Robots in Space E-Book

Dr Ezzy Pearson

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 491

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Space sparks the imagination in fantastic ways, but nothing quite captures people's attention more than when we actually reach out and touch another world. Whether it's missions to the Moon, transporting rovers to Mars or landing Philae on a comet, the idea that we can not only picture these worlds from afar, but to touch them is wonderfully inspiring, and it is through cutting-edge robotic technology that it is made possible. In Robots in Space expert space journalist Dr Ezzy Pearson delves into the fascinating robotic history of space exploration, from distant times when stars were an unreachable godly mystery, through the intense Space Race following the Second World War to the Mars missions of the twenty-first century. As we find ourselves on the cusp of a new and exciting space age, Pearson explores how and why humanity turns its best minds to travelling to the stars, and exactly how far we could go.

Leseprobe

First published 2020

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Dr Ezzy Pearson, 2020

The right of Dr Ezzy Pearson to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9637 2

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

For Mum, who would have been proud

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part 1: The Moon

1    Dawn of the Space Race

2    Ranger Danger

3    The Soviets Return to the Moon

4    Scratching at the Surface

5    To the Moon and Back

6    Moon Rovers

Part 2: Venus

7    The Journey to Venus

8    On the Surface of Venus

9    The United States at Venus

10  Together at Venus

Part 3: Mars

11  The Curse of Mars

12  The Rocky Road to Viking

13  The View from Mars

14  The Russians Return

15  The Path to Pathfinder

16  Mars in a Box

17  Red Rovers

18  Spirit and Opportunity

19  The Phoenix Rises

20  A Curious Rover

21  An InSight Inside of Mars

22  The Future of Mars

Part 4: The Solar System’s Other Siblings

23  To Visit a Comet

24  Chasing a Comet’s Tail

25  Deep Impact

26  Rosetta

27  Asteroids

28  Icy Moons

Part 5: Forward to the Future

29  Back to the Moon

30  So What Happens Next?

Acknowledgements

Select Bibliography and Sources

INTRODUCTION

Space. The last great bastion of exploration left to humanity. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the idea of landing on another world was a fantasy relegated to the realms of science fiction. Then, in 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, and everything changed. The planets were no longer beyond the grasp of humanity. Instead, they were the next new lands waiting for those bold enough to venture out beyond the horizon.

Today, we are firmly entrenched in the Space Age. Every year, more and more spacecraft journey out into the void, heading off to another planet, moon, comet or asteroid. Each new mission is another step forward in mankind’s push to explore the cosmos around us.

But for the first time in history, it’s not humans that are leading the way to terra incognita but our mechanical envoys – robots.

These metal explorers have several advantages over us fleshy meat bags. There are places in the solar system where the radiation is so high that a human’s DNA would break down within hours, but where a robot has visited. There are planets so cold that a human would freeze in moments, but where a robot has visited. There are worlds where a person would be boiled, crushed, corroded and poisoned, but where a robot has visited.

Robots can be thrown around with accelerations that would liquify squishy organs but barely even effect their circuitry. And to top it all off, you don’t necessarily need to worry about bringing them back afterwards.

While robots have managed to fly past every kind of body found in our solar system, returning some incredible images, there’s nothing that quite compares to those missions that have reached out and touched another world. There is something visceral about making contact with an object, even by proxy, that makes it seem more real. In today’s age of photo editing, seeing is very often not believing. If you touch something, however, then you know it’s real.

In my work as a space journalist,1 I’ve been documenting from the front lines of space exploration. While there have been dozens of new robotic missions in those years, there’s nothing quite like the furore surrounding those times a spacecraft touches down on another world. These are the missions that capture not just my imagination but the world’s.

And yet, the history of these robotic explorers often goes unremembered, especially if accomplished by anyone other than NASA of the United States. Ask most people in the West whether or not humanity has landed on Venus and they’ll probably say we haven’t. In fact, the Soviets have managed to land on the hellish planet, not just once but multiple times.

Robots have been all over our solar system. They’ve landed on the Moon, Venus and Mars. They’ve dived into the atmosphere of Jupiter and driven through the tail of a comet. They’ve courted asteroids and returned home to tell their tale. Herein lies the heroic story of the robots that have ventured beyond the safety of our own world to reach another.

The story isn’t a straightforward one to tell. It’s been a complicated journey, with dozens of different nations taking part. The narrative of this book will jump around in time, instead choosing to focus on the story of each region of our solar system that we have visited.

To stop you getting lost, I’d like to clarifying a few terms. When referring to our own, I’ll use a capital ‘M’: Moon. All other moons will have a little ‘m’. I’m also going to use ‘world’ as a catchall term for any kind of planetary body: planets, moons, comets and asteroids.

There are also times when spacecraft have been given multiple names. For the most part, I will simply refer to them by their most common title and list any other names in a footnote.

One of the major space players today is Russia. As the former Soviet states also contributed to the nation’s early space programme, I will refer to the country as the Soviet Union prior to 1992, and Russia after that.

Advances in science or exploration are never achieved solely by one middle-aged white man, despite what other history books might to try to convince you. Every single thing we know about the universe is the work of thousands of people, and it would take a book longer than this one just to list the names of everyone who deserves credit. As such, I will often refer to teams and groups.

Equally, space is no longer the domain of an elite handful of world powers. In the early days of the Space Race, it seemed that the Soviet Union and the United States were the only nations venturing into space, but in reality, dozens of countries had their eyes on the stars. However, not all of them were equally open about their exploits. In the past, the Soviet Union was notable for operating behind a veil of secrecy. Now it is China that keeps its goals close to its chest. Other nations aren’t necessarily trying to be secretive but just aren’t very good at blowing their own horn.

