Then we’d land on Mars,
The asteroids, the planets,
And finally the Stars.
That beautiful Tomorrow,
Waiting on today...
To screw in the mud at Woodstock
We threw it all away.

We preferred to gorge on slogans
And masturbate with angst;
Instead of firing rockets
We wound up shooting blanks;
We scorned the triumphs of science
And raised superstition high --
To screw in the mud at Woodstock
We sacrificed the sky.

What's the use of spaceflight
To end poverty or strife?
And what's the point of science
If it won't extend MY life?
We reject the claims of history,
With its tears and sweat and blood:
We think Mankind's finest hour
Was an orgy in the mud.

We abandoned our ambitions
For short-term pleasure schemes
And arrested our development
With counterfeited dreams;
We demanded dope and circuses,
Enough for you and me --
We screwed in the mud at Woodstock,
Then went home and watched TV.

-- HeadlessUnicornGuy and JakeWasHere

They'd rather be Yertle the Turtle than Leif Ericson or Columbus, and they'd just as soon there were no pesky George Washingtons around in the future, thank you very much.

You should note that the baby boomers answer to any problem is to spend other people’s money. All they care about is self satisfaction their great anti war protests stopped the minute the draft was stopped. They did not care about the war in Vietnam they only cared if they had to go fight it.

Since the baby boomers can not see what they can get out of the space program they are not interested. It should also be noted that it was the baby boomers that gave us Enron, World Comm and the other financial crimes of this century.

As for liberals and the space program you would think that they would be for it. They are big on talking about expanding human horizons but in fact that scares the hell out of them. Going into space would put the lie to the one earth BS they have been trying to shove down our throats for the last thirty years. Look at there reaction to the data that the other planets had temperature increases like the Earth did from the 60’s to the late 90’s. They tried to tell us that what happens in the solar system has nothing to do with the climate of the earth; it’s the one earth BS again.

The only way the liberal left can use decreasing resources as the reason for there anti grow policies is to stop any chance of getting them from space. They know once we are in space there is no way they can argue that we will use up the universe. There is no logical way we could use all the resources of the solar system in a time scale shorter than millions of years. How would they be able to kill the free market if mankind had access to almost unlimited energy and resources? That is why they do not want man in space we would become free to do anything we could imagine they would lose any chance of control.

There's trends in politics: the 60s were fairly liberal, the 70s were vastly more liberal, the 80s were vastly more conservative in reaction, the 90s made a show of being really liberal, but in fact they were about on par with the 60s. The OOs are vastly more liberal, and perhaps not coincidentally the 70s were the lowest ebb of our space program. Even now, our President is debating shutting our space program down for 5 years...

Of course the 60s generation really had nothing to do with the Space Program, aside from as increasingly-critical spectators. It was the World War II and Korean generations that put people on the moon. It was the Baby Boomers who've refused to do anything of note since.

Like R3 I read quite a few of these what if pre 1960 space books unlike R3 I read them when we where still landing men on the moon. This type of book are from a time when America looked like it could do anything even the books written by non American’s assumed that it would be the USA that conquered space.

They are from a world that had not learned to fear science like most people do now. From a time that still thought that anything was possible. People of this time talked about the space age like it was a natural evolution of the things that had come before. People thought of the wonders of science not the dangers or the draw backs.

Back in the 50’s and early 60’s more time was spent on finding out how to do something instead of wondering if we should do something. Now of course people spend more energy on how to stop other people from doing things.

By the early 70’s people turned inward and stopped looking at the stars and wanting to go there. It is ironic that people that should be for a vigorous space program are against it. I remember when the plan was to move most heavy polluting industries into space. To mine the solar system instead of the earth and make the earth an Eden again with power being beamed down from orbital solar stations.

The environmental movement that started out to save the earth ended up worshiping it instead like the pagan’s of old. They became like pagans of the Iron Age afraid of thunder and fire and started to think of science as evil. It’s funny in a way that the left started to become even more anti science than the most radical fundamentalists. Where some religious people dislike some science the environmental left started to hate all science. Nothing represents science more than a rocket thundering into the sky on a column of fire.