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THE SPACE ISSUE

James Bacon • Claire Brialey • Chris Garcia • Anne Gray • David A. Hardy Nicholas Hill • Dick ‘Ditmar’ Jenssen • Jean Martin • Liam Proven Alastair Reynolds • Ang Rosin • James Shields • Bill Wright 1 Contact us at: contents [email protected]

Editorials James Bacon, Chris Garcia, Pete 3 Young

The LoC Box: Lightly edited by Claire Brialey 7 Our Readers Write Again...

Acme Instant Fanzine Edited by James Bacon 18

Beginnings Jean Martin 22

Our Future in Space James Shields 25

The British Space Programme Nicholas Hill 29

The Space Race, Mark II Liam Proven 40

Into the Superunknown: The Death Alastair Reynolds 42 of Hard SF, and Why This Is Possibly a Good Thing

Notes: ‘Space’ in Space Opera Dick ‘Ditmar’ Jenssen, Bill 48 Wright

Mission: Atlantis Ang Rosin 49

Women in Space: The Program that Anne Gray 52 Almost Started Twenty Years Earlier

Spacewar! Video Gaming’s Space Chris Garcia 60 Race

My Life as a Space Alien Claire Brialey 62

Photo & illustration credits for this issue cover & page 6 – © David A. Hardy, used by permission. www.astroart.org. this page & page 48 – David Gunter (cc) 2008. pages 3, 17, 28, 47, 57 & 67 – via www.wordle.net. page 7 – Mathieu Struck, (cc) 2009. pages 22, 55 & 56 – NASA, public domain. page 25 – Chris Hagood, (cc) 2010. page 29 – Robert Harrison, © 2009, used by permission. page 32 – Kaptain Kobold, (cc) 2006. page 35 – Gary Henderson, (cc) 2006. page 36 – Pete Woodhead, © 2010, used by permission. page 37 – artq55, (cc) 2003. page 40 – Dave Malkoff, (cc) 2008. page 42 – Sue Jones, © 2009, used by permission. page 49 – Samantha Decker, (cc) 2010. page 50 – Ang Rosin, © 2010, used by permission. page 51 – Tasha Parkin, © 2010, used by permission. page 52 – Peter Talke, (cc) 2010. page 60 – Patrick Brosset, (cc) 2009. page 62 – Adam Currie, (cc) 2009.

Guest editor & design: Pete Young, co-editors: James Bacon, Claire Brialey, & Chris Garcia

James, Chris, Claire and Pete wish to deliver a Prime Directive of eternal thanks and universal gratitude to all contributors for use of their articles, photography and artwork. All written contributions are © their respective authors. If James Bacon tells you he’s seeing attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, ask him to buy you a pint so you can have a look too. 2 Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. – Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1979

EDITORIALs

James Bacon take it for granted, please. A small It's really very nice to work with this comment or thank you, is quite nice, gang, Claire, Chris and Pete, and the John understood that. Do you? end result shows. Pete’s awesome I enjoy fanzines and conventions layout, Claires super touch that and feed off people having a good refines and induces editorial re- time and in this case a good read. I flection, Chris’s gung-ho ‘we can mend especially would like to hear from you, it’ approach that mirrors my own if I haven't yet. brazen positivity. It’s nicer, though, to A LoC would be good, but if you get a response. want to write about something, your Two years ago, John Birchby favourite SF novel, a series of comics, approached me at Eastercon to a science experiment, drop us a line. compliment my writing for Bananna You may be an expert in something Wings, and in quiet but firm words, we'd love to publish. Ask about future encouraged more. That was an plans – your article might fit in. incredible moment. I will treasure it. Other feedback is welcome – Always. photocopies of interesting articles or With Journey Planet John corres- even a book recommendation etc., is ponded with us, stamps and delightful all good. Even if words lose you, some postcards arrived. At this year’s stamps or a nice postcard is very Picocon, I bought him a half pint and pleasant to receive. we chatted a little. If you don't want the paper Now John is gone. fanzine or prefer the electronic one, I like doing this stuff, but don't let us know – it will save us money