This is the reason why, in the West at least, there’s often the impression that space exploration is almost solely done by NASA. While they are undoubtedly prolific, they are by no means heading out into the wilderness alone. Spaceflight may have started as two nations racing against one another, but it has now become an arena where political adversaries put aside their differences to work together towards something greater than any one nation.

That’s not to say that spaceflight is some utopian ideal where everyone gets along. Politics aside, space missions are huge projects with many different teams and, as anyone who’s ever worked on a group project knows, there are plenty of conflicts around every aspect of space exploration. And while space can be a grand symbol of what we can do together, it’s also a great opportunity to show off on an international (and interplanetary) stage in a game of one-upmanship that has its roots in the very earliest days of the Space Race.

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1 Yes. It’s a real job.

1

DAWN OF THE SPACE RACE

Before Sputnik, the world’s dreams of spaceflight were confined to the pages of science fiction and the ambitions of a few rocket engineers. In the first half of the twentieth century, groups of enthusiasts around the world created rocketry clubs, attempting to build vehicles that could one day pierce the sky. Mostly, they only succeeded in creating a lot of smoke, noise and – in the case of the student group at the California Institute of Technology who would go on to form NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) – exploding one too many rockets on campus, resulting in them being banished to the nearby foothills of Pasadena.

Unfortunately, while these clubs sought to raise the human race up to the stars, the first real advancements in rocket technology would come from conflict. As Europe was gearing up for the Second World War, the work of young German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun caught the attention of Nazi military minds. Since childhood, von Braun had dreamed of exploring the stars, becoming obsessed with the rockets that might take us there. Joining the Nazi Party would allow von Braun to build his rockets, although they would be pointed at the Reich’s enemies instead of the heavens. It was a compromise von Braun was willing to make. He took an SS officer’s commission and set to work creating Germany’s first ballistic missiles.

Initially, von Braun’s efforts were condemned by Adolf Hitler as overpriced ordnance shells. Then, on 8 September 1944, the weapon’s true power became apparent when a rocket launched from the Hague in Nazi-occupied Holland dropped on Staveley Road in Chiswick, west London, over 300km away, tearing it apart. Nazi High Command called it the Vergeltungswaffe 2 (meaning retaliatory or retribution weapon). To the rest of the world, it was simply the V-2.

For months, over 3,000 V-2s pummelled Germany’s enemies. But the tide of the war had already turned in favour of the Allied forces, led by the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States. By the spring of 1945 the war was all but over at Mittelwerk, the underground factory built into a hill in central Germany, where the bombs were manufactured with slave labour from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. As the United States and Soviet forces closed in, the German engineers knew that their only chance to avoid being tried for their atrocities was by selling their knowledge of rocketry to the highest bidder.

Although the embers of one war were fading, the kindling of the next was already being laid down. Even though they were ostensibly allies, it was increasingly apparent that wildly differing world views would soon cause the United States and the Soviet Union to come to blows. The V-2 technology might not have been enough to save Germany, but it could shift the future balance of global military dominance.

The two powers raced each other to gather as many of the plans, hardware and personnel involved with the V-2 programme as possible. However, when forced to choose between toil in communist Russia and a comfortable life of material wealth in the United States, almost all the engineers, including von Braun, chose to go with the Americans. In return for their knowledge, the scientists would eventually be allowed US citizenship and a blind eye would be turned to their Nazi past.2

The United States had everything it needed to build an entire fleet of missiles and place itself firmly at the top of the arms race. But on 6 August 1945, the United States dropped atomic bomb ‘Little Boy’ on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Its destructive power stunned the world and made the V-2 look like a child’s toy. Why would the United States need the second-most terrible weapon to come out of the war when it already had the first? The German engineers were sequestered in Texas, where they taught the army to build copies of the now-redundant V-2 and were quickly forgotten.

With the Cold War now in full swing, the Soviet Union continued to pursue rocket technology in an effort to gain a military edge over the United States. Their efforts were led by the austere Sergei Korolev.

Korolev’s road to the top had been a hard one. Before the Second World War, he’d been one of the best engineers at the Russian Jet Propulsion Research Institute but fell victim to the Great Purge, a period of government-sanctioned paranoia that lasted from 1936 to 1938. Korolev spent years in prisons and the Gulag, before serving out most of the war building rockets in a sharashka, a labour camp where prisoners worked in secret laboratories for the state. He was finally set free in 1944 but continued his work on rocketry.

Korolev was a difficult man, possessing a sharp temper and belligerent attitude that meant many of his contemporaries refused to work for him more than once. Yet, he was undoubtably brilliant, and his time in the Gulag had left him with a fierce determination.

His goal, like von Braun, wasn’t to use rockets to blow up people but to send them into space. First, however, he would have to convince the Soviet governmental institution that oversaw many military matters, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, that his dreams were more than a childish fancy.

The Soviet leaders failed to share Korolev’s enthusiasm for space. Korolev hoped to change their minds by revealing a prototype he’d been working on in secret – an artificial satellite. It was the first of its kind and if they’d let him fly it, Korolev could ensure the first hands to reach out towards the heavens were Soviet ones, but the leaders remained unimpressed.

Thankfully, one of Korolev’s talents was playing the political game and he knew exactly how to get the Presidium on side – he told them the United States were not only building satellites, they were very close to launching one. This was, of course, a blatant ploy but it was effective. Now Korolev had not just his funding but the interest of his government.

Meanwhile, von Braun had moved to Huntsville in northern Alabama to work for the US Army and was having similar problems getting their support, while also fighting off competition from a rival rocket project being conducted by the navy. Von Braun was rapidly realising that he couldn’t change military minds, but perhaps he could change civilian ones.

The science fiction of the first half of the decade had been filled with buccaneer space heroes such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom novels, which transported American Civil War veteran John Carter to the Red Planet to repeatedly save the day while falling in love with Martian princesses. These works showed the public’s hunger for space travel. Von Braun played on this, writing articles for magazines, using the imagery of these fictional worlds to enthuse people about spaceflight, before realising there was a better way to capture people’s attention – television.

