Pioneering Space
Oberg, James E. & Oberg, Alcestis R .
PIONEERING SPACE: LIVING ON THE NEXT FRONTIER James E. Oberg and Alcestis R. Oberg/McGraw-Hill/$16.95 Reid Buckley Space is a forbidding environment; but it is being irreversibly invaded. Before...
...There are no recalls out there...
...The four points of the compass no longer pro-vide co-ordinates for the navigator...
...All around was perfect silence, no sense of the speed of flight...
...Each of the Soviet Venus robot landers carried dual television cameras . . . and a long, hinged arm that was to drive a spike into the Venusian dirt...
...Circadian order is distressed, as low orbiting astronauts witness sunrises and sunsets every ninety minutes or so...
...Man's inherent appetite for adventuring into the knowable unknown guarantees the early resumption of our shuttle program, the building of ever more platforms and laboratories, and one day the severing by our descendents of the solar system's umbilical cord...
...We talk about minorities...
...After a voyage of many months and many tens of millions of miles, the . . . Venusian robot succeeded in deter-mining the hardness of earthborn titanium...
...Zeitgebers, the physical, physiological, and social measures of time, are torn to pieces in space...
...All around was the dense blackness of the space night...
...Provincial allegiances tend to erode as month after month spacefarers gaze down upon Mother Earth...
...Sustaining life in space is a major challenge: the forms of death that threaten at all times are dreadful to contemplate...
...Finally, there remain throw-weighty matters for future panelists to mull: "Will Star Wars, as Reagan says, change the course of human history byrendering nuclear weapons obsolete...
...This book is comprehensive...
...They are doing magnificently well...
...Jimmy Carter "foundered on economic shoals" (poor fella), but even then, "hardly anyone figured that the disillusionment was so deep that it would catapult Ronald Wilson Reagan into such a surprisingly easy conquest . . ." Well, not anyone on "Washington Week in Review," anyway: Four days before the 1980 election, staring into some of the same poll data that were turning Pat Caddell's beard half gray, half of the show's panelists even picked Carter to win...
...Seizures and convulsions...
...Solar flares can inflict lethal doses of radiation...
...This is how the guy must feel when he wakes up from anesthesia and discovers they've amputated his legs,' he agonized to himself...
...After Jack Nelson of the Los Angeles Times sounds his usual sour note, Haynes retreats, acknowledging that "the poor and the dispossessed feel out of American society all the more...
...But as luck or fate would have it . . . the [spike] descended . . . right onto the discarded lens cover...
...These small metal disks sank to the ground within the camera's field of view...
...A new language appropriate to spaceflight is already developing, whose connotations are in-comprehensible to earthlings...
...They will mine raw materials for use on Earth, or for the purpose of creating habitable environments on moons and other planets .. . These are rich lodes...
...Skylabs and the impressive new Soviet Mir space station are realities of the present...
...In an hour and a half," says cosmonaut Aleksandr Aleksandrov, "we travel right around the world, and time is compressed so that the minutes can cover a year...
...Reagan was in, look out...
...paralleled since New Deal days...
...I will admit to some surprise about the contribution from Washington Post correspondent Haynes Johnson...
...For nearly twenty years, this show has put a moderator and four Washing-ton correspondents in a room and experimented with some independent variables, the week's Big Stories in Town...
...The station hatch shone like an open door in a house in the countryside...
...And, of course, he also comments on Reagan the performer...
...The dependent variable has in-variably been a dose of conventional wisdom...
...Down, down swung the instrumental head, carrying the years of hopes of a large team of scientists and engineers...
...Syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer is the most pleasant breeze to blow through this program, probably because her international travels take her the farthest away from Washington...
...We're beginning to learn that there are relative answers, and I think maybe that what we're seeing under President Reagan is that a lot of Americans are thinkTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 39...
...What is North, what East...
...There is low comedy in the discussion of space toilets...
...but the ever-recurring theme that provokes the imagination most is predictions of a race of descendents who will inevitably become alienated: who will be changed in physical appearance and radically in their mindset...
...Gastrointestinal collapse...
...What makes for compatible personalities on long voyages in cramped quarters...
...there is high comedy in the contemplation of the effect of weightlessness on romance...
...Space travelers experience a pro-found disorientation...
...There is no such thing as "night," or "day," nor are the seasons perceivable as hot or cold...
...First the cameras were switched on, and their protective covers were jettisoned...
...The first thirty pages of Washington Week: The Book consist mainly of present and former hosts of the show patting all concerned with the production on the back...
...In Pioneering Space, James and Alcestis Oberg make extensive use of the diaries of Russian cosmonauts, who are, of course, the recordholders for spinning around the globe (237 days...
