The Future of Geography: Tim Marshall's Exploration of Space PDF

‘In his typical style – wielding a wickedly clever pen – Marshall provides a thoroughly enjoyable, dizzyingly thought-provoking, and technologically plausible ride through the terrain of solar space. Along the way, he shows how irretrievably entwined with space humanity has become, pathways to a space future we could take and, fortunately for us, a few that we should. I’m envious. This is a book I wish I could have written. Fortunately, I got to read it.’ Professor Everett Dolman, Professor of Comparative Military Studies and Strategy, US Air Force ‘A fascinating and crucial insight into how, even as humanity moves upwards into the nal frontier, we’ll be in uenced by the geographies of space. Marshall has done it again!’ Professor Lewis Dartnell, author of Being Human: How Our Biology Shaped World History ‘A chilling, insightful exploration of the political and military implications of our presence in space.’ Brian Clegg, author of Final Frontier ‘Astropolitics is a word I never thought would enter my lexicon – but after reading this fascinating book, I’m hooked!’ Dr Becky Smethurst, astrophysicist at the University of Oxford and author of A Brief History of Black Holes ‘If space is our future, this urgent book reveals that we’re in danger of handing it over to warmongers, plutocrats and conquistadors as rapacious as those on Earth. Tim Marshall shows us why we need to look up – fast.’ Tom Burgis, author of Kleptopia Praise for The Power of Geography: ‘I can’t imagine reading a better book this year.’ Daily Mirror ‘A useful reminder of the value of consulting an atlas before blundering into world a airs, and especially so in times of rising geopolitical tensions... interesting insights.’ Financial Times ‘A skilful navigation of the regions that could de ne geopolitics for future generations. One to read to stay ahead of the game.’ Dharshini David, author of The Almighty Dollar Praise for Prisoners of Geography: ‘One of the best books about geopolitics you could imagine: reading it is like having a light shone on your understanding.’ Nicholas Lezard, Evening Standard ‘A fresh and original insight into the geopolitics behind today’s foreign policy challenges.’ Andrew Neil ‘Sharp insights into the way geography shapes the choices of world leaders.’ Gideon Rachman, ft.com ‘Marshall is not afraid to ask tough questions and provide sharp answers.’ Newsweek To my family CONTENTS Introduction PART 1: THE PATH TO THE STARS 1. Looking Up 2. The Road to the Heavens PART 2: RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW 3. The Era of Astropolitics 4. Outlaws 5. China: The Long March... into Space 6. The USA: Back to the Future 7. Russia in Retrograde 8. Fellow Travellers PART 3: FUTURE PAST 9. Space Wars 10. Tomorrow’s World Epilogue Acknowledgements Selected Bibliography Index INTRODUCTION ‘I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.’ Susan Sontag W E EXPLORED THE WORLD AND DISCOVERED IT IS FINITE. Now, just as our territory and resources begin to run out, we nd that the big, beautiful ball in the sky – the Moon – is full of the minerals and elements we all need. It’s also a launchpad: just as early humans went from island to island as they crossed the seas, so the Moon will allow us to reach across the solar system and beyond. It’s no surprise, then, that we are in a new Space Race. To the victor the spoils. The challenge will be to ensure that humanity is the victor. Space has shaped human life from our very beginning. The heavens explained our early creation stories, in uenced our cultures, and inspired scienti c advances. But our view of space is changing. It is now, more than ever, becoming an extension of the geography of Earth: humans are taking our nation states, our corporations, our history, politics and con icts way up above us. And that could revolutionize life down on Earth’s surface. Space has already changed much in our everyday lives. It is central to communication, economics and military strategy, and increasingly important to international relations. It is now also becoming the latest arena for intense human competition. The signs that space is going to be a huge geopolitical narrative of the twenty- rst century have been accumulating for some time. In recent years, rare metals and water have been found on the Moon; private companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX have massively lowered the cost of breaking through the atmosphere; and the big powers have red missiles from Earth, blowing up their own satellites to test new weapons. All of these events have been pieces of the bigger story emerging. To understand that story, it is helpful to see space as a place with geography: it has corridors suited to travel, regions with key natural assets, land on which to build and dangerous hazards to avoid. For the last few decades all of this was considered to be the common property of humanity – no sovereign nation could exploit or lay claim to any of it in its own name. But that idea, enshrined in several noble, albeit outdated and unenforceable documents, is fraying badly. The nations of Earth are all looking to take advantage where they can. Throughout recorded history, civilizations fortunate enough to be able to utilize natural resources have developed technologies to help themselves grow stronger, and eventually to dominate others. It doesn’t have to be that way. We have many examples of cooperation in space, and many of the space-related technologies being developed, in medicine and clean energy for example, will help us all. Several countries are working on ways to de ect huge asteroids, capable of destroying the world, o a collision course – and it doesn’t get more common property than that. As the science- ction writer Larry Niven said, ‘The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space programme.’ It would be beyond inconvenient to su er another hit like that. It’s taken a long time to get where we are. The Big Bang theory suggests that 13.7 billion years ago, give or take the odd few thousand years, every single thing in the universe that exists today was compressed into an in nitesimally tiny particle existing in nothingness. Some concepts related to the universe can be di cult to get your head around, and ‘nothingness’ is one that scientists argue over endlessly. They go into notions such as quantum vacuums, in which ripples in space can cause things to pop into existence, but after reading and rereading the theories several times over I’m never much further along. The universe is expanding – but into what? What is outside its current boundaries? I can’t imagine nothing. An endless wall of grey does the trick (beige is also available), but only for a second because, of course, grey is something and not nothing... and then I give up. Fortunately, theoretical physicists and cosmologists are made of sterner stu. From ‘nothingness’ the particle exploded – although it wasn’t so much ‘ ash, bang, wallop!’ as ‘bang, wallop, ash!’ as it took about 380,000 years for the rst particles of light to emerge. This is the cosmic microwave background, which scientists can see through modern space telescopes – all the way back, almost to the very beginning. You can see it for yourself in the static fuzz between channels when you tune an old analogue TV. The universe expanded and cooled, and gravity caused gas clouds to gather and condense into stars. We now know that our Sun was formed roughly 4.6 billion years ago – a relative newcomer in the universe. A huge disc of gas and heavier debris swirling around the new star then created the planets and their moons in our solar system. Planet Earth is the third rock from the Sun. It’s a good place to be. In fact, for now it’s the only place because if it were anywhere else – we wouldn’t be. Everything that has happened since the Big Bang has shaped the geography of what we see now and allowed us to evolve to where we are. Earth is the Goldilocks of planets. Not too hot, not too cold – just right for life. Earth’s position, size and atmosphere all contribute to keeping us grounded. Literally. Its size means gravity has enough strength to hold on to the atmosphere. Move elsewhere in our neck of in nity and we’d either fry, freeze or su ocate due to a lack of breathable air. As the great American cosmologist Carl Sagan said in his book Billions and Billions, ‘Many astronauts have reported seeing that delicate, thin blue aura at the horizon of the daylit hemisphere – that represents the thickness of the entire atmosphere – and immediately, unbidden, began contemplating its fragility and vulnerability. They worry about it. They have reason to worry.’ You’d think we might take better care of it. But humans have always been wanderers, and in the last century have begun to move far from our planet. Space is such a massive canvas that we have only sketched our presence on it in a tiny corner. The rest is there for us to draw on in detail – together. If we’re to navigate our way outwards into the next era of the Space Age in a peaceful and cooperative fashion, we need to understand space in its historical, political and military contexts, and to grasp what it will mean for our future. In these chapters, we will look back in time to see how space has in uenced our cultures and our ideas, from societies organized largely around religion, all the way to scienti c revolutions. From there, it was the Cold War that drove the Space Race – prompting huge leaps in human endeavour and innovation that nally allowed us to break the bonds of Earth. Once out, we started to see opportunities, resources and strategic points worth competing for. We are now in the era of astropolitics. But what we’ve failed to establish so far is a set of universally agreed-upon rules to regulate this competition; without laws governing human activity in space, the stage is set for disagreements on an astronomical level. In the modern era, there are three main players we need to know about: China, the USA and Russia. These are the independent spacefaring nations, and how they choose to proceed will a ect everyone else on Earth. The militaries of each have a version of a ‘Space Force’ that provides war- ghting capabilities for their forces on land, sea and in the air. All are increasing their capacity to attack and defend the satellites that provide those capabilities. The rest of the nations know they can’t compete with the Big Three, but they still want to have a say in what goes up and what comes down; they are assessing their options and aligning into ‘space blocs’. If we cannot nd a way to move forward as one uni ed planet, there is an inevitable outcome: competition and possibly con ict played out in the new arena of space. And nally, we’ll look far forward into our future, to see what space could hold for us – on the Moon, on Mars and beyond. The Moon pulls the sea to the shore, and humans to its surface. Wolves raise their muzzles and howl at the silvery disc hanging in the night sky. Humans raise their eyes and look further, to in nity. We always have, and now we are on our way. PART 1 THE PATH TO THE STARS CHAPTER 1 LOOKING UP ‘To con ne our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.’ Stephen Hawking Our solar system. T Long before we HE FLICKERING LIGHTS OF THE STARS TELL MANY STORIES. ever dreamed of venturing into space, before arti cial light dimmed our view, we stared up at the skies and asked – why is there something rather than nothing? Much of human endeavour has been driven by our desire to reach for the stars. The rst recorded beliefs about creation, the gods and constellations must have come from an oral storytelling tradition stretching back into prehistory. All ancient cultures saw in the sky an idea of what might have created them, who they were, what was their role and how they should behave. If there were gods – and what else could explain what was seen – it was logical to believe that some of them lived in the heavens above. Humans are hardwired to look at things and see patterns. People joined the dots and made a picture corresponding to what they saw on Earth and what they knew from their legends. Those in hot climates might see the shapes of scorpions or lions, while those in colder realms would pick out a moose. In Finland the Northern Lights are known as ‘fox res’ because of the ancient tale of a magical fox whose tail swept snow up into the heavens, while in parts of Africa there is a legend that the Sun is behind the night sky and the stars are holes that let some of its light through. The stars were inseparable from our stories, myths and legends. The earliest potential evidence of people trying to analyse and understand the skies dates to about 30,000 years ago, towards the end of the last Ice Age. In the early 1960s the prehistorian Alexander Marshack interpreted marks carved into animal bones as being lunar calendars. The bones show sequences of twenty-eight and twenty-nine points. Experts still argue about exactly what women and men in the Late Palaeolithic period might have known, but there is a body of evidence that they were studying the stars. Scientists speculate that these early astronomers used their portable calendars as they moved on long hunting trips and migrations, and possibly for rituals. It makes sense that a way of marking time would develop. You would need to know when, for example, the mosquito season was about to begin, or when you should move on towards the trees whose fruit was ripe. The more practical side of watching the skies was also crucial as hunter-gatherers became more sedentary, a process that began roughly 12,000 years ago. The rst farmers and herders needed to know when to sow seeds and how long it was before harvest. Some of the Neolithic cave paintings found in Europe, which are over 10,000 years old, are thought to depict star formations. Again, the claims are debated, but the pattern of constellations can be found in some of the animal drawings. People who looked at the stars every clear night must have noticed that the lights were in di erent positions at di erent times, even if they had not yet worked out that 365 periods of daylight and darkness equalled one unit of time. We are still a long way from any proof of accurate measurement of the movement of the planets and stars at that time. Even when we arrive at the beginning of the building of stone circles, the evidence is sketchy. The oldest known is Nabta Playa in what is now Egypt. It’s sometimes called the Stonehenge in the Sahara, which is a bit unfair as it was built about 7,000 years ago, some 2,000 years before the world’s most famous henge. This is because the site was only discovered in the 1970s and fully excavated in the 1990s. It’s thought it was built by semi-nomadic herders to help them know when they should be on the move. There’s some evidence to suggest that the stones were aligned with key stars, such as Sirius, which is the brightest star in the night sky. Evidence for the more fanciful suggestion that they could also measure the distance to those stars is harder to nd, mostly because, according to experts, it isn’t there. The same is true of Stonehenge and the many other stone circles in north-west Europe. Stonehenge was rst constructed about 5,000 years ago, by which time farming had been a way of life in the region for 1,000 years. It is safe to say that Stonehenge lines up with the Sun on the winter and summer solstices, but beyond that any association with astronomy is far more speculative. It’s known that great feasts were held near the monument from the 38,000 discarded animal bones found at a settlement 3 kilometres away. Alas, Druids are not thought to have been present at these events as they didn’t show up in Britain until about 2,000 years later, which must be quite disappointing for those people who descend on the site today dressed in white gowns and carrying sticks. It’s when we reach back about 4,000 years that we begin to nd written proof that people were analysing the skies with a high level of sophistication and the ability to predict movements accurately. Writing and mathematics were the keys enabling the breakthrough. In around 1800 BCE the Babylonians, borrowing from their predecessors, the Sumerians, wrote down the signs of the zodiac based on the constellations as they saw them. They had long believed that the gods sent them warnings from the sky about future events such as famine. Priests developed the ability to record celestial movements on clay tablets and designed a calendar featuring twelve lunar months. That was the relatively easy part. After a few generations of storing the data, and using advancements in mathematics, they noticed that planets do not move in the same way in consecutive years but, given long enough, patterns of repetition do occur. This allowed them to work out where in the sky a planet would be on a speci c date in the future. It’s largely down to the Babylonians that we divide time into seven-day weeks. They saw seven celestial bodies, gured that each one oversaw a particular day, and so divided the lunar cycle of twenty-eight days into four parts. At the time, the Egyptians were using a ten-day division, which, had it lasted, would make for a long working week. As for a two-day weekend? Well, the Babylonians did designate one day for relaxation, but we can also thank the Hebrews for letting us know that if God wanted to rest on the seventh day, then so should we. Somewhat later, the unions won us another day o whether God wanted one or not. The Assyrians, Egyptians and others made similar advances in astronomy, but humanity still believed that astronomical events were caused by the gods. Astronomy and astrology were inseparable. The ancient Greeks thought the same way as they took up the mantle of these scienti c pioneers. The Greeks put their stamp on cosmology like no other civilization. By looking up at the stars, they also changed the way we think about the world. The Greeks had been learning from the Babylonians for centuries. Pythagoras was just one of those who had bene ted when, c.550 BCE, he worked out that what were called the morning star and the evening star were the same thing – the planet Venus. The breakthroughs he and others went on to achieve came as they applied geometry and trigonometry to cosmic questions. One of the greats was Hipparchus, who is thought to have invented the astrolabe – Greek for ‘star taker’. This was the ‘smartphone’ of the ancients and, unlike some of today’s consumer technology, it didn’t have a built-in failure date. Astrolabes were used for almost 2,000 years. They could tell you where you were, what time it was, when the Sun would set, and give you your horoscope. They functioned using a series of sliding plates, including ones containing Earth’s latitudinal lines and the location of certain stars. They spread from the Hellenic Greek region into the Arab countries and later to western Europe. The Muslims used them to locate the direction of Mecca; Columbus used them as he headed towards the Americas. The Greeks believed Earth to be round several generations before Aristotle describes it as such in his On the Heavens, written in 350 BCE. He noted that Earth’s shadow on the Moon during a lunar eclipse is circular. If Earth was a at disc, then at some point, when sunlight struck it side on, its shadow on the Moon would be a line. As this did not happen, logic suggested a round Earth. Aristotle writes about mathematicians measuring distance in stades (from where we get the word stadium) and nding that Earth’s circumference was 400,000 stadia – about 72,000 kilometres. They may have been o by 32,000 kilometres, but it was still a massive leap forward in our thinking. About a hundred years later, Eratosthenes of Cyrene worked out how to measure the circumference of Earth accurately. He knew of a well in Syene (now called Aswan) in Egypt where every year at the summer solstice the Sun illuminated the bottom of the well without casting any shadows. This meant the Sun was directly overhead. He then measured the length of the shadow cast by a stick at noon on the summer solstice in Alexandria. From this, he calculated that the di erence in the Sun’s elevation between the two cities equated to an angle of 7.2 degrees along the curvature of Earth – roughly 1/50th of a circle. Now all he needed was an accurate measurement of the distance from Alexandria to Syene. He hired professional surveyors, trained to walk with equal strides, and was told the distance was 5,000 stadia. His conclusion was that Earth’s circumference was between 40,250 and 45,900 kilometres. The actual circumference is now usually accepted as 40,096 kilometres. At its heart, Greek learning argued that there is an underlying order to the universe and that this could be discovered and expressed by observation and mathematics. This was the beginning of the idea that the world could be understood through natural processes, rather than with reference to the gods. The Greeks worked to nd the circumference of the Moon, and the distance from Earth to the Moon, and the Moon to the Sun. However, they consistently vastly underestimated distance and, although they developed theoretical models of planetary motion, in all of them the planets circled Earth, a belief that survived until the Renaissance. There were many scienti c giants, culminating with Claudius Ptolemy (c.100–c.170 CE), who summarized classical astronomy and categorized the star-pictures of the ancients into forty-eight constellations (today there are eighty-eight), giving them names that still dominate many languages. Aquarius, Pegasus, Taurus, Hercules, Capricorn, etc., were all written down in Ptolemy’s book, which he called The Mathematical Collection but is known to the world by its Arabic name – the Almagest. Yet Ptolemy was hamstrung by the same thought process as his predecessors: that Earth was the centre of the universe, and the planets circled it. It was based on what they knew and what their logic told them, and this model held for more than 1,500 years. We know of one early exception to this orthodox view. Aristarchus of Samos (310– 230 BCE) argued that Earth revolved around the Sun – the heliocentric universe model. The scholars disagreed. Aristarchus and others had correctly worked out the distance to the Moon. However, they put the Sun only about twenty times further away than that – a massive underestimation, but still an enormous distance. The Greeks erred on the side of caution. To accept some of the equations would be to accept a cosmos of such magnitude that it required a leap of imagination they could not make. Proxima Centauri, our closest star apart from the Sun, is almost 40 trillion kilometres away. The fastest-travelling spaceship so far built would take 18,000 years to get there. Even in the twenty- rst century we struggle to understand these distances. The things the Greeks worked out, using what they had, are among the greatest intellectual and scienti c achievements in humanity’s long history. As Greek power faded, the Romans had the opportunity to advance the science of astronomy. However, they never embraced maths with quite the same passion. The Greeks were interested in astrology, but the Romans were obsessed with it, especially after the founding of the Roman Empire in 27 BCE. Never mind the distance from Earth to the Sun, what was Mars doing in relation to Venus? The life of the emperor might depend on it! The Romans continued to use astrology to make political predictions all the way up until the collapse of the Western Empire in the fth century, an event they might not have seen coming. During this period the Chinese had been developing their astronomical skills and nding ways to divide time for practical uses. The mathematician Zu Chongzhi (429–500 CE) devised the ‘Calendar of Great Brightness’ based on 365 days a year over a 391- year cycle, with an extra month inserted in to 144 of the years. Zu wrote that his ndings did not derive ‘from spirits or from ghosts, but from careful observations and accurate mathematical calculations’. Behind Zu’s methods was the same