Asteroid Threat : Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-earth Objects (9781616149147) by William E. Burrows Page A

editor, Gordon Manning, had come up with the idea. “Within the next 10 or 15 years, the earth can have a new companion in the skies, a man-made satellite which will be man's first foothold in space,” von Braun predicted in a reference to what would come to be called the International Space Station (ISS). “Inhabited by human beings, and visible from the ground as a sedately moving star, it will sweep around the earth at an incredible rate of speed in that dark void beyond the atmosphere which is known as ‘space.’…From this platform, a trip to the moon itself will be just a step, as scientists reckon distance in space.” (He was overly optimistic about the time frame, since the first section of the ISS was not carried to orbit until 1998, and it was not manned until late 2000.) 2
    â€œWhen man first takes up residence in space, it will be within the spinning hull of a wheel-shaped space station rotating around the earth much as the moon does,” science writer Willy Ley told the audience in a presentation on the space station. “Life will be cramped and complicated for space dwellers; they will exist under conditions comparable to those in a modern submarine.” Ley was another German-American, a historian of science, and a space advocate. He got the shape of the station wrong but was on the mark about the cramped living conditions. A crater is named after him on the far side of the Moon. 3 Heinz Haber, a German physicist and science writer, delivered a presentation about survival in space that began by enumerating the many mortal dangers, including cosmic and ultraviolent rays and “ultra high-speed projectiles”—the meteors that can easily puncture any protective armor. He concluded his presentation, stating that, while spacefarers would neverbe completely safe against hazards such as meteors, they could be protected to the point where they “will probably be safer than pedestrians crossing a busy street at rush hour.” 4 Joseph Kaplan, a leading geophysicist, described the space environment, while Oscar Schachter, an expert on international law, gave his talk, titled “Who Owns the Universe?” (Everyone and no one, as the master sleuth Sherlock Holmes would have put it.) And Fred L. Whipple, the chairman of the Department of Astronomy at Harvard, ended the session with a presentation called “The Heavens Open,” which was appropriately optimistic about humanity's place out there.
    Collier's magazine ran eight cover stories that greatly expanded on the meeting, collectively called “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!” as the first installment was named. All of them were illustrated with what was then exotic, futuristic space pictures by Chesley Bonestell, a noted commercial artist. The series ran from 1952 to 1954. The pictures included an astronaut in the “world's first space suit,” a spacecraft landing on the Moon (it bore no resemblance to the Eagle ), and one of another spacecraft approaching Mars. All eight articles were published as three books: Across the Space Frontier in 1952, Conquest of the Moon in 1953, and The Exploration of Mars in 1956.
    The meeting at the planetarium and the articles and books that came from it, with their diverse subject matter, were about one overriding fact: humanity's future absolutely and irrevocably involved a permanent presence in space; that space, hostile though it may be, would become an integral extension of its home on Earth. Humanity was destined to “conquer” space, occupy it, and thrive in it indefinitely. It was the critical mass that became the American space program. It was widely accepted by that time that Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon were going to come true; that humankind was poised to take to space for both military and civilian reasons. The operative word for the US presence in space was control , meaning not that theUnited States would dictate everything that happened