...Yet his overview here of the shift in political attitudes during the last generation is sufficiently cheery that Paul Duke opens the discussion section with "Haynes, you seem to come down on the side of optimism in the country...
...Thought patterns are bound to diverge, the Obergs argue...
...There is the view of Earth as, until now, only God the Creator has seen it, of an unsurpassable beauty...
...It would take a few days for the water in the body to escape through the skin via evaporation...
...Even there, you get more than a taste of that all-toofamiliar Beltway outlook...
...Every revolution needs its Robespierrists, and as Mr...
...Which is to say: aspiring to create chemically and mechanically a self-sustaining life support system that will permit the ultimate adventure, when the future SS Enterprise slips her galactic moorings...
...No old capital hand's account of the Reagan era would be complete without the chestnut about the 1980 victory reflecting a nostalgic longing for a simpler past when America reigned supreme, and Mr...
...Paul Duke, moderator since 1974, retraces the ebb and flow of Washington political tides, from "the bright dreams evoked by John Kennedy's Camelot" to Gerald Ford's inability to "dispel the crisis in confidence" that gripped the republic after the awful Nixon...
...That's too much...
...In each, an essay by a regular panelist precedes a discussion that simulates the weekly gab...
...Republican" Bob Taft, who fought the good fight and lost like he was supposed to, would look askance at "the zealous brand of partisanship practiced by these latter-day conservative apostles...
...The viewer is advised to pro-vide his own stimuli...
...Ethics are almost certain to undergo drastic revision respecting matters as fundamental as the sanctity of life...
...and then—ah, then: beyond...
...One redeeming aspect of Mac-Neil/Lehrer's expansion to one hour a night on PBS is that it's knocked "Washington Week in Review" off the Friday prime-time schedule in New York...
...The body would thus be dried, mummified . . . it would not decay...
...A break-down in the air revitalization system would bring about carbon dioxide narcosis, an atrociously painful way to die...
...at such time when generations have succeeded each other on the edges of the universe itself, planetary allegiance will have dissolved...
...Some blood vessels would break, causing bruises here and there...
...Then the arm, stowed in the straight-up position, was released...
...Some "spacers" may come to abhor Earth, where gravity inhibits the least movement...
...Robot partners are being developed to per-form dull and dangerous chores...
...These populations will not only grow more and more different...
...So this is not a collection of excerpts from the show...
...I'm going to feel crippled the rest of my life!' " The gates have been flung wide...
...we may suspect they hypothesize its demise...
...As he did, he floated free in the shuttle middeck, as disembodied as the notes he played...
...The explosion of the Challenger was caused by something as frivolous as a gasket made brittle by in-tense cold...
...Don Lind, one of the scientists . . . recalls the lance of agony [that the thought of forever resuming gravity's burden] shot through his soul...
...Mechanical failures will always plague the conquest of space, their consequences appalling...
...He would go for broke," Paul Duke writes...
...Ah, now we're back on track...
...Contrary to popular belief, the person's unprotected body would not explode, because the skin is fairly tough...
...Whether for good or ill, the President succeeded in unleashing a stunning tide of social, economic, and governmental change unTim W Ferguson is editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal...
...The old showman Ron really knows how to draw a crowd...
...astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts will have increasingly much in common...
...Even "Mr...
...Duke comes through with pretty much those words exactly...
...The silence is striking...
...In .. . political and economic disputes, huge populations on Mars, the asteroids, the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, and all the stopping stations in between will not take their marching orders from the beautiful but by then politically in-significant third planet of the Solar System...
...The very old, the chronically ill, the permanently disabled, and infants born sickly or deformed may not be tolerated...
...The technical obstacles are mean-time boggling...
...Or will it [you can almost hear Mr...
...Then unimaginably, frighteningly, compellingly beyond, even unto such magnitudes of distance that ties between the voyagers and Mother Earth become practically severed, children are born in galactic time, and the new breed of human being, the permanent dweller in space, feels only a vestigial romantic loyalty to the planet of his ancestors...
...In this universe of no bearings, the reference frame has to become anthropocentric . . ." In that weightless world the mind has a tendency to float off...
...Hemorrhage...
...Reid Buckley is a novelist...
...Are we talking about the Vietnamese minority...
...A person inadvertently exposed to the vacuum of the voidwould die almost instantly of "hypoxia"--from lack of oxygen: After death, the body's water would seek to evaporate because of the absence of atmospheric pressure, causing the skin to blister all over...
...Duke informs us, "new, more ideologically committed players are running the old town...
...How is decompression accomplished when travelers in whom weightlessness has degraded muscle and bone and the arteriovascular system return to earth...
...It wouldn't even shrink much because the skeletal structure would still be intact...
...You're reading fresh material (in one sense...