ethos that drove the Greeks – the study of empirical facts to explain the world. But the gods and ghosts still dominated thinking in most parts of the world. It would take an explosion of brilliance in the Islamic realm to make great leaps in our understanding. From the eighth to the fteenth centuries, across a vast region stretching from what are now the Central Asian Republics to Portugal and Spain, Islamic culture rst mastered Greek astronomy and then took it forward during the period known as the ‘Golden Age’ of Islamic learning. In 900, Al-Battani reduced the length of a year by just a few minutes, and by doing so suggested that Earth’s distance from the Sun varied. That in turn suggested that perhaps the planets did not move in perfectly circular orbits. Some scholars began to question the idea that Earth did not move, and it became accepted that it rotates. A brilliant polymath named Nasir al-Tusi challenged parts of the Ptolemaic system that were not based on the principle of uniform circular motion. However, again the leap was not made to the model of Earth moving around the Sun. As Islam’s ‘Golden Age’ blazed bright, Europe was in what used to be called the ‘Dark Ages’. Historians now prefer the less pejorative ‘Early Middle Ages’, meaning roughly between the fth and tenth centuries, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the beginnings of a return to urban life in Europe. It was a time when there was a place for everything, and everything was in its place. All celestial bodies circled Earth, which was the centre of the universe. Above this was God; on Earth there were kings, bishops, barons and serfs; and everyone should be content with their lot. As serfs tended to be unable to write, it isn’t easy to know if they agreed. The term ‘Dark Ages’ comes from the Italian scholar Petrarch (1304–74), who felt that Europeans were living in darkness compared to the brilliance of the Greeks and Romans. In his epic work Africa he wrote: ‘This sleep of forgetfulness will not last forever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance.’ Petrarch lived on the cusp of the Renaissance – a time he might well have thought of as ‘pure radiance’. It certainly was for astronomy and its role in progressing humanity’s understanding of its place in the universe. None of the great scienti c texts on astronomy were available to Europeans during the Early Middle Ages. This began to change with the work of Gerard of Cremona (1114–87) and others who translated them from Arabic. Gerard went to Toledo, to learn Arabic well enough to translate Ptolemy’s Almagest into Latin (the original Greek edition had been lost for years). It was the rst of eighty works transcribed by the Toledo School of Translators. The revival of learning was one of the foundations of the Renaissance, opening the doors to knowledge, and the facts owed in as generation after generation built on what came before and contributed to what is known as the Scienti c Revolution, starting in the sixteenth century. It was hard going. The Earth-centred views of cosmology had been adopted by the Catholic Church, and woe betide the heretic who sought to disprove them. European astronomy took centuries to match the expertise of the ancient Greeks and the Islamic Golden Age. It wasn’t until 1543 that it broke serious new ground. That year, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs, which suggested that an Earth-centred universe was wrong. Copernicus was careful with his phrasing, writing, ‘if the Earth were in motion’. At rst criticism was mostly muted. He was a loyal member of the Church and had written ‘if’. He also helpfully died two months after the books came out. However, Catholic and Protestant clergy were keen to undermine his claims, and science was put on notice that the teachings of the Church could not be challenged. In 1584, the Italian astronomer Giordano Bruno published On the In nite Universe and Worlds, in which he defended Copernicus and argued that the universe is in nite, with in nite worlds, inhabited by intelligent beings. He was put on trial, and after nearly eight years behind bars he refused to renounce his views, was declared a heretic and burned at the stake – although it’s likely his questioning of more fundamental Catholic doctrine such as transubstantiation played a bigger role in his demise than his views on cosmology. Next up was Galileo Galilei, the rst person to use the newly invented telescope to systematically record observations of the night sky. In 1610 he published The Starry Messenger, which made his name and, thanks to its challenge to the idea of an Earth-centred universe, almost cost him his life. Galileo’s studies of the movements of the other planets in the solar system appeared to be in line with Copernicus’s theory that Earth did move around the Sun. It wasn’t long before the Church condemned this view as heresy. It said that such beliefs contradicted the Bible – speci cally Joshua 10:12–13, in which a call is made for the Sun to stop moving – ‘And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.’ If Scripture said the Sun moved, who was to say it did not? The pope ordered the theory to be banned. The Church knew that these dangerous new ideas could cause an earthquake undermining the hierarchical model of society, their legitimacy and ultimately their power. If Earth was not the centre of the universe – indeed, if there was no known centre – then were humans so important? The French theologian and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–62) realized the implications: ‘Engulfed in the in nite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I am terri ed.’ Galileo stepped away from the controversy for a while, but in 1623 a new pope, Urban VIII, was elected, who encouraged Galileo to write on the topic, essentially asking him to show his support for the geocentric view. Galileo published Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican in 1632. It was a nuanced book but came down in favour of the probability that Earth was moving. The pope was not amused, and a two-month-long trial began. Galileo’s defence was that his intent hadn’t been to support the Copernican view, that his work was only a means of discussing the view. To no avail – he was found guilty of ‘having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures)... that the earth does move, and is not the centre of the world’. He was sentenced to house arrest, under which he remained until his death in 1642, and was told, ‘Thou shalt recite once a week the Seven Penitential Psalms.’ It could have been worse. Had Galileo not been the most famous scientist in the world he might well have su ered the same painful death as Giordano Bruno. In 1992, 359 years after his trial, the Vatican nally admitted it was wrong. Despite the wrath of the pope (but probably not God), the tide of knowledge was owing in the wrong direction for the priests. Our study of the skies had overturned centuries of accepted wisdom and led to a completely new view of the world. The old gods were being challenged – whether that was the intention or not. A year after Galileo’s death, Isaac Newton was born. He went on to invent a new telescope allowing a deeper view into space than had been previously possible. His Principia (1687) announced to the world the laws of motion and gravity, and ushered in a new age in physics and astronomy. Newton came not to bury God but to praise him. The more he discovered about the universe, the more convinced he was that its magni cent design must have had a designer: ‘This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.’ Newton agreed that Earth orbited around the Sun. Galileo had conducted experiments on what we now call gravity (supposedly dropping objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa), but Newton’s great leap forward was his theory that the laws of gravity applied to all objects, and that this was as true in space as it was on Earth. As with the giants before him, he arrived at a revolutionary moment in history by a combination of empirical work and just sitting down and thinking. Why did the apple fall in a straight line to the ground? Why did a cannonball fall in a curve as it lost speed? What strange force pulled them down? Newton’s law of universal gravitation stated that all objects attract each other, with the force exerted depending on the mass of the objects and the distance between them. So even if the apple was thrown forward from the highest mountain, at such a speed that it just kept going, it would not head out into space in a straight line but ‘fall’ around the world in a never-ending curve, held close to Earth by this strange force called gravity, from the Latin gravitas, meaning weight. And gravity, he said, explained why planets constantly revolved round the Sun instead of just wandering o into space. The closer a greater object is to a smaller one, the stronger is its gravitational pull. There was some limited resistance to his ideas by a few scientists on the grounds that Newton’s gravity was akin to primitive superstitions about a supernatural power. He was content to prove his ideas rationally, and to believe in his God. There was more, so much more. Newton’s work is considered by some to have made the greatest contributions to the history of science. When he died in 1727 his body lay in state in Westminster Abbey for a week. The great English poet Alexander Pope wrote, ‘God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.’ This was an exciting time for science, akin to that of the ancient Greeks and the Islamic world’s Golden Age, but di erent in that knowledge advanced more quickly than in any period before. Each discovery created another chink in the armour of organized religion and its claim to power. In the Age of Reason, it became unreasonable to tell a scientist to recite Penitential Psalms for contradicting Scripture. Staring up at the sky had led to a complete revolution in the way we thought and lived our lives, opening up the road to further scienti c endeavour. Gradually, but not entirely, organized religion in the technologically advanced countries retreated to its temples, and science occupied the temporal sphere. It was an age of miracles and wonders. Since then we have learned a huge amount more, and there’s a majesty to our science which now allows us to see so much when we gaze up at the stars. A modern space telescope can look back in time and detect light that has been travelling for more than 13 billion years. In 1931 Georges Lemaître suggested that the universe began with the explosion of a single tiny particle, which he called the ‘primeval atom’. This idea was supported by observations Edwin Hubble made in the 1920s through the massive Hooker telescope on Mount Wilson in California, which appeared to show that all observable galaxies were moving away from Earth in every direction at rapid speed. It was logical to conclude from this that they must have originated from a single place at a speci c point in time. This theory would become known as the ‘Big Bang’. At the time, conventional wisdom mostly supported the Steady State theory – that the universe had always existed, and always would. But in the 1950s new measurements of the speed of movement of the galaxies suggested its birthday was 13.7 billion years ago. This was an extraordinary revolution in our understanding of the universe. In 1990 the 12-tonne Hubble Space Telescope was put into orbit. Free from the limiting and distorting e ects of Earth’s atmosphere, the telescope began to bring the cosmos into sharper focus and to look further and further into its past, to within microseconds of its, and our, birth. Now, infrared telescopes can detect light from radiation that can pass through cosmic dust but cannot be seen by the human eye or visible light telescopes such as the Hubble. Measuring the wavelengths and composition gives the data to tell the story of the universe. All of these discoveries have been driven by the need to answer the questions ‘How?’ and ‘Why?’ Science is brilliant at answering the rst, but even when it nds the answer, it often throws up yet another ‘Why?’ Despite our advancing knowledge, we have still not taken the wonder out of the universe. In many ways, the theories and discoveries of the twentieth century only added to it, posing questions that might only be answered as we begin to explore the physical realities of space. During the rst two decades of the last century the world was introduced to the strangeness of quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity and space-time. Quantum theory suggests that the mysterious subatomic world of tiny particles is governed by total randomness, an idea that con icted with Einstein’s (and Newton’s) view that there are universal laws. The debate is worth touching on brie y. Brie y because most of us are in good company with some of the best brains ever to have existed in that we, and they, don’t really understand quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, it, Einstein’s response, and his discoveries tell us something about why our destiny is in space. Quantum entanglement theory suggests that particles can be connected to and instantly in uence one another even if they are hundreds of millions of kilometres apart. The key word here is instantly. But this simply doesn’t t with the accepted idea that there are universal laws of science. For example, as Einstein showed, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. That is why he rejected quantum entanglement as ‘spooky action at a distance’ and scientists continue to argue about its validity. Nevertheless, it leaves open the possibility that laws are not universal. If so, perhaps something can travel faster than the speed of light, implausible though this sounds. One of Einstein’s most famous quotes was in response to this dilemma: ‘God does not play dice with the universe.’ Einstein agreed with Newton that space has three dimensions – height, width and length. But Newton thought that the objects in space did not a ect these dimensions. Einstein said they did. His General Theory of Relativity had added a fourth dimension, time, and he called this combination of four dimensions space-time. This new fourth dimension could be warped by large masses even to the extent of speeding it up or slowing it down. Think of space as a foam mattress. You step on it. Your weight (or mass) causes a depression in space. According to Einstein, gravity is a distortion in the shape of space-time. Our ancestors looked up and saw a universe they could not understand, but used its apparent order to make sense of their world. We now know so much more, and yet still confront an in nite universe full of mystery containing dark matter, black holes, warps in the fabric of space-time, and challenges to the very concept of order and law. This is what Newton meant when he said, ‘What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.’ The implications of quantum mechanics and space-time on what will, and will not, be possible in space travel are unknown but will potentially open new avenues in the distant future. Because after all these millennia of discovery, there are still more questions than answers, and more questions to be asked that we don’t even know of yet. Some of those questions and answers will only be found the further away from Earth we go. And the desire to nd out, to know more – and even to go there ourselves – has proved irresistible. CHAPTER 2 THE ROAD TO THE HEAVENS ‘I see Earth! It is so beautiful!’ Yuri Gagarin Astronaut Edwin Aldrin on the Moon beside the US ag, 21 July 1969. W century ago. It E FIRST CROSSED THE BORDER WITH SPACE LESS THAN A had taken thousands of years of slow development, followed by an amazing sprint during those decades of miracles and wonders in the twentieth century. But it was con ict on Earth that nally got us there. The technology that took us to the heavens came from the arms race of the Cold War. For almost all of human history it was so near and yet so far. As the British astronomer Fred Hoyle said in 1979, ‘Space isn’t remote at all. It’s only an hour’s drive away if your car could go straight upwards.’ Formula One engineers can soup up their car engines as much as they like, but they won’t top out at the 7.9-kilometres-a- second required to leave Earth’s surface and go into orbit. A rocket engine, on the other hand... Such a simple thing, a rocket. So simple that we can buy them in shops and launch them from our back gardens to celebrate birthdays or New Year’s Eve. Conversely, getting one into space with a human being in it is so endishly complicated that only three countries have done it. One of the di culties of human space travel is that the cutting- edge technology required ultimately relies on putting people on top of giant tanks of fuel. Then setting re to the fuel. Space Shuttle astronaut Mike Massimino best captured the spirit of this in his memoir Spaceman. He wrote about looking at his cheerful colleagues as they approached the launch pad: ‘Are they insane? Don’t they see we’re about to strap ourselves to a bomb that’s going to blow us hundreds of miles into the sky?’ Indeed. The shuttle’s external fuel tank held 650,000 litres of liquid oxygen and 1.7 million litres of liquid hydrogen. The engines then burned this at the rate equivalent to emptying a family swimming pool every ten seconds. This basic technology is not so di erent from that discovered by monks in China in the ninth century using gunpowder: a mix of sulphur, potassium nitrate and charcoal. At rst it was used for reworks, but the Chinese moved on to make ‘ ying re lances’. In the sixteenth century one man even supposedly tried to use these to reach the stars. As the Chinese legend tells it, Wan Hu attached forty-seven gunpowder- lled rockets to a bamboo chair, strapped himself to it and ordered his servants to light the blue touchpaper. He then travelled a short distance upwards before disappearing in a massive explosion and clouds of smoke. He was never seen again, nor was the chair. There isn’t any written evidence that the event happened. However, there is now a crater on the Moon named after Wan Hu. Over the centuries there have been other attempts to design rockets, with varying degrees of success; but when it comes to the lineage of modern rockets, historians of space ight usually reference three names: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), Robert Goddard (1882–1945) and Hermann Oberth (1894–1989). All were brilliant pioneers in their eld. Goddard, an American, was the rst person to get a rocket o the ground using liquid fuel rather than the compressed powder of solid fuel that had been used since the Chinese discoveries of the ninth century. Oberth was a German scientist whose reputation is tarnished by having worked for the Nazis. They used his studies on rockets to develop the Vergeltungswa e 2 (Vengeance Weapon Two), or V-2 rocket, that was used to such devastating e ect against civilian targets during the Second World War. He also conducted medical experiments on himself to support his theory that humans could survive the physical stresses of space travel, such as G-Force and weightlessness. Arguably, though, the most impressive of the three, for sheer brilliant imagination, is Tsiolkovsky. In 1903, seven months before the rst powered aircraft had own, an unknown, self-taught Russian scientist published the rst theoretical proof for the possibility of space ight. Later that year the Wright brothers ew into the history books, but Tsiolkovsky remains virtually unknown, despite being one of the most far- sighted scientists to have lived. Born the fth of eighteen children to parents of modest means, he became deaf aged ten after a childhood illness and had to leave school. He went on to learn science from reading books in a public library, including numerous volumes on physics, astronomy and analytical mechanics, as well as the science ction novels of Jules Verne. ‘Besides books I had no other teachers,’ he wrote. His early writings included visionary ideas: how to build space stations powered by solar energy, sketches of gyroscopes to control a spaceship’s orientation, airlocks to enable spaceships to dock with each other, and pressurized space suits that would allow cosmonauts to venture outside their craft. As early as 1895 he was theorizing the concept of a space elevator. He went on to produce a stunning body of work including the 1903 paper that later propelled him to fame in Russia. ‘Exploration of the World Space with Reaction Machines’ contained the rst scienti c theoretical proof that a rocket could push through the atmosphere and orbit Earth. Tsiolkovsky had worked out the horizontal speed required to get into orbit and that this could be achieved using rockets fuelled by a mixture of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. His formula, known as ‘the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation’, set out the relationship between the speed of the rocket, the changing mass of the rocket and its fuel, and the speed of the gas as it is expelled. It is the foundation of space travel. When the Soviets took over, they were suspicious of Tsiolkovsky’s quasi-theological musings on space travel, which were at odds with communist philosophy. In Is There God? he argued: ‘We are at the will of and controlled by Cosmos... we are marionettes, mechanical puppets.’ In fact he was controlled by the Communist Party. At one point the secret police arrested him, and he spent several weeks in the notorious Lubyanka jail in Moscow accused of anti-Soviet propaganda. However, as the edgling rocket industry got o the ground, the Soviets realized the PR bene ts of claiming a pioneer as one of their own and in 1929 Tsiolkovsky was allowed to publish the rst paper proposing the concept of a multi-stage rocket booster. The prophet is not without honour, especially in the land of his birth where he has many epitaphs, from ‘father of space ight’ to ‘father of rocketry’. His modest log cabin is open to the public; nearby stands the State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics, which bears his name. On the far side of the Moon, a huge crater discovered by the Soviet spaceship Luna 3 is named after the man who knew that science ction can become science fact. Knowledgeable science ction experts know all this. In the comic book series Assassin’s Creed, a lead character reads from Tsiolkovsky’s The Will of the Universe. In an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation a spaceship is named after him. He is quoted in two of Sid Meier’s video games, and he has been name-checked in a short story by the sci- writer William Gibson. Meier and Gibson would undoubtedly know Tsiolkovsky’s most famous quote: ‘Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot stay in the cradle forever.’ Shortly before his death he wrote: ‘All my life I have dreamed that by my work mankind would at least be advanced a little.’ It was. Putting theory into fact wasn’t easy. To achieve Tsiolkovsky’s equation you must accelerate. To accelerate you need fuel. The faster you accelerate, the more fuel you need. The more fuel you need, the heavier the craft carrying it becomes. In the rst few decades of the twentieth century, many scientists were grappling with this problem. The decades prior to the Second World War saw various advances, but it was the war itself, and then the Cold War, that led to rapid advances in technology, driven by the desire to win. The Soviets and Japanese both experimented with rocket- powered planes and Japan even developed a rocket-powered Kamikaze bomber. But it was the German rocket programme that led the way. Overseeing it was Wernher von Braun, a Prussian aristocrat who was inspired by the work of Hermann Oberth. As had Oberth, von Braun joined the Nazi Party and became a major in the SS. In 1942 he oversaw the rst launch of a rocket into sub-orbital space, about 100 kilometres up, but his team could not yet engineer a rocket that was able to achieve the speed required to enter into orbit. However, his V-2 could travel at up to 5,300 km/h, and for 320 kilometres, before falling back to Earth. When Adolf Hitler was told about von Braun’s breakthrough, he tasked him with building thousands of them, tipped with warheads. In 1944 the rst V-2s were launched. Travelling faster than the speed of sound, they were almost impossible to intercept and they hit their targets less than three minutes after being launched. As Hitler’s ‘Thousand Year Reich’ began to implode twelve years after its inception, von Braun and his team headed to Bavaria and surrendered to the Americans. It was a good move, given that the alternative was to surrender to the Russians. Both powers had intelligence o cers tasked with nding both the Nazi secret weapons and the scientists who made them. In what became known as ‘Operation Paperclip’, von Braun and about 120 other German scientists were secretly own to the USA to develop America’s ballistic missile programme. The scientists’ pasts were covered up. Many were ardent Nazis but, unlike some of their counterparts who faced justice at the Nuremberg trials, instead of being hanged they were hired. The V-2 rockets had been built mostly by slave labourers personally hand-picked from Buchenwald concentration camp by von Braun himself, and they killed thousands of civilians. The cheerful and articulate von Braun eventually became the director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the public face of the American space programme. He was said to have remarked about his V-2 rockets that they had worked perfectly, except for landing on the wrong planet. His moral detachment was matched by the Americans, who made a Faustian pact, whitewashing his past in order to help them ght the new war they found themselves in – the Cold one. The Russians took a similar view. Their version of ‘Paperclip’ was ‘Operation Osoaviakhim’. In October 1946 Soviet army and intelligence units took more than 2,200 German scientists and their families to Russia to work on various projects, including the rocket programme. The Cold War had begun. It was a time when people across the world lived in the shadow of the mushroom cloud. Children practised ‘Duck and Cover’ drills to survive a nuclear attack and people were encouraged to build their own air-raid shelters even though they would be of no help in the event of a thermonuclear exchange. In August 1949 the Soviet Union detonated its rst atomic bomb at a remote test site in Kazakhstan. A US spy plane ying o the coast of Siberia picked up traces of the radiation, and a few weeks later President Harry Truman announced to the world that the Soviet Union was a nuclear power. Nuclear war between the two countries was now a possibility. The dangers of a nuclear holocaust only grew when both developed hydrogen bombs, even more powerful than the atomic versions. Among the weapons used in the Cold War was technology, deployed by each side to prove that its political system – and armoury – was superior. By the 1950s they were building ballistic missiles that could launch satellites into space to test density levels in the atmosphere, study radio wave transmissions and track objects in orbit. Of course, the missiles had another purpose as well. The Soviet space programme was headed by Sergei Korolev. In the 1930s, under torture, he’d ‘confessed’ to being a counter- revolutionary against the Motherland and was sent to a notoriously brutal gulag in Siberia. There he was starved, had his teeth knocked out and his jaw broken, but as war with Germany loomed he was transferred to a Moscow jail, where he worked on rocket designs during the Second World War. During the Cold War his orders were: ‘Beat the Americans, get there rst.’ He made it with four months to spare. In early October 1957, several amateur radio enthusiasts in the eastern United States picked up a series of beep beep beep sounds on their short-wave radios. Some recorded them and within hours the American television and radio audiences were listening to transmissions from Sputnik 1 – the rst man-made object to orbit Earth. The threshold had been crossed. The Space Age was under way. Sputnik 1 was launched on 4 October from Kazakhstan. It was barely bigger than a beach ball, weighing a mere 83.6 kilograms. It had four long antennae protruding from its sphere and inside contained a thermometer, a few batteries, a radio transmitter and a fan to keep it cool. The Americans got very hot under the collar. It was hailed as a victory for Russia, the Soviet Union and communism. The newspaper Pravda commented: ‘All the world heard the announcement of the launching of the arti cial moon.’ The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev learned of its success at 11 p.m. at a drinks reception in the Mariinsky Palace in Kyiv. His son Sergei recalled that Khrushchev was told he had a call and left the room, returning a few minutes later, ‘his face shining’. He then sat silently for a time before raising his hand for silence. ‘Comrades,’ he told uncomprehending Ukrainian party o cials, ‘a little while ago, an arti cial satellite of the Earth was launched.’ The White House pretended not to care. President Eisenhower called it a ‘small ball in the air’, an aide said the USA was not playing ‘an outer space basketball game’, and another even called Sputnik ‘a silly bauble’. In private, though, the signi cance of Moscow’s achievement was sinking in, and the US media headlines made anyone doubting the enormity of the event concentrate – ‘A Grave Defeat’, declared the New York Herald Tribune, a ‘National Emergency’, said The Reporter. The small ball in the air had shattered the USA’s sense of invulnerability. Sputnik 1 had a highly polished aluminium exterior that shone so brightly Americans could see it as it passed overhead every ninety minutes, every day, for three months, before it burned up after re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. Every time it came past was another reminder that the Soviets had surpassed American technology. The anxiety in the USA was not so much about the satellite itself as about the massive rocket that had carried it into space. What the Russians called Iskustveni Sputnik Zemli, or Arti cial Satellite of Earth, was a game changer. Before Sputnik, the USA assumed it would be able to intercept Soviet nuclear-armed aircraft. But Sputnik had been delivered to space on top of what was in e ect a ballistic missile, which it was now clear could reach America. The historian Walter McDougall later spoke of the e ect the news of Sputnik had on the American government and people: ‘To have the communists lead in technology? To pioneer a new frontier of in nite size? In a sense to capture the future?... What did this mean? That the future belongs to communism?’ Now the Reds weren’t just under the bed – they were overhead. A memo marked ‘Con dential’ written for the White House a few days after Sputnik launched gives an insight into what President Eisenhower’s administration thought was at stake. Titled ‘Reaction to the Soviet Satellite’, it says: ‘Public opinion in friendly countries shows decided concerns over the possibility that the balance of military power has shifted,’ and ends: ‘General Soviet credibility has been sharply enhanced.’ A few weeks later the Soviets successfully launched Sputnik 2. Inside was a dog named Laika who became the rst animal in space, but sadly not the rst to return. Eisenhower gave the go-ahead for an American satellite to be launched as soon as possible. Two months after Sputnik 1 lifted o into space, the rocket carrying America’s Vanguard Test Vehicle Three set o from Cape Canaveral, rose up just over a metre, fell back to Earth and exploded. In contrast to what had happened in the USSR, the news cameras had been invited to record the event and the outcome was broadcast coast to coast within hours. The media had a eld day with headlines such as ‘Kaputnik!’ and ‘Flopnik’. The Soviets o ered the USA help under their ‘programme of technical assistance to backward nations’. Eisenhower was not amused. The USA’s budget for its space programme went from approximately $89 million per year to $401 million in just two years. In January 1958, the von Braun-designed Juno 1 rocket successfully took the US Explorer 1 satellite into orbit. But the Soviets had achieved two ‘ rsts’. Both sides now looked for the next. Over the years that followed, each had a few, but none was of the magnitude of Sputnik 1. In December 1958 President Eisenhower’s recorded Christmas message was transmitted from a US satellite and became the rst broadcast of a human voice from space. A few weeks later the USSR’s Luna 1 probe missed its intended target of the Moon, sailing right past it, and began to orbit the Sun instead of Earth – a rst, but an accidental one. Then, later in 1959, the Soviets had a hit, literally, when Luna 2 became the rst spacecraft to reach the surface of the Moon. It was a ‘hard landing’, which is scienti c talk for ‘crashed’, but it did its job and scattered silver panels bearing Soviet symbols on the surface. In a nice touch Khrushchev sent a replica of one to President Eisenhower as a gift. That year also saw Luna 3 (another Korolev design) reach the far side of the Moon. It was, as it often is, bathed in sunlight, but years later Pink Floyd were not going to let that stand in the way of their best-selling LP. The year 1960 saw the Americans launch a Television Infrared Observation Satellite (TIROS) to study the weather. Within days it was able to detect and track a storm o the coast of Madagascar and TIROS became the prototype of the current global systems used for weather reporting. It could only capture large-scale features, but that was still enough to make Moscow nervous. Later that year Sputnik 5 ew two dogs, Belka and Strelka, to space and, happily for them, returned them alive. After a period as a celebrity, Strelka retired from public life and had six puppies, one of them named Pushinka (Flu y). Khrushchev remembered that during a conversation in 1961 with US First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy she had asked after Strelka. Now developing a skill for gifting, he sent Pushinka to the White House, complete with Soviet passport. President John F. Kennedy wrote to thank him: ‘Mrs Kennedy and I were particularly pleased to receive “Pushinka”. Her ight from the Soviet Union to the United States was not as dramatic as the ight of her mother, nevertheless it was a long voyage and she stood it well. We both appreciate your remembering these matters in your busy life.’ Pushinka and one of the Kennedy dogs, Charlie, then developed a shine for one another, resulting in four puppies referred to by JFK as ‘pupniks’. Given the extreme tensions of the Cold War, these rare moments of cordiality were welcomed. But there was still a Space Race to win. The Americans saw Belka and Strelka and raised them Ham – a chimpanzee who became the rst hominid sent into space on 31 January 1961. No one remembers Ham, though, because the second hominid sent into space was also the rst man in space. The Americans had unfortunately named their project ‘Man in Space Soonest’, or MISS. They did. On 12 April 1961, Senior Lieutenant Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin approached the Vostok 1 rocket, pausing only to urinate on the right-hand back wheels of the vehicle that had taken him to the launch pad. To this day, Russian cosmonauts do the same in tribute to him. (Female crew members splash the wheels with liquid from a bottle.) Gagarin then climbed aboard the capsule and waited. There was no countdown – Sergei Korolev thought of them as an American a ectation – and at 9:07 a.m. Moscow time they simply pressed a button. Gagarin shouted ‘Poyekhali!’ – ‘Let’s go!’ – and o he went, slipping the surly bonds of Earth into what the poet and pilot John Gillespie Magee had called ‘the high untrespassed sanctity of space’ and engraving his name in the annals of the human story. The ight lasted 108 minutes as Gagarin made just over one orbit of Earth. Upon re-entry, about 7 kilometres up, he ejected from the capsule and landed in a rural area of the Volga region. A few minutes later, a woman named Anna Takhtarova and her ve-year- old granddaughter saw a spaceman wearing a bright-orange suit and white helmet walking towards them across a eld where they had been planting potatoes. Gagarin later recalled, ‘When they saw me in my space suit and the parachute dragging alongside as I walked, they started to back away in fear. I told them, don’t be afraid, I am a Soviet citizen, like you, who has descended from space and I must nd a telephone to call Moscow!’ Gagarin became a global celebrity, a ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ and a major asset to the communists in the Cold War. He was only twenty-seven, charming, and had a ready smile. Better still, he was also the son of peasants from a small collective farm and had risen to become a ghter pilot, then a cosmonaut, and then the rst man in space – what better proof of the superiority of the Soviet system over the capitalist West? Gagarin was chosen from among 200 ghter pilots enrolled on the Soviet programme. Ahead of the launch they had been whittled down to two. His rival was Gherman Titov, every bit as able as Gagarin but with a aw – he came from a comfortable middle-class, well-educated family. Khrushchev knew the propaganda value of the ‘from collective farm to space’ narrative, and so the peasants’ son rode Vostok 1 through the atmosphere and out into space. Before attending his victory parade in Red Square, Gagarin’s parents were told to wear simple clothes at the event. The story broke in the USA in the early hours and news desks across the country began to call NASA for comment. Public a airs o cer John ‘Shorty’ Powers, cross that his slumbers had been disturbed, shouted at one reporter, ‘What is this! We’re all asleep down here!’, resulting in the classic headline: ‘Soviets put man in space. Spokesman says US asleep.’ It was quite the wake-up call. A few months earlier, in his inaugural address, President Kennedy had said, ‘We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to ensure the survival and success of liberty.’ Before Gagarin’s ight, massive funding for NASA was not part of that price. Now it was. On 5 May 1961, just three weeks after Gagarin landed, Alan Shepard became the rst American, but second man, to travel to space. Kennedy set his country’s sights higher. He and Vice President Lyndon Johnson had concluded that orbiting the Moon or building a space station would not be enough to demonstrate American technological prowess and leadership. For that they had to land Americans on the Moon and show the world they’d done it. He laid it out in a speech to Congress that same month, saying: ‘If we are to go only halfway, or reduce our sights in the face of di culty, in my judgement it would be better not to go at all.’ He also made clear the connection with the Cold War: ‘If we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere... I believe that this nation 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... it will not be one man going to the Moon – if we make this judgement a rmatively, it will be an entire nation.’ The spirit of the times was caught the following year in his ‘We choose to go to the Moon’ speech in Houston: ‘We choose to go to the Moon in this decade, and do the other things – not because they are easy, but because they are hard.’ Von Braun set to work. Korolev was already busy. Despite his many successes, including Sputnik 1, his role as chief designer of the Soviet rocket programme was unknown to the public. It was only revealed after his death in 1966 following complications during routine surgery. Doctors tried to use a breathing tube but could not get it down his throat because it had been so damaged in the gulag. Korolev was given a state funeral and his ashes taken to the Kremlin Wall. Gagarin read the eulogy. Two years later, he too was gone. He’d said about his journey to space, ‘I could have gone on ying through space forever,’ but it was ight that killed him while test piloting a MiG-15 ghter jet aged thirty-four. Tens of thousands of people attended his funeral in Red Square and his ashes were interred close to Korolev’s. Between Kennedy’s speech and Korolev’s death, the Soviets had kept up their string of ‘ rsts’, all of which had the Russian engineer’s stamp on them. First dual-crewed space ight, 1962. First woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, 1963. First spacewalk, Alexei Leonov, 1965. Leonov’s spacewalk was dramatic enough – but, while outside his craft, Leonov’s suit swelled up, making it impossible for him to get back into the capsule. There were several tense minutes as he bled enough oxygen out to allow him to squeeze back through the metre-wide airlock. A year later, Luna 9 achieved the rst soft landing on the Moon and transmitted the rst close-up photos of its surface. In response to Kennedy’s 1961 speech Khrushchev had refused to con rm or deny that Moscow was in a race to the Moon. Secretly he had given the order: if the Americans said they would be on the Moon ‘before this decade was out’, the Soviets would be there before them, aiming for 1968. Not without their chief designer and chief inspiration Sergei Korolev they wouldn’t. Following his passing there was a series of technical failures, including the tragic death of Vladimir Komarov, the pilot of Soyuz 1, in 1967. After several mishaps his mission was aborted, only for the craft’s primary parachute to fail and the reserve chute to become entangled. Soyuz 1 hit the ground at high speed and exploded. It took engineers eighteen months to nd and x the problems before piloted missions could y again. NASA had its own tragedies, including the deaths of Virgil Grissom, Ed White and Roger Cha ee in a re in the Apollo 1 cabin during a ground test in 1967. It took almost two years before the faults identi ed could be recti ed. But the race for the rst crewed Moon landing was still on. The Soviets were aware of the di culties NASA was having with the Saturn V rocket it had developed for launch, and the lunar landing vehicle, and concluded that the USA would miss its deadline and would not try until 1970 at the earliest. Many in NASA felt the same way. Conversely, the Americans, unaware of the scale of problems the Soviets were facing post-Korolev, feared they would use a launch window that was coming up in December 1968, after which the Moon would not be in a proper position for ights until well into 1969. The window opened, and then closed, with no movement from the Soviet side. But in the same month three Americans became the rst men to orbit the Moon. Apollo 8 circled it ten times with Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders on board. Anders took the famous ‘Earthrise’ photograph and said later they’d gone to the Moon but discovered Earth. The image of our planet hanging precariously in the void, with its thin atmospheric layer protecting it, had a huge psychological e ect on many people who saw it and is credited with giving a great boost to the edgling environmentalist movement. On Christmas Eve, before they returned home, all three participated in a live TV transmission and took turns reading from the book of Genesis: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. Numerous sources suggest the global viewing gures at a billion people – about one in four humans. That seems unfeasibly high, but it was without doubt a massive audience for an amazing event. Humans had been around the Moon and back. Next up was the main aim. The clock was ticking. ‘T minus ten, nine, eight, seven...’ It was 16 July 1969. The countdown for Apollo 11 was under way. Korolev had been right – the countdown was an American a ectation. Or rather, an American-German a ectation. The 1929 Fritz Lang lm Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon) had featured the rst rocket launch countdown to heighten the tension and used captions reading ‘Noch 10 sekunden’ (‘10 more seconds’) etc., culminating in ‘Jetzt!’ (‘Now!’). Guess who saw the lm... a young Wernher von Braun, who was much taken by the idea. It married well with the American sense of drama and spectacle in the television age. It doesn’t get much more dramatic than a crewed rocket launch and it’s worth revisiting Space Shuttle astronaut Mike Massimino’s memoirs for a fraction of an insight into what astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin and Michael Collins went through at the Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex: At six seconds you feel the rumble of the main engines lighting. The whole stack lurches forward for a moment. Then at zero it tilts back upright again and that’s when the solid rocket boosters light and that’s when you go. There’s no question that you’re moving. It’s not like Oh, did we leave yet? No. It’s bang! and you’re gone... I felt like some giant science ction monster had reached down and grabbed me by the chest and was hurling me up and up... The whole thing can be summed up as controlled violence, the greatest display of power and speed ever created by humans. Saturn V was the most powerful launch vehicle ever built. It had three stages. The rst red its engines and lifted the 111-metre-tall rocket o the ground while burning 18,000 kilograms of fuel per second. Before it had even cleared the launch tower it was travelling at over 100 km/h. After two and half minutes, and at 68 kilometres up, the rst stage ran out of fuel, fell away, and the second stage ignited its engines. Six minutes later, Saturn V was at an altitude of 175 kilometres and accelerating towards orbital velocity. As the second stage fell away the third took over, sending Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin into orbit at 28,000 km/h. The rest of the outward journey took just over three days. On the way they checked they were on course using an instrument familiar to Galileo – a telescope – and another known to generations of sailors: a sextant. The computer on board the command module was less powerful than a modern pocket calculator. It was a tense descent as Armstrong and Aldrin brought the Eagle lunar module down on to the boulder-strewn surface of the Moon – as they landed it had just fteen seconds’ worth of fuel left in the tank. Four hours later, Armstrong made his small step on to the surface of the Sea of Tranquillity and giant leap into history. 21 July 1969: a date that will be remembered in the distant future as one of the most incredible moments in humanity’s story, long after details of many wars, revolutions, stock exchange crashes and pandemics have faded into obscurity. Armstrong is a colossal gure, but he knew he stood on the shoulders of giants such as Gagarin and Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, Oberth, Korolev, von Braun and, before them, the great scientists down the ages. He also understood the signi cance of the moment in the Cold War, saying later: ‘I was certainly aware that this was a culmination of the work of 300,000 or 400,000 people over a decade and that the nation’s hopes and outward appearance largely rested on how the results came out.’ Among them were unsung heroes such as the brilliant mathematician Katherine Johnson, who calculated the precise trajectories allowing Apollo 11 to land on the Moon, and Margaret Hamilton, who coined the phrase ‘software engineering’ and wrote the programs controlling the command and lunar modules. Armstrong also knew he was not alone in another sense – the Soviets were overhead. In a last-ditch e ort to at least get a machine to the Moon’s surface and back, they’d launched an unmanned craft a few days before Apollo 11 took o. They’d known for months that their dream of being rst to land a human on the Moon had almost certainly gone. Or gone up in ames, to be more precise. They were well behind the Americans even before two catastrophic events that year involving the giant N1 rocket, their rival to America’s Saturn V. The rst, in February 1969, saw the rocket and unmanned landing module lift o from the Baikonur Cosmodrome launch centre in Soviet Kazakhstan, streak upwards for about two minutes, reach an altitude of 14 kilometres before slowing, and then fall back to Earth some way from the launch site, exploding on impact. In early July, just two weeks before Apollo 11’s launch date, the Soviets tried again. Middle-ranking o cials had tried to warn the top brass about a series of potential problems but were told to keep quiet. The Politburo in Moscow was told what its senior members wanted to hear. This time the rocket and module only got 100 metres o the ground before appearing to freeze in mid-air and then tilting over, crashing back down and exploding. Most of the launch complex was destroyed, and windows in the technicians’ residential area 35 kilometres away were blown in. Even if the Apollo 11 mission had failed, the USSR would not have had an advantage. It would take more than a year to rebuild the N1 launch pad. But they still had the Proton K rocket and a Luna module capable of landing on, and lifting o from, the Moon. They could t it with telecommunications systems, a drilling kit to collect lunar soil and a camera, and they could launch it and get it back before Apollo 11. A rst home run may not be as good as rst man on the Moon, but it might dilute the e ect of what the Americans were about to do. Thus, three days before Apollo 11 took o from Cape Kennedy, Luna 15 set o from Baikonur. The Americans didn’t know what the launch was for, but the Soviets knew the race was on. The Soviet craft endured technical problems en route and then lost more time as it orbited the Moon, and technicians realized its landing trajectory might take it into rugged terrain in which it would crash. Twice they delayed the landing procedure, and into the gap ew Apollo 11. By the time the Soviet scientists were con dent enough to land Luna 15, Armstrong and Aldrin had been out for their Moonwalk, gathered 22 kilograms of soil and rocks, planted the American ag, spoken with President Richard Nixon in front of a global TV audience estimated at more than 650 million people and were back in the spacecraft. Two hours before Apollo 11 took o from the Moon, Luna 15, now on its fty-second orbit, began to descend. As the dramatic events were unfolding, British scientists at the Jodrell Bank Observatory were listening in to the transmissions from both missions via a radio telescope. Rumours from Moscow suggested Luna 15 might be equipped to land, and on the recordings made at Jodrell you can hear the moment its mission became clear. In a wonderfully British manner one of the scientists exclaims, ‘It’s landing!... I say, this has really been drama of the highest order.’ But it was more crashing than landing. It came in at an angle. Data suggests that when its last transmission came, Luna 15 was about 3 kilometres above the Moon’s surface. It probably crashed into the side of a mountain at about 480 km/h. The crash site was in the Sea of Crises. Shortly afterwards Armstrong and Aldrin took o , leaving behind them a commemorative medallion bearing Gagarin’s name and those of other cosmonauts and astronauts who had lost their lives in the Space Race. Exactly 2,982 days had passed since Kennedy had given the deadline for success. They’d made it there and back with 161 days to spare. The contest was over. The Americans had won, so the Soviets pretended it had been a one-horse race. The USSR, champion of the world’s workers, would never have wasted the people’s money on such a costly, dangerous sideshow, sni ed the Kremlin. Radio Moscow’s message to its Marxist-Leninist allies in countries such as the People’s Republic of Angola, the Republic of Cuba and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was that Apollo 11 was part of ‘the fanatical squandering of wealth looted from the oppressed peoples of the developing world’. Despite evidence to the contrary, the lie was believed in some of the more credulous Western circles and held until 1989 during the Soviet period of glasnost, or openness. Then a team of American aerospace engineers was invited to Moscow’s Aviation Institute and shown the lunar landing craft the Soviets had built to get their cosmonauts to the Moon rst. The New York Times ran a front-page headline: ‘Now, Soviets Acknowledge a Moon Race’. In 1964 it had written, ‘there is still time to call o what has become a one-nation race’. After 1969 the Soviets slowly concluded that coming second wasn’t worth the huge sums of money they were spending. The cosmonaut training programme was scrapped but the rocket engineers were kept on. A lunar landing in the 1970s would only con rm that they had been trying all along, and that their technology was inferior. As Yaroslav Golovanov, a journalist for Pravda, later noted, ‘Secrecy was necessary so that no one would overtake us. But later, when they did overtake us, we had to maintain secrecy so that no one knew that we had been overtaken.’ The Americans went on to complete six crewed missions, landing a total of twelve astronauts on the Moon’s surface. Apollo 17 was the last, leaving on 14 December 1972, and since then no one has been back. The space programme had drained $30 billion from the country’s co ers, the Vietnam War was raging, there were riots in the big cities, and public interest in the landings had waned. The American and Soviet leaders (Nixon and Brezhnev) cut the space budgets, and during a slight thaw in the Cold War the two nations planned a joint mission to dock a Soyuz craft with an Apollo. They came together in 1975 and the two crews exchanged gifts as they visited each other’s spaceships via an airlock not dissimilar to the one Tsiolkovsky had designed at the beginning of the century. Both countries then focused on space shuttles and orbital space stations. And the Moon? It’s still there, of course. Also still there are the three vehicles (Moon buggies) the Americans left behind, as well as tools and television equipment abandoned to make room for the soil and rock samples brought home. One day, perhaps, they will be in a museum on the Moon, along with many of the other objects littering the surface. There are several US ags, and a plaque from the Apollo 11 mission that reads: ‘Here men from the planet Earth rst set foot upon the Moon. July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.’ There are also a hammer and a feather. Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott paid tribute to Galileo’s experiments in the sixteenth century, when the Italian is said to have dropped two objects of di erent weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Scott said Galileo was instrumental to the Moon landings. As he dropped a feather and a hammer onto the lunar surface, a television audience watched as they fell at the same speed. The feather came from Baggin, the Air Force Academy’s mascot falcon. And there are two golf balls. Alan Shepard took the head of a golf club on to the Apollo 14 mission, attached it to one of the tools and hacked his way into history. All these items speak of the romance of space exploration, less so the 100 or so bags of urine and excrement left behind. There may be room for one or two in our future Moon museum, but surely not all. So what, apart from debris, did the Moon landing achieve? There is the geopolitical angle – the Space Race was a major battle in the long decades of the Cold War. The system that delivered the technical prowess and money required to win that battle dealt the other system a psychological blow. It is said the Cold War was won ‘without a shot being red’. Given the number of proxy wars it spawned around the world, that was never true, but another shot, the ‘Moonshot’, played its role. There are also the scienti c achievements the wider Space Race underpinned: advances made by both sides. Computer science, telecommunications, microtechnology and solar power technology were all rapidly boosted via the engineering required to get to the Moon and back. Modern portable water puri cation systems owe their lineage to those invented by NASA. So do the lighter breathing masks used by re ghters around the world, as well as their heat- resistant clothing. Laptop computers, wireless headsets, LED lights and memory-foam mattresses? All can be traced back to the science of the Space Race, some directly. But wireless headsets and breathing masks are mere minor details of history, and even the Cold War will eventually be consigned to an afterthought. It’s estimated that about 110 billion humans have walked on the surface of Earth. Almost all of them will have gazed at the Moon in wonder. But only twelve have walked there. Armstrong setting foot on what Aldrin called a scene of ‘magni cent desolation’ is a moment for the ages. PART 2 RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW CHAPTER 3 THE ERA OF ASTROPOLITICS ‘The rst day or so we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day we were pointing to our continents. By the fth day we were aware of only one Earth.’ Sultan Bin Salman al-Saud, astronaut Space Shuttle Atlantis takes o from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, headed for the International Space Station on 16 November 2009. M ANY OF US STILL THINK OF SPACE AS ‘OUT THERE’ AND ‘in the future’. But it’s here and now – the border into the great beyond is well within our reach. The Space Race was all about getting up and out. Now we’re claiming what’s there. And as more countries become spacefaring nations, history suggests there will be competition and cooperation along the way. That will inevitably mean ‘spheres of in uence’ and even claims on territory as the rivalries, alliances and con icts on Earth spill out into space. Both military and civilian players are already eyeing opportunities from the satellite belt all the way to the Moon and onwards. This is the era of astropolitics. The great geopolitical theorists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan (sea power) and Halford Mackinder (land power), factored in place, distance and supplies when assessing the limits of what a country could and could not achieve, and the impact of this on international relations. Valleys, rivers and mountains create the conditions in which we trade and sometimes ght with each other. ‘Astropolitics’ applies similar principles. Like geopolitics, its basis is in geography. Outer space is not featureless – it has regions of intense radiation to be navigated, oceans of distance to cross, superhighways where a planet’s gravity can accelerate spaceships, strategic corridors in which to place military and commercial equipment, and land rich in natural resources. All this attracts the attention of the big powers, who will try to establish and maintain an advantage. And it raises important questions as countries prepare for the scramble for space. Which strategic locations in space are most useful? Which planets might have water or minerals? What is the density of their atmospheres? Is there a viable planet we could colonize? An understanding of the geography of space is necessary if we are to understand astropolitics. The geography of space begins on Earth, as rst we need to nd a way up. The costs and e ort required have certainly lessened since the Apollo era, but if you want to be a spacefaring nation – or company – you need a serious amount of money and either rocket launch capability or access to a suitable part of the world that is willing to host you. And so we start, literally, on terra rma, with the locations best suited for launching rockets. Think of these as the ports from which vessels set out on voyages. The most functional location for launch is one that takes maximum advantage of Earth’s rotational speed for the quickest entry into space – thus using less fuel – which means somewhere close to the equator where Earth’s rotation is fastest (about 1,669 km/h). Thus the USA uses the Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex in Florida, as close to the equator as its borders allow, where the speed is about 1,440 km/h. The EU has used French Guiana in South America, while Russia uses Kazakhstan. Our planet rotates west to east, and so rockets are launched