One man who was a master at using television to both entertain and inform was the animator extraordinaire, Walt Disney. At the time, he was in the process of creating several television shows to promote his new amusement park in California. Von Braun first acted as a technical consultant for several shows about space exploration but his charismatic personality and ability to simply explain complicated concepts soon put him in front of the camera. On 9 March 1955, von Braun stepped onto the screen in the first episode of Tomorrowland, showcasing the latest scientific advancements that could, with the right support, send people into space. Watched by 42 million people, Tomorrowland fuelled a new obsession with all things futuristic amongst the American public.

The final push towards space came from outside either nation, when the International Geophysical Year, a sort of scientific Olympics, laid down a challenge to the world’s scientific institutions to send a spacecraft into orbit before the end of 1958. The Soviet Academy of Sciences announced its intention to join the race, despite not technically having the backing of the government that would fund it at the time.

The United States threw its hat into the ring too, but much to von Braun’s consternation the government was backing the navy project, Vanguard. Although von Braun was now a celebrity and a US citizen, his project was based on stolen German technology; Vanguard had the advantage of being all-American. The army, by contrast, had been ordered to destroy all its remaining space rockets, an order the agency head, Colonel John Medaris, chose to ignore.

The Geophysical Year’s challenge was won on 4 October 1957, when Korolev finally launched his satellite, now named Sputnik, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in modern-day Kazakhstan. Mankind had made its first venture beyond the confines of Earth.

At first, neither the Soviet nor US leaders realised the momentous nature of the event, and the following day the Soviet state newspaper Pravda ran only a small article about the launch. However, the US media had a very different take. The ‘Reds’ had placed a satellite into orbit; how long before they used it to launch a bomb? Was there one already up there, waiting to turn the temperature of the war from cold to thermonuclear?

The Russian Government realised what Sputnik really was: a symbol of their prowess. Perceptions had shifted overnight from a world order in which the US military reigned, to one where Russia was the technological superpower. The Americans could no longer let this threat go unmet. The Space Race had begun.

Wanting to one-up themselves on the next space mission a month later, the Soviets hastily reworked Sputnik 2 to accommodate the first ever living creature to venture into space, a stray dog named Laika. But there was no time to work out how to safely return the poor animal. She died from overheating while still in orbit, the first casualty of the Space Race.

The mission showed that while sending a human, or indeed any living creature, into space was entirely possible, bringing them back alive was quite another thing. It would take time before the Soviets could reliably launch a human into orbit. In the meantime, the nation needed to cement its glory. They needed another headline-grabbing mission.

The most obvious target was the Moon. Even then, the Soviets realised the key to capturing the human imagination was tangibility. If they could make contact with the Moon, then they would forever be remembered as the first nation that had the audacity not just to reach the heavens but to touch them.

Touching was pretty much all the mission hoped to achieve as even a crash landing would be difficult enough. The first Luna probes were little more than balls of steel with a radio and a few instruments strapped to them. The only method of steering came from the rocket that launched them. If that rocket’s aim was off during take-off, then the spacecraft would miss, which is precisely what happened to Luna 1.3 Instead of crashing into the surface, it sailed past almost 6,000km away.

Rather than admit that Luna 1 hadn’t gone to plan, the Soviets claimed they had intended a flyby all along, the start of a long Soviet tradition of hiding failed space missions. The Soviet Union refused to announce exactly what a mission was before they flew. If a spacecraft failed to get out of Earth orbit, then it would be given the designation Kosmos, while the propaganda arm of the Soviet Union declared it was never meant to go any further anyway (although the West was rarely fooled). Only once a mission was officially under way would it receive its official name and number designation. If it went wrong on the way, well then, that had always been the plan.

While this helped to give the impression that the Soviet space programme was doing far better than it was, it sometimes backfired. Instead of Luna 1 being praised, the mission was met with intense scepticism. No one knew that a lunar mission was about to take place and the probe was foolishly sent on its way on a Friday night. The majority of the mission happened over the weekend, when the telescopes that could bear witness to its flight weren’t in operation.

‘Everything I had seen and heard in Russia argued against the alleged fact of Lunik,’ said Lloyd Mallan in Russia and the Big Red Lie, a book published in 1959 that was dedicated to defaming the Soviet space programme. ‘The scientific community which I had studied in that enigmatic land was not capable – simply not capable – of producing any such thing… The Lunik in short, was a coolly insolent, magnificent, international hoax.’

The Soviet Union wouldn’t make the same mistake with Luna 2. The moment they were sure that Luna 2 was on its way to the Moon, the Soviets made sure everyone knew where it was. The spacecraft released a cloud of sodium vapour, making it easy for telescopes to spot, but to really quiet the naysayers they would need a more accurate measurement.

One facility that could help them was the huge radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, located just outside Manchester in north-west England. The telescope was making a name for itself tracking spacecraft and if Jodrell Bank said that the Soviets had crashed into the Moon, then they had.4

Back in the Soviet Union, Korolev and his team waited in the control room as their spacecraft drew ever closer to the Moon. It was dead on target, heading for an area known as the Marsh of Decay. The spacecraft continued to transmit when, at 21:02 Universal Standard Time (UST) on 13 September 1959 the signal suddenly fell silent. The probe had impacted the Moon at an astonishing 10,000km/h.

Mankind had reached out and touched another world, and it was a Communist hand that had done so. The day after the landing, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev met with US President Dwight D. Eisenhower during a rare trip to the United States. Ostensibly as a gesture of goodwill, he presented the US leader with a replica of the Luna 2 lander, complete with the dozens of pennants bearing the hammer, sickle and star it was meant to scatter across the lunar surface. In truth, the spacecraft had been a ‘hard-lander’ – meaning it crashed into the surface at speed, rather than a controlled descent – and Luna 2 most likely vaporised on impact. But the message was clear. The path to the Moon was being forged by the Communists.

