Escaping the Bonds of Earth

Overshadowed by the dark events of Vietnam, civil rights, the Kennedy and King murders, the Bay of Pigs and a close shave with nuclear holocaust, the Sixties will hopefully also be remembered by history as the decade in which humanity first ventured into the heavens. Men and a woman left Earth’s atmosphere, spacewalked hundreds of kilometres above their home planet, rendezvoused and docked their ships together and travelled to the Moon for the first time. These triumphs, however, were tempered by tragedy: three astronauts asphyxiated in a launch pad fire, then a cosmonaut killed during his ill-fated descent to Earth. Still, by the end of the decade, both the United States and the Soviet Union had firmly established their presence in space. The excitement and euphoria which these years inspired were felt not just in America and Russia, but throughout the world. By the time Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders circled the Moon on Christmas Eve 1968, it is said that no fewer than a billion people back home were watching or listening.

This book explores the history of humanity’s early exploration of space, beginning with the pioneering flight by Yuri Gagarin and ending with Apollo 8’s circumnavigation of the Moon. It will, I hope, form the basis of a series to commemorate the first half-century of human exploration in space. By the time of that momentous anniversary in 2011, perhaps, the ongoing drive towards private spaceflight and ‘space tourism’ will begin to make human journeys into the heavens so commonplace that it will be impossible to catalogue them all! It is my most fervent wish that a further volume – covering the decade from 2011 – will be impossible to write, because men and women will be in space so often and human spaceflight will have changed from the realm of the few and the privileged to the realm of the many.

My intention in writing this volume was to convey some of my own enthusiasm for what was one of the most remarkable decades in human history. Born in 1976, sadly, I missed it all, and still await the chance to see my first manned lunar landing. Still, I have attempted to introduce the reader to some of the problems faced in the early days: from the basic questions of whether men could breathe, eat and avoid going mad in space, to more complex issues of the kinds of fuels and atmospheres to be used in rockets and spacecraft and the techniques needed to accomplish orbital rendezvous, docking and reaching the Moon. Many of the techniques pioneered by the trailblazing heroes of the Sixties continue to be used today by Shuttle and

International Space Station crews and close parallels can be drawn between Apollo lunar mission design and plans for the United States’ proposed return to the Moon in 2020. However, in my mind, at least, the real achievement of that handful of early astronauts and cosmonauts is that they drew our attention away from petty problems on Earth and refocused it once more on the excitement of exploration, the thrill of discovery and the conquest of new frontiers. That legacy, that passion for adventure and that yearning to stretch our horizons, will surely drive the next generation of space explorers and inspire our next 50 years in space.

Ben Evans

Atherstone, February 2009