Space Exploration (1956-1981)
"[She] had bought A-794 [...] with the acquiescence of the various North American governments concerned on two worlds, for the sum of one Confed dollar. She had also bought another half-dozen obsolete weather and communications satellites, including one that had an antenna permanently tuned to the frequencies on which the Grand Tour probes launched two decades before -- European, American, Brazilian, Japanese -- cried out softly as their radioisotope generators slowly died down."
The so-called "space race" of the mid-20th century was an interesting episode of Tripartite Alliance Earth's history, marking both the technological apex of this world's indigenous technologies and the moral ignorance that contributed to this world's later devastation. In the space of a generation all those states that possessed the technological and economic wherewithal required to support ambitious programs of space exploration did so, mapping almost the entire Solar System before the end of this, the "Golden Age" of space exploration.
Beginning in the 1920's, various military powers conducted intensive research into the construction of missiles -- long-range suborbital rockets consuming either solid or liquid fuel that carried warheads of one kind or another -- and their use for military purposes. Only in the Second World War were these missiles used on any scale, as Greater Germany deployed missiles as an integral element of battle strategies against both the Soviet Union and the League of Nations. After Greater Germany was destroyed, the legacies of this ambitious and deadly military program were absorbed worldwide.
In a relatively short period of time, these disparate research programs achieved startling results. The League of Nations' programs -- particularly the French and Brazilian programs, and increasingly the British and Japanese programs -- produced the most immediate results thanks to their superior base on Greater German technologies. The missile programs of the Soviet Union and the United States were handicapped by their isolation from the wider scientific community but nonetheless made significant progress. One significant technical innovation was the replacement in the 1950's of the older solid-propellant rockets with reliable and efficient liquid-propellant rockets. Later in the decade, researchers in the French, American, and Soviet missile programs also began to study the development of multi-stage missiles, that is, missiles that contained multiple separate "stages," each with its own rocket engine and supply of fuel, each detaching from the warhead once the fuel supply was exhausted. The net effect of these technological innovations was to produce missiles that could launch reliably, travel for hundreds if not thousands of kilometers, and precisely deliver even large warheads to their targets. However, these missiles could also be modified to launch objects -- artificial satellites -- into stable orbits around the Earth.
As early as the belle époque, such visionaries as the French Verne and the Russian Tsiolkovsky had suggested that one day, human beings and their machines might travel in space, exploring the cosmos and spreading human life across the Solar System. Indeed, in the early 20th century some astronomers suggested that not only did life exist on the planet Mars, but that Mars was home to an indigenous intelligent species. These astronomers were eventually proven to be mistaken, but their intriguing suggestions introduced the idea of space exploration to a wider audience. It was only in the mid-1950's, with the development of the prerequisite technologies (powerful ballistic missiles, reliable radio communications, and durable and efficient informatics) for space exploration that the dreams of Verne and Tsiolkovsky became realistic possibilities. Furthermore, many governments soon came to recognize the incredible prestige that could accrue to them if they could successfully launch an object into a stable Earth orbit; not only could an artificial satellite serve simple scientific purposes, but it could symbolize their country's general superiority. Accordingly, an undeclared competition to launch the first artificial satellite in orbit began as early as 1953.
France won this competition on the 7th of September, 1956, when a converted French missile launched east over the Atlantic from the Belém Missile Range in French Guyana successfully deployed the artificial satellite F-1 in an elliptical low earth orbit. F-1 was an aluminum sphere only a half-metre in diameter and weighing barely 70 kilograms, but for 19 days as it orbited the Earth on-board instruments radioed to Belém data concerning cosmic rays, meteoroids, and the upper atmosphere. This spectacular French success inspired other countries -- some within the League, some not -- to launch their own artificial satellites: Brazil in 1957, the Soviet Union and the United States in 1958, and the United Kingdom and Japan in 1960. These half-dozen powers, then, as a byproduct of the development of long-range ballistic missiles, managed to haltingly begin the exploration of space.
The "space race" was given an additional impetus on the 7th of October in 1961, when a rocket lifted off from the United States' Isle of Pines facility off Cuba's southwestern coastline, carrying with it cosmonaut Alan Williams. The shock of Williams' successful 28 orbits around the Earth and subsequent landing in the Pacific Ocean just to the west of Pearl Harbour was matched by the announcement of United States President S. Leonard Bell that within ten years, the United States would successfully land cosmonauts on the Moon and return them safely to Earth. This statement amounted to little more than a challenge to the other spacefaring powers to try to match -- or even to beat -- this spectacular American effort.