The gift was a power play, one Eisenhower refused to be drawn into. While there were many in the US government, military, media and public who clamoured for a hasty retort to the ‘Red Threat’, no matter the cost, the president knew the rewards of a space programme were best reaped slowly. Rather than racing towards a short-term game of one-upmanship, President Eisenhower called for a long-term plan of robotic missions that would help set the United States up for the future.

It was an admirable goal, but the US space programme was already floundering. The US Navy launched Vanguard, their response to Sputnik, on 6 December 1957, but it made it little over a metre off the ground before crashing back to Earth in front of the world’s media. Dubbed ‘Kaputnik’ (Daily Express), ‘Flopnik’ (Daily Herald) and ‘Stayputnik’ (New Chronicle), the United States’ failed effort left the nation humiliated.

With the navy unsuccessful, Colonel Medaris stepped forward with the army’s offering. He had risked being court-martialled to continue building his and von Braun’s satellites in secrecy, but it paid off. On 31 January 1958, the United States launched its first successful satellite, Explorer 1. Colonel Medaris was America’s knight in shining armour.

The Vanguard/Explorer face-off had highlighted that the current system for developing US space technology wasn’t working. Each branch of the military was fighting for control, working against each other when they should have been collaborating. They needed a single body to bring together all aspects of the space programme and on 29 July 1958, Eisenhower signed into creation the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA.

It was a smart move, one that Korolev suggested the Soviets replicate, but his request was ignored by Khrushchev. Instead, the Soviet space programme remained in the hands of several different design bureaus, many of them working for completely different ministries. It would prove a costly mistake.

Despite these organisational problems, the Soviet space programme still delivered incredible new missions with a regularity that astounded the world and annoyed the United States. On 4 October 1959, a third lunar probe, Luna 3, launched from Baikonur.

Unlike Luna 1 and 2, which had run on batteries charged before launch, Luna 3 had solar panels. Solar cells, which convert the energy from sunlight into electrical current, had been around since 1883, but proved too unwieldy for industrial use. Seventy years later, in the 1950s, Bell Laboratories in the US state of New Jersey succeeded in making them more efficient, only to make them completely unaffordable as well. While they were no good for large-scale use, in situations where the high cost wasn’t an immediate barrier, such as the well-funded space programme, solar panels could be used as portable power stations.

Now that it had solar panels, Luna 3 wasn’t confined to the few hours of battery power its predecessors had been. Spacecraft would now be able to operate for months, perhaps even years. It was a major evolution in the technology of spaceflight.

Luna 3’s solar panels generated enough power to operate a camera. On 7 October 1958, Luna 3’s sensors picked up the bright light of the Moon and set the camera running. They were still going as Luna 3 missed the surface, this time on purpose, and swung around into orbit. Once done, the film was transferred to an on-board lab to be chemically developed, dried, scanned in and sent back to Earth.

The images were fuzzy, but contained a view never seen by human eyes – the lunar far side.

Wanting to ensure that everyone knew about their triumph, the Soviets sent a model of Luna 3 on tour. Among those who came to see it were several CIA operatives, who were shocked to discover the spacecraft wasn’t just a model but a flight-ready spacecraft. If they could just get a closer look, they might be able to find out how the Russians had reached the Moon.

One bribed truck driver later, the CIA spies were secretly dismantling one of the technological marvels of the age. After taking dozens of pictures and measurements of its inner workings, the team put it all back together and returned it to the driver. No one was any the wiser to the lunar spacecraft’s terrestrial detour.5

This level of espionage, risking an international incident to steal the secrets of Soviet spacecraft, shows exactly how desperate the United States was to catch up. The triumph of the Luna missions wasn’t just seen as a success for the Soviet space programme, but as a sign of the superiority of the communist way of life. Nations like France and the UK were beginning to lose faith in the United States’ military superiority and looking towards the Soviet Union, a situation the Americans found untenable. The United States needed to save face, which meant getting to the Moon. And fast.

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2 Despite his achievements, the ugly origins of the father of spaceflight should not be ignored. Von Braun later claimed that joining the Nazi Party was the only way he could continue researching rockets; he was doing his patriotic duty in a time of war and had no idea of the horrors of the concentration camps. This is debatable, as several eyewitnesses at Mittelwerk claimed they saw him take joy in beating the prisoners. Although he might not have known the full extent of the atrocities, he knew of some of them. He may have built the craft that took humanity to the stars, but he sold his soul to do so.

3 The spacecraft was originally dubbed ‘The First Cosmic Ship’ by the Soviets. In the West, it was usually referred to as Sputnik 3. In 1963 it was eventually named Luna 1. I will use the latter to avoid confusion.

4 The Soviets appeared to have a second case of bad timing. The collision once again occurred over the weekend, and Jodrell Bank director Bernard Lowell almost missed the event as he had far more important matters to attend to – his weekly cricket match. It was only when he received a direct call from Moscow that Lowell realised the significance and ditched his cricket whites to get back to the office.

5 As it remained classified until 1995, exactly how useful this stolen intelligence was remains uncertain. It is, however, a fantastic story and I’m at a loss to explain why it has yet to be made into a fabulous spy-caper mini-series.

2

RANGER DANGER

NASA’s answer to the rapidly progressing Soviet Luna programme was Ranger, a thirty-six-month-long venture to send a series of spacecraft to smash into the Moon. This was a very quick turnaround for a programme consisting of all-new technology. The trade-off for speed, however, was a much higher chance of failure than anyone at NASA would have liked, but it was the only way to keep pace with the Soviets.

