‘In novels and short stories people started speculating a long time ago about how we could travel to the stars, but it was the Russians who first managed to fire an artificial heavenly body into near-Earth orbit. On 4 October 1957 at 22.29 hours and 34 seconds they fired an aluminium sphere into orbit, just over 84 kilos in weight and with four antennae that broadcast a series of now legendary beeps as a radio signal on 15 and 7.5 metre wavelengths, all across the world: Sputnik 1 took the world’s breath away!’
Over the next few minutes the imaginary spaceship turned once again into a time machine, as new objects were constantly fired into space. The dogs Strelka and Belka barked cheerfully on board Sputnik 4. Alexei Leonov ventured out of his capsule and floated like an astral baby on his umbilical cord through space. They met Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, the first woman in space, they saw Neil Armstrong leaving his boot-prints in the Moon’s dust on 20 July 1969, and all kinds of space stations circling the Earth. Space Shuttles and Soyuz capsules carried goods and crews to the ISS, China started its first moon probe. A new international space race began, the Space Shuttle was mothballed, Russia revived its Soyuz programme, Ares rockets now headed for the endless construction site that was ISS, the spaceship Orion brought people to the Moon again, the European Space Agency immersed itself in preparations for a flight to Mars, China started to build a space station of its own, almost everyone fantasised about the colonisation of space, via Moon landings, flights to Mars and ventures into galaxies to which no man had ever boldly gone, as a science-fiction series of the early years had so nicely put it.
‘But all these plans,’ Julian explained, ‘shared the problem that spaceships and space stations couldn’t be built the way they ideally should have been built. Which was down to two unavoidable physical givens: air resistance – and gravitation.’
Now Rocky Rocket made his grand entrance again, balancing on a stylised globe, with a distant, friendly lunar face hanging over it. The satellite, unambiguously female, with crater acne but pretty nonetheless, winked at Rocky and flirted so brazenly with the little rocket that he sent sparks into ether from his pointed tip. Tim slipped deeper into his seat and leaned over to Julian.
‘Very child-friendly,’ he teased quietly.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘The whole thing’s a bit phallic. I mean, the Moon is female, so Miss Luna wants to be fucked. Or what?’
‘Rockets are phallic,’ Julian complained. ‘What should we have done in your view? Make the Moon masculine? Would you rather have had a gay Moon? I wouldn’t.’
‘I don’t mean that.’
‘I don’t want a gay Moon. No one wants a gay Moon. Or a gay spaceship with a glowing arse. Forget it.’
‘I didn’t say I didn’t like it. I just—’
‘You’re a born sceptic.’
Arguing for argument’s sake. Tim wondered how they would survive the next two weeks together. Meanwhile Rocky Rocket packed everything a rocket might need into his suitcase, cleanly folded a few astronauts in there too, stuffed the case into his belly, and then, blowing kisses, fired off a cute little stream of fire and leapt into the air. Immediately the Earth’s surface threw out a dozen extendable arms and pulled him back down again. Rocky, extremely puzzled, tried again, but escaping the planet seemed impossible. High above him, the randy Moon fell into a mild depression.
‘If someone jumps in the air, it is one hundred per cent certain that he will fall back to the ground,’ screen-Julian explained. ‘Matter exerts gravity. The more mass a body contains, the greater is its field of gravity, with which it pulls smaller objects to it.’
Sir Isaac Newton appeared dozing under a tree, until an apple fell on his head and he leapt up with a knowing expression: ‘This is exactly,’ he said, ‘how the heavenly mechanics of all bodies works. Because I am bigger than the apple, you would imagine that the fruit would succumb to my very personal physicality. And in fact I do exert modest forces of gravity. But compared with the mass of the planet, I play a subordinate role for the apple, which is ripe for gravitational behaviour. In fact this tiny apple has no chance against Earth’s gravity. The more power I summon up in my attempt to throw it back up in the air, the higher it will climb, but however hard I try, it will inevitably fall back to the ground.’ As if to prove his remarks, Sir Isaac tried his hand at apple-throwing and wiped the sweat from his brow. ‘You see, the Earth pulls the apple right back down again. So how much energy would be required to sling it straight into space?’
‘Thank you, Sir Isaac,’ Julian said affably. ‘That’s exactly what’s at issue. If we consider the Earth as a whole, a rocket is not much different from an apple, even though rockets are, of course, bigger than apples. In other words, it takes a massive amount of energy for it to be able to launch at all. And additional energy to balance out the second force that slows it as it climbs: our atmosphere.’
Rocky Rocket, exhausted by his efforts to reach his celestial beloved, walked over to an enormous cylinder marked Fuel and drank it down, whereupon he swelled up suddenly and his eyes burst from their sockets. By now, however, he was finally in a position to produce such a massive explosion of flame that he took off and became smaller and smaller until at last he could no longer be seen.
Julian wrote up a calculation. ‘Leaving aside the fact that the size of the fuel tank required for interstellar spaceships becomes a problem after a certain point, in the twentieth century each new launch cost a phenomenal sum of money. Energy is expensive. In fact, the amount of energy required to accelerate a single kilogram to flight velocity sufficient to escape the Earth’s gravity was on average fifty thousand US dollars. Just one kilogram! But the fully crewed Apollo 11 rocket with Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins on board weighed almost three thousand tonnes! So anything you installed on the ship, anything you took with you made the costs – astronomical. Making spaceships safe enough against meteorites, space junk and cosmic radiation looked like a wild fantasy. How could you ever get the heavy armour up there, when every sip of drinking water, every centimetre of leg-room was already far too expensive? It was all well and good sharing a sardine-tin for a few days, but who wanted to fly to Mars in such conditions? The fact that more and more people were questioning the point of this ruinous endeavour, while the bulk of the world’s population was living on less than a dollar a day, was another exacerbating factor. Given all these considerations, plans such as the settlement and economic exploitation of the Moon or flights to other planets seemed an impossible dream.’ Julian paused. ‘When in fact the solution had been sitting on the table all the time! In the form of an essay written by a Russian physicist called Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1895, sixty-two years before the launch of Sputnik 1.’
An old man, with cobweb hair, a fuzzy beard and metal-rimmed glasses, stepped onto the virtual stage with all the grace of an ancient Cossack. As he spoke, a bizarre grid construction rose up on the Earth’s surface.
‘What I had in mind was a tower,’ Tsiolkovsky told the audience, hands bobbing. ‘Like the Eiffel Tower, but much, much higher. It was to reach all the way to space, a colossal lift-shaft, with a cable hung from the top end that was to reach all the way to the Earth. With such a device, it seemed to me, it would surely be possible to put objects into a stable terrestrial orbit without the need for noisy, stinky, bulky and expensive rockets. During the ascent, these objects, the further they go from the Earth’s gravity, would be tangentially accelerated until their energy and velocity are sufficient to remain at their destination, at an altitude of 35,786 kilometres, in perpetuity.’