![Cover of the book From the Earth to Mars.](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/earth_to_mars_graphic_novel_full_ebook_jacket-800x447.jpg)
Multiverse Media Inc.
When did spaceflight begin? There isn’t a single answer.
For newcomers to space, the start of time will be traced to as recently as December 2015. That is when SpaceX landed its Falcon 9 rocket successfully for the primary time, opening the trendy era of rapid, reusable spaceflight. Increasingly, anything that got here before feels anachronistic.
But for those with a bit more perspective, the dawn of spaceflight will be pushed back further back into time, to the 1957 launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite that shocked the world. This small orbiting spacecraft kicked off the frenetic space race that culminated with NASA’s Apollo 11 Moon landing only a dozen years later.
Yet in a brand new book, , space entrepreneur Jeffrey Manber takes us back much further into the murk of history to divine the origins of spaceflight. His story goes back a century and a half, telling the tales of some figures who’re fairly well-known, resembling Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth, and others a bit less so, including Thea von Harbou and Robert Esnault-Pelterie.
It’s difficult to characterize Manber’s book. It’s part graphic novel, with illustrations by Shraya Rajbhandary and cartoon strips by Jay Mazhar, and part essay on the colourful origins and personalities who first conceived of recent rocketry and early attempts to commercialize it. One criticism I actually have is that the book is just evenly edited and will use some tightening. However, the colloquial prose is friendly and familiar. Greater than anything, reading is rather a lot like having a conversation with Manber. And that is a delight because he’s knowledgeable, warm, witty, and entertaining on these subjects.
Woman within the Moon
There are several important themes within the book, which essentially covers the second half of the 1800s and the primary few many years of the 1900s. One is the near total absence—but for some furtive experiments by Robert Goddard—of the USA of America. Space mania in its early many years was most typical in Europe and Russia. One other is the dearth of intervention by governments. Quite, early space activities were undertaken for industrial or entertainment purposes.
Certainly one of my favorite sequences within the book involves German screenwriter and actress Thea von Harbou, who collaborated along with her husband, film director Fritz Lang, on the production of the classic film . In 1929, she authored a book titled , which Lang pitched to studio owners as a possible movie. Von Harbou had been partly inspired to write down after reading the works of Hermann Oberth and Willy Ley, each of whom had written popular spaceflight books.
So as to add to the spectacle of the movie, during which a scientist flies to the Moon to assert deposits of gold in its interior, Lang desired to film an actual rocket launch. Alas, he only gave Oberth to develop the rocket, and predictably, a rocket was not forthcoming in such a brief time period. But Oberth ensured that what was shown on the screen reflected reality to at the very least some extent.
![A page from From Earth to Mars depicting the origin of a rocket launch countdown.](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/fetm-980x648.jpg)
Multiverse Media, Inc.
“The Friede rocket had multiple stages, a liquid-fueled engine system and realistic calculations on escape velocity were displayed on the screen,” Manber writes. “Other cinema details that may prove prophetic included providing the crew with straps on the ground to carry them upright in the course of the zero-gravity space voyage, and most consequently, the movie invented the dramatic countdown resulting in a launch of an area vehicle. That is right, there isn’t a engineering reason for a countdown. It was employed for dramatic effect!”
Governments take over
There are loads of moments like this within the book, where we are able to see the seeds of recent spaceflight being planted a century ago.
That is history with enthusiasm and attitude. For instance, Manber argues that governments sidetracked what was a really happily developing industrial space industry within the Nineteen Thirties. This happened, after all, since the German government—and others—realized that suborbital rockets would make for good weapons to be dropped on foreign adversaries.
This launched the start of V-2 rocket development within the Nineteen Thirties and ultimately led to the bombing of Britain during World War II, the event of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, and ultimately Sputnik and the space race of the Nineteen Sixties. It’s interesting to ponder what course history might need taken had wartime needs not interceded with the private space mania nearly a century ago.
Manber’s book is subtitled “Before the Governments were Involved.” The second book within the series, he says, will tackle Russian rocket builders. I sit up for it.