There were initially five missions planned, all built around the same generic form: a conical body, with two solar panels and a dish antenna sticking out from the base. The idea was to use an incremental approach, at first staging simple missions to get the basics right before advancing to a more complex spacecraft. The first two missions, dubbed Block I, would test the systems needed to launch towards the Moon, but wouldn’t attempt to go near it. That would be left to the Block II probes, which would be impactors launched on a collision course with the Moon.

As NASA couldn’t be the first to touch the Moon, they concentrated on making a more impressive landing. Like Luna 2, the mission would be a hard-lander, but the Ranger spacecraft would have a package of scientific instruments that Luna 2 had lacked. Although this wouldn’t survive, the spacecraft would take photographs as well as magnetic and particle measurements up to the final moment before impact.

There were even plans to carry a small seismometer that would eject just before impact. It would balance on the nose of the spacecraft’s cone, surrounded by a balsa wood ball, which would crush on landing to absorb the impact. One of the biggest questions around the Moon at the time was whether its craters were made by volcanoes or meteor impacts. If lunar volcanoes were responsible, then the Moon could still be geologically active, with insides that were partially liquid and moving around. The seismometers would be able to detect these motions as moonquakes.

Unfortunately, Ranger was beset by problems from the start. NASA had only just formed, and new departments were joining every day. No one was sure exactly who was in charge of what. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), now part of NASA, was the contract manager in charge of designing and building the spacecraft, but the air force was in charge of the launch vehicle and von Braun’s army team were also involved. Throughout, the military-based wings of the mission were still squabbling over who should be building rockets, and frequently refused to talk to each other.

To make things even harder, NASA decided that Ranger would be far more complicated than it strictly needed to be. To keep costs down in the long run, the agency planned to create a spacecraft design that could be used to visit not just the Moon, but other worlds as well.

Shortly into the project another, more tangible, problem arose with Ranger’s rockets. When it comes to space missions, weight – or more accurately, mass – is king. To get something off Earth, you have to point it upwards and give it enough speed to escape Earth’s gravity (around 11.2km/s, thirty-three times the speed of sound). Giving something that amount of speed takes a lot of energy, which is why you use a big tube filled with explosives, otherwise known as a rocket. However, the heavier the object you’re trying to launch – known as the payload – the more energy it takes and the more fuel you need. This makes your rocket heavier, which means you need more fuel, and so on.

Whereas the Luna probes had been sent directly from Earth to the Moon, Ranger would be launched using an Atlas rocket into what’s known as a ‘parking orbit’ around Earth. From here, a second smaller engine, the Agena, would send the spacecraft on towards the Moon. Doing so would widen the potential launch window – the range of time where the positions of the Moon and Earth make the journey possible.

The Atlas-Agena rockets were being built for the air force by a private aerospace company called Lockheed. On 11 July 1960, the company submitted a set of figures stating it would be able to carry a payload 34kg less than NASA had been expecting. This was fine for the Block I flybys, but the Block II landers would have to shed serious weight. No one was sure how the discrepancy could have happened, or if it was even accurate, but there was no time to investigate fully. They’d just have to lose the weight.

At first the team tried to ‘nickel-and-dime’ their way out – shaving down insulation, using thinner wires, shaving down struts and even drilling holes in the sides of internal panels until some began to resemble Swiss cheese. But it wasn’t enough. Something big was going to have to go.

Unwilling to sacrifice the spacecraft’s main systems, NASA elected to throw out the redundant ones. If something breaks on a spacecraft, you can’t send out a mechanic to fix it, so to prevent an entire mission being lost due to a broken radio or faulty clock, most spacecraft have redundant systems built in so that they’ll carry on operating even if one part fails. Without these redundancies, one broken wire could cause the entire mission to fail. It was a big gamble, but there was no choice.

To add insult to injury, a few months later Lockheed reported back that not only could they actually launch the originally specified weight, they could handle more. However, Ranger was already running late. If the project team waited around to refit the gutted spacecraft, they’d miss the thirty-six-month deadline they’d been set. The first Rangers were launched as they’d been built.

The Block I Ranger missions, the flybys, began in August 1961. Ranger 1 took a while to even get off the ground, with launch delays caused by everything from power interruptions to accidentally deploying the solar panels while still on the launch pad. When it finally launched, the rocket’s upper stage – the part meant to take it to the Moon after the first stages got it into space – failed, stranding it in Earth orbit. Ranger 2 didn’t fare much better four months later.

Both these issues were with the rockets, not the spacecraft. The Rangers had performed exactly as expected and the schedule was advancing, so NASA decided to move onto Block II, and start with the landing missions.

The more time went on, the more problems piled up. In May 1961, the company responsible for building the balsa wood-covered seismometers, Aeronutronic, reported their test drops of the landers in the Mojave Desert were going badly. Many simply didn’t survive and those that did suffered electronics issues. The fault seemed to lie with the stringent sterilisation procedures that NASA had imposed on the spacecraft.

While most spacecraft fly through the void of space, Ranger would be touching down on a completely alien world. While more fanciful ideas of hidden lunar civilisations had been disproved, there was still a chance the Moon could be home to bacteria-like life.

Knowing how aggressive Earth microbes can be once they get a foothold, Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Joshua Lederberg feared that an Earth probe could carry bacteria to the Moon and other planets where they would spread, potentially wiping out any existing forms of life. Lederberg wrote:

History shows how the exploitation of newly found resources has enriched human experience; equally often we have seen great waste and needless misery follow from the thoughtless spread of disease and other ecological disturbances. The overgrowth of terrestrial bacteria on Mars would destroy an inestimably valuable opportunity of understanding our own living nature.6

Following Sputnik, Lederberg campaigned for extensive planetary-protection measures: every spacecraft that would touch another world must be decontaminated before leaving Earth. His pleas were heard and in October 1959, Abe Silverstein, the NASA Director of Space Flight, ordered all impactors to be sterilised.