eastwards to receive an extra boost from Earth’s rotation speed, saving fuel and time. It’s also important that the drop zone for rocket boosters is over mostly uninhabited areas – hence why many launch sites are positioned on eastern coastlines. Ideally a country should also be large enough to have su cient resources in expertise, engineering, technology and rare earth metals so that its space programme needs no vital external support; its population should be engaged in the project and believe strongly in the value of science and technological advancement. In addition, the bigger the country, the more of the sky it can see from its home territory and the easier it is to track satellites and spacecraft – friendly or otherwise. Taking the above into account helps to explain why currently China, the USA and Russia are the dominant powers, developing signi cant military and civilian presence in space. The EU would be able to join them if it took the long-term strategic choice to so do; India, too, has potential. Having found a way o the surface of the planet, now we’re heading up through the clouds and quickly zooming past the typical maximum cruising height for commercial planes – about 12 kilometres. Up another 60 kilometres and we are approaching space, de ned by NASA as beginning 80 kilometres up from sea level – everything below that is Earth. However, the Swiss-based Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, which rati es astronautical records, de nes it as beginning at 100 kilometres. This is the Kármán line, the point at which a craft will start to break free from Earth’s gravity. We’re entering cislunar space – covering the region between Earth and the Moon, 385,000 kilometres away. The term is from the Latin for ‘on this side of the Moon’. When you reach low Earth orbit, from around 160 kilometres to 2,000 kilometres above us, you might catch a glimpse of the International Space Station, which orbits at an average height of 400 kilometres. This area has changed a lot since Sputnik went up, not least the politics. In 1993 a deal was agreed between the American, Russian, European, Japanese and Canadian space agencies to build a space station bridging political and cultural divides. In 1998 the Russians took the rst piece up and two years later there was enough room for occupants to move in. Since then, more than 160 Americans and over fty Russians have shared the living quarters and science labs with dozens of other astronauts, including eleven from Japan, nine from Canada, ve from Italy and four each from France and Germany. Other countries have sent people to contribute to the ongoing scienti c work carried out there: Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, the UK, Israel, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and the UAE. The record number of people present at any one time is thirteen. Mission control centres in Moscow and Houston saw those men and women there and back, usually via a Russian Soyuz capsule. The ISS is a symbol of what can be achieved in space through cooperation. Sadly, it has almost reached the end of its lifespan and is due to be decommissioned in 2031; it will be crashed into a remote part of the Paci c Ocean known as Point Nemo, where it will sleep with the shes. The orbits where satellites operate around Earth (not to scale). But you might miss the ISS, what with all the other tra c hurtling around. Low Earth orbit is an attractive piece of real estate because that’s where most satellites operate. Without satellites, international communication networks and global positioning systems would not exist. Jam, spoof or destroy these satellites and your grocery delivery van can’t nd you, the emergency services are lost, ships drift o course and a major industrialized economy such as the UK loses an estimated £1 billion a day. Their importance to modern life cannot be overstated and their function in the military is now key to modern warfare. Modern satellites come in various shapes and weights, from small ones about the size of a Rubik’s Cube weighing just 1.33 kilograms all the way up to those weighing upwards of 1,000 kilograms, the traditional workhorses of the industry. Most models have solar panels to derive power from the Sun as well as panels to protect the electrics from the intense heat. They all require a communication system, a computer to monitor a range of measurements including altitude and orientation, and a means of propulsion to course-correct if they are drifting out of the required orbit. Satellites arrive in orbit after hitching a ride on a rocket that has been red vertically to punch through the atmosphere as quickly as possible in order to reduce fuel consumption. Most then y west to east, following the direction of Earth’s rotation. Fewer satellites y the north to south polar orbit because the direction of launch means more fuel is required. Those in polar orbit are mostly used for mapping, weather monitoring and reconnaissance, and a complete orbit takes approximately ninety minutes. The satellite observes the globe in segments, as they are both moving in a di erent direction, as if it were a giant pale-blue satsuma. The entire surface can be mapped this way in twenty-four hours. Satellites in the standard west to east orbit take between ninety minutes and two hours to orbit the planet, depending on how far away from Earth they are, spending only a few minutes over a target area on each pass. They tend to work in groups, or constellations, to create a ‘net’ and often communicate with each other, as well as with the ground stations, to create permanent coverage. America’s Global Positioning System (GPS) system uses a minimum of twenty-four satellites distributed equally around the planet to achieve this. Low Earth orbit is the region most commonly used for satellite imaging: being relatively close to Earth’s surface allows clearer pictures. The detail that military-grade satellite cameras can capture, for example, is impressive. A civilian weather satellite might have a resolution of 1 kilometre, which means you can’t see anything smaller than 1 kilometre in size – ne for measuring sea temperatures, not so good for identifying Jason Bourne walking out of a building. Anything above 50 metres is considered low resolution. Modern high-end military satellite resolution is thought to go down as far as 0.15 metres, so now you can identify what brand of sunglasses Bourne is wearing. Commercial sale of this technology is not allowed on security grounds. If a satellite is being used for surveillance, then spotting it, or knowing when it is overhead, is very useful for those who prefer not to be watched. Some can be seen with the naked eye; others require inside knowledge to know their location. Strategically, low Earth orbit is a potential ‘choke point’. We’re familiar with these on Earth, for example the Suez Canal and Strait of Hormuz: places where sea lanes are narrow and can easily be blockaded. It’s not an exact analogy, but it is a useful one. Just as you need to be able to defend your launch sites in order to venture up into space, so you need to ensure you have access to the lines of communication provided by satellites in low Earth orbit, and also be able to move through it on your way out to the ‘ocean’ of the Cosmos. As we continue our journey upwards, we need to avoid loitering in the Van Allen radiation belts – two doughnut-shaped areas extending outwards from Earth for thousands of kilometres containing high-energy particles trapped by Earth’s magnetic eld. Concentrations of radiation vary, but in places they are high enough to fry a spacecraft’s electronics and, over time, break apart the chemical bonds in human body cells. At around 2,000 kilometres up we enter medium Earth orbit, which goes up to about 35,786 kilometres. Satellites here take twelve hours or so to go round the world. Many of them provide positioning and navigation services on Earth. These machines carry atomic clocks that measure time according to vibrations of atoms. They are kept on track by atomic clocks on Earth that are said to be so accurate they wouldn’t gain or lose a second over millions of years. The satellite sends a radio signal (at the speed of light) to a receiver on Earth, including one in your smartphone or car’s sat-nav system. This works out your location as you move about so your car knows where it is and how to get somewhere else. Usually. Onwards and upwards to high Earth orbit, starting with the region of geosynchronous and geostationary orbit, 35,786 kilometres from Earth. The only real di erence between them is that a satellite in geosynchronous orbit can circle the planet at any inclination, while a geostationary satellite always follows the equator. Low Earth orbit is di cult territory for communication satellites because they move so quickly that it’s hard for ground stations to keep track of them, but up here the speed of the satellite matches the speed of the rotation of Earth and so is above the same piece of territory all the time. If you could see one from Earth it would appear stationary. A single machine can see up to 42 per cent of Earth’s surface. Military communication and intercept satellites live here along with TV, radio and some long-range weather satellites. It’s busy, but much less so than low Earth orbit. Due to signal interference there are only so many ‘slots’ there, and limited frequencies on which machines can communicate. The UN’s International Telecommunications Union awards both the positions and frequencies so you can’t just pull up and park there. This is where the Americans hold their six dual-use Advanced Extremely High Frequency Satellites that communicate with their war planes, with the British, Dutch, Australian and Canadian militaries, and with the US nuclear early-warning system. The Russian early-warning Uni ed Satellite Communication System is in the same orbit, and it’s thought that parts of China’s Beidou satellite system have similar capabilities. Further out into high Earth orbit is where many satellites go to die. As a satellite comes to the end of its natural life, on-board thrusters push it out of geosynchronous orbit, deeper into space, to ensure it is not a hazard to others. It’s getting busy above Terra, and is destined to become more so. More than eighty countries have crossed the border and placed satellites in space, taken there by the eleven countries that have (or had) launch capabilities. The biggest players are China, the USA and Russia, with Japan, India, Germany and the UK positioning themselves to be among the front-runners. Also claiming their place in the satellite belt are Tunisia, Ghana, Angola, Bolivia, Peru, Laos, Iraq and dozens of other countries not usually associated with machines orbiting the planet. Many of these satellites are launched by private companies, not just states. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists there are currently well over 8,000 satellites hurtling around Earth, of which about 60 per cent are active, and they are going to be joined by many, many more. There’s plenty of room for hundreds of thousands of them, but with each new one the risks of collision and outright con ict increase. Further out, other key areas for satellites are the Lagrange points. These are ‘car parks’ in space, places where the gravitational pull of two large masses that are orbiting each other is balanced equally between them. This means that a third, smaller body, such as a satellite or spacecraft, can ‘hover’ at the sweet spot to remain in position while using minimal fuel. Alternatively, in the future you could deliver a consignment of raw materials mined from an asteroid, or equipment needed to build a space station, to one of these points and be con dent that it would still be there when you returned. There are ve Lagrange points in each two-body system, for example the Sun and Jupiter, but the ones that concern us are those of Earth and the Sun, and Earth and the Moon. L1 in the Earth/Sun system may be 1.5 million kilometre

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