...They must be able to reclaim, reconstitute, or create their own air and water—to which end such devices as the EDC (Electrochemical Depolarized CO, Concentrator) Module have been invented...
...We've sifted down now to a point where it's cultural values that count in this society...
...Just as the group is beginning to brood, she comes through with this: What Americans have not understood before is that each answer to problems causes new problems, which is what civil rights did...
...After these preliminaries, the book is broken down into topical sections...
...If the heaters fail, crews will instantly freeze solid...
...His columns for that newspaper give fuller vent to left-liberalism than most reporters are permitted in their workaday roles...
...We will find each other strange...
...The garden has to be compacted somehow, and it will have to be en-closed in its own module, attached to the space station, where plant transpiration can take place at an efficient rate...
...The universe is no longer heliocentric to the mind, or geocentric to the senses...
...If death took place as the result of a rip in the spacesuit, the "dying process" might take as long as fifteen seconds...
...Some will be designed to reproduce them38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 BEYOND REAGAN: THE POLITICS OF UPHEAVAL Edited by Paul.Duke, and including essays and discussion by the panelists of "Washington Week in Review" Warner Books/$9.95 paper Tim W. Ferguson selves, in the process of which they will develop human-like affinities...
...Before long, it will be peopled...
...Space gardens are being grown, and they will be the staff of permanent space station life, but what complex technological knots have yet to be puzzled out...
...At 0620 we went into shade...
...The future, however, may be as sorrowful to contemplate as it is exhilarating and exciting...
...If that...
...Release from the grip of gravity is the ultimate seduction...
...There is a poignant and beautiful recollection by one of his comrades of doomed astronaut Ronald McNair carefully assembling his saxophone: "He began a fine, very skilled, very sensitive jazz solo...
...Man must do what man was created to do: explore, conquer, and populate the cosmos...
...One passage by Valentin Lebedev vividly describes the strangeness of braving the threshold of the void: My first feeling on opening the hatch was a huge Earth and a real sense of the unreality of everything that was happening...
...But once Mr...
...The spectacle had all the trappings of a public hanging," it is said...
...Duke's voice drop a few octaves] mark the final stepping stone to an ever-closer Armageddon...
...Accelerometers on the head of the spike would provide valuable geological measurements of the consistency of the soil...
...Bassett Maguire, of the University of Texas, estimates that four to seven hundred pounds of water each day has to be passed through the biomass dedicated to the feeding of each human being, and it is calculated that 5,600 cubic feet of hothouse will be required per person...
...You won't find mention of that in the book, by the way...
...Crews must be sup-plied with renewable life support systems, with oxygen at just the right pressure and kept uncontaminated by dangerous gases, such as the carbon dioxide people exhale...
...Imagine a world free of mosquitoes, gnats and cockroaches, and then imagine coming back to Earth where those intrepid little vectors of filth and disease thrive...
...No wind whistles in your ears, nothing weighs on you...
...There are, however, the unmatchable compensations...
...After the effortless agility of weightlessness," write the Obergs, "--the fulfillment of the universal human dream of flying—the returning astronauts felt increasingly oppressed by the gradually mounting sensation of weight on their arms, legs, chest, neck...
...It is wizardry, but not fun...
...Despite the horrendous immolation of Challenger, the shuttle program will be resumed, and one day not long off shuttles will link redoubt to redoubt, from low-orbiting geosynchronous platforms to the giant base of our moon, thence to Mars, and from Mars to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn...
...Lest you conclude that unoriginal thinking is on the run, however, here comes the book version of television's bad dinner party, available in paperback at all hours...
...The authors cover almost every aspect of existence in space yet never once mention religion...
...The station is frozen in space like a block...
...The longer people stay up in space the more likely are they to respond to different rhythms, which has a psychologically distancing effect...
...Call the Post ombudsman...
...The air will be humid and foul-smelling to the Moon native...
...Murphy's law is dramatically described by the Obergs in a less tragic connection: In full view of the controllers sixty million miles away, the debacle unfolded...
...Scientists are engaged in nothing less than inventing a microhabitat of the perpetually renewable character of Earth's megahabitat...
...In case anyone a traffic light away from 3rd and In-dependence has forgotten or never bothered to notice, there is a page and a half of transcript from the press session at which Margaret Heckler was ushered out as head of the health and welfare bureaucracy and sent to Dublin to deal with yet another basket case...
...Thank goodness the fair-minded Tip O'Neill has been around to keep things honest...
...The happy-go-lucky phrase, feeling full of "piss and vinegar," acquires a certain mordancy as all liquids, unsparingly, are recycled...
...Before long," declare the Obergs, "populations who live off Earth will have to develop their own codes of justice, their own laws, their own courts, and their own punishments...
...There is no "up," there's no "down...
Vol. 19 • July 1986 • No. 7