Doing so, however, is easier said than done. Not only is life everywhere on Earth, it’s extremely tenacious. Completely eradicating bacteria, and keeping them eradicated, is impossible, although you can get damn close. The best the Ranger team could do was bake the spacecraft at 125°C for 24 hours and then wash it with toxic ethylene oxide just before launch. The temperatures would damage some of the more delicate components, but the Ranger team thought that with just a few reworkings the spacecraft would be able to survive the procedure.

They thought wrong. The sterilisation ended up destroying several key components, leaving a non-functioning spacecraft. NASA waived some of the more extreme protection measures for the more fragile parts, but as Block II progressed, more component failures were discovered. The team began to consider Ranger 3 even reaching the Moon a success. If the lander actually managed to set down or send data, it would be a bonus. Besides, Rangers 4 and 5 were always there for another run.

But, while NASA was worrying about frail robotics, they failed to account for the biggest problem in any space programme – the fallibility of the humans operating them. Ranger 3 launched on 26 January 1962 and things seemed to be well under way, until it came time for the mid-course correction. Ranger had thrusters that could subtly nudge the spacecraft to make sure it was on target. When the code had been written for Ranger 3’s mid-course correction, an error meant the thruster’s direction was input backwards. The engine fired the wrong way and Ranger 3 missed the Moon by over 36,000km.

This error was human, not robotic. The team should be able to do better next time.

They didn’t.

The rockets delivered the next spacecraft into orbit as expected, but when the spacecraft phoned home, there was no telemetry – the data that tells NASA where the spacecraft is and how it’s doing. One of Ranger 4’s clocks had stopped ticking. It couldn’t keep track of its position and it was tumbling as it flew towards the Moon. The spacecraft transmitted for 64 hours, before falling silent on impact with the Moon. US hardware had finally made it to the lunar surface, but it was a hollow victory.

Four missions in and Ranger still hadn’t done any science. The Ranger mission was not getting off to an auspicious start. However, it was about to meet the biggest obstacle to the scientific exploration of the Moon: John F. Kennedy (JFK).

In the early 1960s, both the United States’ and Soviet plans for the exploration of the Moon and the planets were ostensibly scientific, but there was no denying that the missions were being used as political weapons. The Soviet space programmes posed an unstated threat to the United States: if we can launch a satellite and land it on the Moon, we can launch a bomb and drop it on Washington DC. The United States’ failure to keep up was not just a sign of their science programme’s downfall, but a sign of their military prowess lagging behind the Soviets.

The ‘missile gap’ – the perceived disparity between the few missiles the United States had built compared to the many the Soviets were assumed to have – was one of the key topics of the 1960 US presidential election, one that JFK made a key campaign policy. The current president, Eisenhower, had refused to be drawn into the Space Race, favouring long-term progress over short-term gain. Despite having been against the space programme while he was a senator, JFK now painted Eisenhower’s lacklustre approach to space as a failure to respond to the Soviet threat, hoping to undermine his political opponent. It worked, and on 20 January 1961, JFK became the 35th President of the United States.

Just a few months later, the Soviet space programme achieved its most headline-grabbing milestone yet when on 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth.7 With every success, the Soviets cemented their image as the superior power and, over time, other nations of the world were beginning to lend their support to the communist state over the United States.

The United States needed a win. A big one. Some grand moment that would forever cement it as the leader of spaceflight.

NASA’s own human spaceflight programme was already in motion. The idea of a human lunar landing had been kicking around since 1960, but Eisenhower had baulked at the astronomical cost. Now, JFK saw a chance for the United States to take back the stars. A moon landing was something he could get the nation behind, something he could use to inspire and, importantly, had a single goal that he could point to and say, ‘Look what we achieved’.

On 25 May 1961, Kennedy stood before Congress and announced that the United States should ‘commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth’. This was the speech that would launch the Apollo programme.

It’s undeniable that if the president wanted to create a single, defining moment, Apollo was it. Half a century later, Apollo 11 is still used as the symbol of what humanity can achieve when we set our minds to it. What Apollo was not, and was never meant to be, was a scientific enterprise.

As soon as Apollo was given the go-ahead, it became NASA’s focal point. Unfortunately, it came at the expense of almost every other project. The existing lunar programmes were gutted. Their scientific content was wrenched out, to be replaced with tasks that would serve Apollo. Planned planetary missions to Venus and Mars were in jeopardy of being cancelled outright. Faced with an ever-ballooning budget, US Congress – the entity that holds NASA’s purse strings – threatened to cut the funding for anything that wasn’t related to Apollo.

James Webb – the visionary administrator who saw the agency through its formative years – knew that the space programme was more than a mere political tool and fought the move. ‘So far as I’m concerned, I’m not going to run a program that’s just a one-shot program,’ Webb said. ‘If you want me to be the administrator, it’s going to be a balanced program that does the job for the country …’8

NASA kept its science funding but Webb couldn’t save everything. In October 1962, the Director of the Lunar Planetary Programme, Oran Nicks, was tasked with working out which of NASA’s robotic missions could be used to support Apollo.

Ranger was the obvious choice. The probes could be sent to scout out potential landing sites, photographing the terrain, while the results from their collisions could answer one of the most pressing questions of the project – could the lunar surface even support the weight of a human?

The programme was given funding for four new Block III missions that were designed to pave the way for Apollo. Despite the scientific scope of these probes being cut back, the Ranger team welcomed the announcement of four more chances to land on the Moon, especially when on 18 October 1962 Ranger 5 lost power shortly after reaching orbit. The culprit was again found to be the sterilising heat treatment of the components causing a short circuit.