Over the 1960's, the space race intensified greatly. In 1962, the French, British, and assorted European space efforts were merged to form the Agence Spatiale Européen (ASE), a unified European space effort under the supervision of the European Confederation that drew on the talent and wealth of all Europe. Other countries matched the large European expenditures simply by diverting more funds per capita; in the mid-1960's, the Brazilian, Japanese, and United States space programs regularly consumed between 3% and 4% of each country's total annual economic output, while the Siberian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (following the end of the Soviet Civil War home to most of the Soviet Union's launch sites and space-related professionals) is estimated to have devoted some 8% of the Soviet Union's annual economic output from 1966 to its space program. As time passed, boosters were made more powerful, cosmonaut crews made larger, technologies tested successively more ambitious tasks (extra-vehicular activity, prolonged periods in space) were achieved. The spacefaring powers inside the League of Nations engaged in some mutual collaboration on difficult technical problems. All the spacefaring powers shared the data gathered by the each power's lunar fly-by probes, orbiters, and landers. These instances of cooperation aside, the space race was fiercely competitive.
In 1971, Europe won the race to the Moon when on the 19th of June a second-series Hermès rocket lifted off from the ASE launching platforms in Belém, Guyana. Four days later, as television audiences worldwide watched in awe, the famous cosmonaut pair of François-Marie Lavaillot and Emil Constantinescu disembarked from the Luna-2 landing module and engaged in a simple survey of the landing site before lifting off to rendezvous with their supply ship and to return to the Earth. Japan was the the next spacefaring power to land a teams of cosmonauts on the Moon, arriving just two weeks before the second European moon mission in February of 1972. Brazil's moon landing of 17 June 1972 inspired an outpouring of national pride in that emerging new Great Power, as did the belated moon landings of the Soviet Union and the United States (the Americans landing cosmonaut Michael Collins) and the third European moon landing in 1973.
Despite the immense public-relations successes of the Moon landings, the spacefaring powers soon became dissatisfied with the programs of manned lunar exploration. Although the manned landings did manage to demonstrate each spacefaring powers' technological prowess and did collect valuable scientific data on the Moon's material composition and the early history of the Solar System, these purely scientific landings were too expensive. Over the 1970's Siberia and the United States turned their substantial space infrastructures over to the construction of networks of orbital weaponries (including space stations supposed to serve as manned weapons platforms) designed to enhance their deteriorating power on the Earth. More, between 1973 and 1980 23 teams of American cosmonauts and 17 teams of Siberian cosmonauts landed on the Moon, where American and Siberian military outposts (known, respectively, as Washington and Lunagrad) were built on the lunar surface. This militarization of space would eventually play a major role in the Third World War.
Beginning in the mid-1970's, though, the League spacefaring powers and the United States embarked on a substantial program of unmanned exploration of the Solar System, using robotic probes. During the 1960's, Europe, Japan, and the United States had launched simple fly-by space probes to other planets in the Solar System. The images sent back by the Japanese M-1 probe to Mars in 1966, for instance, decisively demolished the hopeful beliefs of Earth-bound astronomers that Mars might yet be home to a simple biosphere, while the American Mariner 5 and Mariner 6 space probes revealed that Venus -- once thought to be a lush jungle world -- was in fact enveloped by a superheated and dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide. By 1970, these simple probes had managed to chart the atmospheres and surface features of the planets of Mars, Mercury, and Venus to a high degree of accuracy.
In the 1970's, rapid advances in long-range radio communications and informatics made possible the construction of far more sophisticated space probes. This new generation of space probes -- Europe's Explorateur series, Brazil's PLD series, the American Lewis and Clark probes, and Japan's single Meisuko Orbiter -- could theoretically work as autonomous agents entire light-hours from Earth, imaging each of their preassigned targets and transmitting these images back to earth as television pictures with only a minimum of intervention from Earth-based controllers. Power concerns were no problem, though the weak sunlight of the outer Solar System could not generate enough electricity with even the most efficient solar panel arrays; this new generation of space probes was powered by radioisotope generators, which harnessed the heat produced by the decay of radioactive elements to provide more than enough power.
The first of the long-range probes were launched in 1972, when the Explorateur-2 was sent to Mars and the PLD-1 set forth on its long voyage through space to Jupiter and then into the depths of interstellar space. (Explorateur-1 was destroyed when its first-series Hermès booster exploded upon launch.) Explorateur-2 arrived in Mars orbit at the end of the year, and to the amazement of planetary scientists the world over began radioing back high-resolution images of Mars' surface that revealed that though that world might be lifeless, the Martian surface was still being actively reshaped by natural forces.
