Science Friday: “An introduction to outer space”
SpaceLaw Probe links up to an amazing document from the Eisenhower administration: An Introduction To Outer Space. This 16-page phamplet describes launch vehicles, orbital mechanics, engineering challenges of operating in space, scientific, economic, and intelligence (as in spying) opportunities, and discusses the risks of space militarization. It is as clear and relevant today as it was in 1958 – worth reading even if you only want to see a sparkling example of science writing for the public.
Here’s a brief sample that especially caught my attention:
…Other instruments in the satellites will measure for the first time how much solar energy is falling upon the earth’s atmosphere and how much is reflected and radiated back into space by clouds, oceans, the continents, and by the great polar ice fields.
It is not generally appreciated that the earth has to send back into space, over the long run, exactly as much heat energy as it receives from the sun. If this were not so the earth would either heat up or cool off. But there is an excess of income over outgo in the tropical regions, and an excess of outgo over income in the polar regions. This imbalance has to be continuously rectified by the activity of the earth’s atmosphere which we call weather.
By looking at the atmosphere from the outside, satellites will provide the first real accounting of the energy imbalances, and their consequent tensions, all around the globe. With the insight gained from such studies, meterologists hope they may improve long-range forecasting of world weather trends.
(We have constructed such a satellite; it is called the Deep Space Climate Observatory. But it is sitting in a box in a warehouse outside Washington, DC., where it has a poor view of the Earth’s atmosphere. That’s a pretty interesting story in itself.)
The historical context of the publication is important; it was released only 6 months after the Soviets launched Sputnik. Imagine the president calling in his Science Advisory Committee. What a meeting that must have been! And one year after Sputnik, Congress passed the Space Act, which created NASA and took other actions as well.
From the list in the back of the document, Eisenhower had some really heavy hitters on the Committee. It is notable that they were listed in alphabetical order, not by ego size. (As a bit of historitrivia, my father briefly worked for one of them, Dr. Edwin H. Land, testing a revolutionary instant photography technology. He said when Land and Adams got to talking photochemistry, nobody else could keep up.)
There’s a lot more – it is difficult to do it justice in this brief summary. Eisenhower said:
…This is not science fiction. This is a sober, realistic presentation prepared by leading scientists. I have found this statement so informative and interesting that I wish to share it with all the people of America and indeed with all the people of the earth. I hope that it can be widely disseminated by all news media…
And blogs, Ike. Don’t forget the blogs… ;-P