The many failures of Ranger had not gone unnoticed. The programme was subjected to an extensive review, with the board of inquiry ultimately decreeing that the harsh sterilisation procedures were to blame. As the Moon was almost certainly barren of life, the planetary protection measures were deemed unnecessary and dropped. To improve matters further, the probes would no longer be designed as universal spacecraft and the redundant systems were put back in.

Now Ranger was the top priority on NASA’s flight schedule; the team just had to build a Block III spacecraft that would achieve its new goals. The seismometer was the first to go, and the rest of the science instruments were replaced by television cameras, which digitally recorded and transmitted the image. This was vital as the spacecraft was destined to smash itself against the surface, rendering it unable to develop the images on board as Luna 3 had done.

When Ranger 6 launched on 30 January 1964, it was heading towards one of the dark patches of the Moon, known as the ‘lunar maria’. These regions make up the most obvious features on the Moon when viewed from Earth and are thought to be plains flooded by now solidified lava. Ranger 6 was heading towards Mare Tranquillitatis, the Sea of Tranquillity.9 Like all the new Ranger missions, its destination was a potential Apollo landing site.

The launch proceeded completely to plan, barring a momentary hiccup when the TV system turned on for just over 1 minute. As the spacecraft successfully redirected itself for lunar impact, JPL’s director, William H. Pickering announced to the press that he was ‘cautiously optimistic’ for the mission’s success.

Eighteen minutes before impact, the TV cameras were due to begin warming up for the big show. Nothing happened. Thirteen minutes until impact, the cameras were due to switch to full power. Nothing happened. Ten minutes out, Ranger 6 was supposed to start taking images. Again, nothing happened.

At 09:24 UST, the control team were supposed to be receiving the last images from the spacecraft before it impacted the surface. Instead, all they had to watch was the radio signal from the spacecraft as it suddenly went dead. It seemed the camera’s early switch-on had been caused by an electrical short that destroyed its power supply, killing the television system. Ranger 6 had made impact with the Moon, but it had done so without taking a single photograph.

Ranger seemed cursed. When Ranger 7 launched on 28 July 1964, heading towards Mare Nubium, the Sea of Clouds, the press room was packed with journalists waiting to hear how the latest Ranger would meet its untimely end. But at the 18-minute mark, the relieved team declared the cameras were warming up. The announcement they were at full power was greeted with a round of applause.

At 13:08 UST, Ranger finally succeeded in taking an image of the lunar surface. The video stream was coming in just as it should be. Then, at 13:25 UST, Ranger 7 slammed into the surface. Finally, NASA had done it. The United States had not just landed on the Moon but had broadcast themselves doing it.10

Ranger 7 took 4,316 pictures during its descent. The closest images had resolutions as fine as half a metre – enough detail to hunt out the Apollo landing sites. Eager to capitalise on their success, the first press conference was held an hour after the impact. That evening, scientists broadcast their findings live on national TV, as the press clamoured for an instant scientific interpretation of images taken just hours before.

The big question was whether the Moon could support a craft large enough to hold humans. The pictures had shown several large rocks on the surface – if the surface could support a boulder it could probably support a human.

Despite the mission’s goals being Apollo based, the images still fed a scientific community that had been waiting for years. For the first time, geologists could count the number of meteor craters on the lunar surface. The longer a landscape has been around, the more times it will have been scarred by space rocks and so the number of craters can be used to date how long it’s been since the world’s surface has been refreshed by lava. The Moon appeared to have craters down to the resolution of the closest images, meaning the surface was at least 3.6 billion years old.

This constant rain of meteorites has smoothed away the edges of mountains and craters, leaving a softly undulating surface. The craters appeared to have been filled in by ancient lava flows that had now cooled, but without the seismometer there was no way to tell if molten lava still moved beneath the surface. Nor could they tell whether the lava had come from inside the planet or had been created by the heat of the impact itself.

With Ranger 7 such a success, the controllers were eager for Ranger 8.11 The mission launched successfully on 17 February 1965 and made impact with the Sea of Tranquillity on 20 February. As the spacecraft came in at a different angle, it was able to take twice as many photos as Ranger 7 – 7,137 in total. Unfortunately, it also meant the spacecraft was moving faster, smearing the last few frames and the best resolution was only 1.5m.

A sequence of images taken by Ranger 9 as it approached the lunar surface. The image taken furthest out is in the top left and the nearest in the bottom right. The eventual crash site is marked in all the pictures by a white circle. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

This site seemed much rockier, and the images supplied a good view of craters that looked, at first, as if they might be a caldera, the crater formed by a now long-dead volcano collapsing in on itself. A closer examination revealed they were actually created by meteor impacts.

Ranger 7 and 8 seemed to show the craters were largely the same. So it was decided the final mission, Ranger 9, would take a look at something completely different. The Ranger landing team managed to find a scientifically interesting location that still appeased the Apollo people – Alphonsus, a crater that was believed to be volcanic in origin.

When Ranger 9 crashed into the Moon on 24 March 1965, it performed a ‘terminal manoeuvre’, pointing the camera down the direction of its motion to prevent blurring. The final resolution was just 25cm, an incredible achievement.

After such a troubled beginning, it was a magnificent end to Ranger. The project had been intended to simply keep up with the Soviets, yet by its end had outpaced the United States’ rivals by three impacts to one. After being hijacked by Apollo, Ranger had served its new masters well, returning close-up images of the surface – a feat the Soviets had failed to achieve – and given tentative evidence that the surface could support a heavy lander.

There were still many questions the Apollo teams needed answers to before they would risk American lives. Those would be up to another mission to answer. Ranger was over.