As plans were made by ASE to dispatch two more Explorateurs to Mars in 1974, Brazil prepared to launch the PLD-2 for December of 1974. The PLD-2 was to be sent on a different course than its sister ship the PLD-1, visiting Jupiter and then Saturn. Although the two probes would be the first spacecraft to ever visit a world beyond the orbit of Mars and would provide valuable information on the two largest planets in the Solar System (and their moons); they also played an important role by gathering navigational data for the future "Grand Tour" probes. In the 1960's, a team of German scientists who had been calculating planetary orbits in the near future noticed that in the 1970's and 1980's, all five planets in the outer Solar System would be aligned on the same side of the Sun. With special planning spacecraft could be sent to explore all those worlds at a minimum cost in fuel by flying the gravitation of each planet to send the spacecraft towards the next planet. Two sequences were identified as being of particular scientific value, the first being the route Jupiter-Saturn-Uranus-Neptune, the second Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto, the two being known collectively as the "Grand Tour" routes. As it happened, the robust design of the Explorateur series of probes allowed ASE to present these two missions as inexpensive and scientifically invaluable, and the two missions were approved in October of 1973. Not to be outdone, the United States Air Force received approval from the Nixon Administration for the hurried construction of two probes, both to be sent on the route Jupiter-Saturn-Uranus-Neptune. (Though Japan was uncertain as to the durability of its probes, its space agency nonetheless planned the construction of the Meisuko Orbiter, a long-duration probe to be dispatched to Jupiter orbit in order to study both that planet and its large Galilean moons.)
The passage of PLD-1 past Jupiter in December of 1973 provided Brazil with a major publicity coup. Though PLD-1 was unable to provide high-resolution images of Jupiter's moons, it was able to provide high-resolution images of Jupiter itself, as was PLD-2 one year later. The May 1974 launch of the Explorateur-4 from Belém towards Mars passed with relatively little fanfare, as did Brazil's launch of the PLD-3 in September of 1974 on a mapping mission of the giant asteroid Ceres and a series of Siberian and American probes to Venus and Mars. Only the successful July 1975 landing of Explorateur-4's Ares lander on the Martian surface and the inconclusive results of an automatic search for microbes in the Martian soil inspired a world population long accustomed to spectacular achievements in space exploration.
The geometries of the orbits of the Solar System's planets made the year 1977 a spectacular year for space exploration. In sequence, first the European Explorateur-5 and Explorateur-6, then Japan's Meisuko Orbiter, then the United States' twin Lewis and Clark probes and Brazil's PLD-4 were launched into interplanetary space, en route for the Grand Tour. With the launches of these six probes the 1970's flurry of unmanned autonomous probes into the depths of the Solar System came to an end, and through assorted hardware and navigational problems the probes travelled towards their rendezvouses with Jupiter, scheduled for 1979.
The United States' Clark probe was the first of the six to encounter Jupiter, in March of 1979; the remaining five probes arrived at Jupiter by no later than July of that year. In the course of their encounters with Jupiter, each of the five interplanetary probes transmitted vast amounts of data to radio receivers on Earth, providing scientifically invaluable data -- and, perhaps more importantly to the viewing public, beautiful pictures -- of the world of Jupiter and its moons. As the Meisuko Orbiter successfully established a stable orbit around Jupiter in June, it confirmed the discoveries of the flyby probes, not least of which was the moon Io's active volcanism, the water ice surfaces and possible oceanic interiors of the three other Galilean moons (Europa, Ganymede, Callisto) and detailed data about the atmospheric patterns and composition of giant Jupiter itself. To their delight, planetary scientists found at Jupiter almost an entire Solar System to study, in detail and at their leisure.
The 1981 rendezvouses of the remaining probes with Saturn (the earliest being Clarke's rendezvous with Saturn in November 1980 and the latest being PLD-4's rendezvous in August 1981) were marred by concerns over growing world instability. In these troubled times, the data and images transmitted back to Earth might have been expected to provide a distraction at best. To the pleasant surprise of scientists, however, the stunning imagery amazed and delighted the public the world over, while the detailed data on Saturn's atmosphere, Saturn's famous rings, and Saturn's array of moons -- in particular, on the tectonically-active ice moon of Enceladus and the vast and atmosphere-shrouded moon of Titan -- proved more than sufficient for scientists.
In the aftermath of the Saturn encounters, the differing courses of the five spacecraft -- chosen so as to allow detailed surveillance of selected scientific targets and future course changes -- took these probes apart. Nearing the end of its design lifetime, the PLD-4 took a course near Titan that flung that spacecraft out beyond the planets into interplanetary space. The Explorateur-5 navigated a different course and was thrown towards the planet Pluto, which it was expected to reach in 1995. The Explorateur-6, the Lewis, and the Clarke continued stolidly along the Grand Tour towards Uranus and Neptune, even as the Meisuko Orbiter continued to transmit data back from Jupiter and its moons.
Unlike the relatively brief burst of manned space exploration, then, which left few lasting results apart from new Soviet and American military programs in space, by 1981 the unmanned probes sent on the Grand Tour -- never mind those probes dispatched to other targets -- had incited sustained public interest in space exploration. Had outside events not intervened, this interest might well have inspired a second burst of unmanned exploration of the Solar System.