_____________

6 J. Lederberg, ‘Exobiology: Approaches to Life Beyond Earth’, Science (1960).

7 In a twist of fate, Alan Shepard, the first US citizen to reach space, could have launched before Gagarin but von Braun insisted on one last uncrewed test flight, delaying his launch. If Shepard had beaten Gagarin, there’s every possibility that JFK would not have felt the need to commit to Apollo. How different might the story of space exploration be if he had?

8 Transcript, James E. Webb oral history Interview 1, 4/29/1969 by T.H. Baker, Internet copy, Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) Library, University of Texas.

9 The large features of the lunar landscape received their names in 1651, when astronomers Francesco Grimaldi and Giovanni Battista Riccioli created one of the first lunar atlases.

10 Shortly after the landing, a case of champagne appeared in the control room and the NASA staff were treated to a well-earned drink. Presumably, no one had felt like celebrating after the previous six failures.

11 One superstitious soul put the success of Ranger 7 down to the fact that someone had brought peanuts into the control room on launch day. Hoping to ensure the success of Ranger 8, they brought in peanuts again as a lucky charm. The tradition of bringing peanuts to planetary launches survives to this day.

3

THE SOVIETS RETURN TO THE MOON

After Luna 3, the Soviets’ path back to the Moon was a little more circuitous than their US counterparts. The nation had largely abandoned the Moon in favour of the planets, while its human spaceflight efforts remained in low Earth orbit. For many years, the Soviets had assumed that the US moonshot was a case of fine rhetoric on JFK’s part rather than a serious commitment to lunar exploration. But as Congress poured more and more money into the project, it became apparent that the Americans meant to go to the Moon, and they would get there before the Soviets.

Korolev refused to let this stand. If the United States reached the Moon first, it would outshine all the achievements the Soviets had made before this point. Starting in autumn 1963, Korolev pushed Khrushchev, declaring that not pursuing a Soviet human lunar landing would be a mistake, if not downright unpatriotic.

In summer 1964, the Soviet Union committed to sending a human to the Moon but did so in secret. While the West believed the Soviet space programme was going from strength to strength, the truth was very different. Behind the Soviet Union’s veil of secrecy lay a pile of broken probes and exploded rockets, their failures far outstripping their successes. There was a serious risk they would fail to land a human on the Moon at all. While beating the United States to the surface without warning would be a major coup, announcing they were making the attempt and then failing would be a disaster.

The Soviet space programme abandoned the exploration plans they’d been working on since Luna 2 – a long-term investigation into human spaceflight while exploring Mars and Venus robotically – and refocused on the Moon. It was now the Soviets’ turn to plunder their existing space missions in service of a crewed lunar landing.

The Soviets had been planning on exploring Mars and Venus robotically with a spacecraft called the Ye-6. These were designed at Lavochkin, a secret aerospace facility in the Moscow region. They would be ‘soft’ landers, meaning they would use retrorockets – small thrusters that fired in the opposite direction to the spacecraft’s travel, slowing them down during approach to the surface. Landing at a slower speed meant the Ye-6, and the scientific instruments on board, could survive the landing.

The question was how long exactly to burn the thrusters for. This was before the days of on-board computers. All the burn times had to be worked out before the spacecraft flew and encoded with mechanical timers. If the thrusters didn’t burn hard enough, they wouldn’t shave off enough speed and the spacecraft would crash. Equally, if they burned too hard, they’d run out of fuel before reaching the surface and the spacecraft would begin to fall under the Moon’s gravity, picking up speed until they were travelling too fast to survive the landing. The final decision was to turn them on 75km from the Moon, reducing the speed from over 2.5km/s to almost nothing in around 46 seconds.

As a final precaution in case the calculations were out, the spacecraft had a boom sticking out of the top that could sense when it had struck the lunar surface. When it did, it would deploy an airbag to absorb the shock of a potentially bumpy landing. The actual lander itself was suitably sci-fi – a smooth steel egg just over 1m high that unfolded its four ‘petals’ to stabilise the craft and reveal a package of instruments within.

The Soviets made several attempts to launch their Ye-6 lander, but failed to reach Earth orbit at an alarming rate.12 In fact, the rate was so high that when the United States published a list of the failures it had been able to spy out, many people did not believe the numbers: surely no nation could incur such losses and continue with their endeavour?

Their unlucky streak finally ended on 2 April 1963 when Luna 4 managed to get out of Earth orbit, and on towards the Moon. The mission was announced to the world with only the vague description of travelling ‘to the vicinity of the Moon’, with no indication of its real purpose.

However, its success was short-lived. Luna 4 soon lost its astronavigation – the systems that detect the positions of bright stars and navigate by them as mariners have done for centuries. Without this, the spacecraft had no way to correct its course. It would miss the Moon. The Soviets once again claimed they’d always intended a flyby, but few in the West believed them.

An investigation into the Ye-6 turned up a multitude of problems. These seemed to have one root cause: the mission had been rushed and quality control had suffered as a result.

With the issues fixed, hopes were higher for Luna 5 when it launched on 3 May 1965. It managed to make impact with the Moon but mostly by luck rather than design. Ground Control lost control shortly into the flight, meaning none of the in-flight thruster burns meant to refine its trajectory happened. The initial direction when leaving parking orbit had been good enough to at least hit the lunar surface, but the impact was considerably more terminal than the controllers were aiming for.

On 8 June 1965, Luna 6 suffered the opposite problem to its predecessor. While Luna 5’s thrusters wouldn’t turn on, Luna 6’s wouldn’t turn off and it ended up missing the Moon by over 160,000km. Ground Control still sent the command for the probe to proceed with its landing procedure. It did so perfectly, albeit in the void of space, rather than on the Moon.

In October, the Soviet Union celebrated the eighth anniversary of Sputnik as they prepared to launch Luna 7. Elsewhere in the lunar programme, the orbiter missions were returning fantastic images of the far side of the moon. Surely the auspicious date was a good omen for Luna 7?