3 and we'll appreciate your thought- orator. It seemed to be far more fulness. Likewise, if you read this willing to pose for NatGeo centerfolds online and would prefer a paper copy than space. – get in touch. The thing is space is huge, slow, I suppose some stamps and a empty, dull. You look up and you see relevant postcard from John meant a a sky full of points of light, but if you lot. That's gone now and the positive look above it all, there’s nothing. Stars effect, or lack thereof, worries me, so are merely punctuation in a universal please make an effort. We do. essay that just goes on and on. Space Very grateful as always to some is that area in a vault that isn’t superb contributors and especially actually occupied by something. The to Dave Lally who will always get stories are written about what’s in Journey Planet now for an unusual them, but the space itself is sec- contribution to my wall! ondary. The sea is full of stories, every Hope to hear from you soon. inch a tale told in hydrobiology. Maybe the big different is that the Chris Garcia ocean is water while space is a Space isn’t my thing. I’m not a huge vacuum. space guy, I never played spaceman It’s hard to get a handle on the when I was young. We played sheer size of space. Superheroes, we played detectives, we I think that’s one of the reasons played scientists, but we never played why there are so many terrible bits of spacemen. My Dad, he loved space, nonsense in science fiction movies. especially the explorations of the Lasers wouldn’t show up as bright 1960s and ’70s. He turned fourteen streaks across the sky in space! It’s the day they left for the moon. We had impossible to go faster-than-light. photo books from the Pioneer and There’s so many problems because Viking programmes full of pictures you have to deal with the fact that and early computer graphics done on much of space is simple nothing. It’s the SuperPaint system (which is hard to make nothing interesting, currently in the collection of The hence ridiculous (yet AWESOME!) Computer History Museum). I spent a space battles, insane special effects, lot of time looking through them. weird rocket shapes which would Even when we’d go to Disneyland, two never work. In novels, it’s a little or three times a year, Dad would easier to deal with, but can you think spend five or ten minutes staring at of a novel that actually dealt with the space images along the line to ride Space instead of with people/politics/ Space Mountain. We’d have to pull his hyper-intelligent squids in space? I sleeve to get him to move along. Such can’t. was the pull of space to my Pops. There have been times when Me? Not too much. people got it right, or at least I loved the oceans. I had a series interesting. The first one that comes of books of photos of undersea to mind is 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is photographs. Hundreds of photos of a film that has been often accused of octopi, of Humboldt Squid, huge being confusing, pretentious, slow and schools of sardines shaped like dull. I can see some of that, but the Kandinsky amorphs, beluga whales, slow and dull I will take exception angler fish, cuttlefish, giant lobsters. I with. It is space as space. It is wide- spent hours with them, sometimes open, probably the most wide-open trying to draw the figures in crayon in you’ll ever see when it comes to a little notebook. In the early 1980s, movies. It’s quiet. There are periods we were discovering new and exciting where the only sound is that made by sealife all the time. There would be the audience. There are long, slow, huge spreads in National Geographic desperate moments of floating, of the latest discoveries. Space? We sitting, staring. It’s as if every word is hadn’t been to the moon in my coming from Earth to the ship. There lifetime. We had given up on most of are long pauses, amazing and space. We were talking about space, beautiful pauses that just settle you we were coming up with hundreds of into the fact that there is an amazing theories of everything space, but we emptiness. Hell, when HAL kills the had stopped going to all but a few crew that’s in cryostasis, it’s as if places. nothing has happened. A lesser film The sea was a frequent collab- would have had them crawling out of

4 the pods and dying significant, You don’t see these things happening soundful deaths on the ship’s floor, in space. but this was a story of space as it may So yeah, I like space, I think that well be. Quiet. Distant. Empty. the people crazy enough to take to Not a lot of films get that. Moon, space an either insane or brave by Duncan Jones (aka. David Bowie’s beyond reason. I wish I could do it, go son) is another. Any film which deals out there, but I like living too much with the isolation in any way other and I think I’d be bored being held in than embracing it is simply kidding us by an infinity of nothing. all. In Moon, there is quiet and when there is action, like clones knocking Pete Young each other out, it stands out because One of my favourite quotes that I it revels in the isolation, the silence, discovered recently is from Gene the strain to see anything other than Roddenberry (and I’ve embodied it in emptiness. a Wordle on page 17 of this zine): Space is weird. It’s the Grand “For me science fiction is a way of Canyon without the cliff walls. thinking, a way of logic that bypasses When you look into the abyss, a lot of nonsense. It allows people to either the deep sea variety or the last look directly at important subjects.” really cool James Cameron film, you see that it is what space has always Granted, it also provides plenty more been represented as. There are nonsense to entertain and waste your dangers around every corner. We time if that’s what you happen to be understand how to interact with it, looking for (I’m kind of addicted to how to prevent our own dark death 3rd Rock from the Sun myself), and from it, but we have trouble lasting in this only goes to demonstrate that it, staying under it. There has never science fiction, from its early roots up been an under-sea research station to today, now has space enough to that didn’t receive supplies from the encompass pretty much everything ground. Most subs surface every few under the sun to meet almost days. In space, there’s a constant anyone’s tastes, if you know where to pressure, while the deeper under the find it. And thankfully it’s most sea you go, you have to deal with certainly not a self contained genre as greater and greater attempts to crush many non-SF readers still believe, as it your vessel. The deepest part of the still borrows from elsewhere as much sea is still full of life, of action, of as it gives back. It’s a healthy trade. flows of gases and magma and so on. Roddenberry was famously optimistic It’s an impossibly rich place, almost about the future and humanity’s unknown to us save for brief destiny in space; in fact it almost glimpses. In space, there is nothing. seemed to be his personal Mission You might come across a rock, maybe Statement to entertain while providing some dust, every million miles or so. food for thought on somehow getting It’s like trying to find a needle in a us closer to a more positive future, haystack that has been spread across bypassing “a lot of nonsense” that the whole of the Earth. There are big passes for life in our time (Point A) things, stars, planets, etc, but mostly, and getting us ASAP to where, ideally, it’s just the space between. he believed we ought to be heading And the sea is even more mys- (Point B). There are two futures I terious than space. Space is a mystery would settle for living in: Iain M. due to size. The oceans are a mystery Bank’s Culture (and I’m far from being because we just can’t rope it in. There alone in that sentiment) and Rodden- are dozens of varieties of new sealife berry’s Federation. And I wouldn’t found every week. There are animals even call myself a Star Trek fan. that we only know from the fact that However I wish more people we’ve found pieces of them in the would use science fiction as a tool to stomach of whales. We’ve only had a evaluate the world in a similar way to couple of good photos of giant, not- Roddenberry. If time permitted (and yet-hyper-intelligent squids, and none let’s face it, space in a PDF like this is of at least a half-dozen kinds of not a problem) I’d like to have comm- cetaceans that we know from found issioned an article that explored just skeletons. The waters of the Indian that notion of how we might get from Ocean hid coelacanths for eons and Points A to B as described above: I we hardly knew anything about them. expect it would involve a greater

5 human presence in space, although is the only proof copy. It’s still one of not necessarily, and I suspect it would the most optimistic science fiction almost by definition involve a world- illustrations about space that I know changing reduction on arms spending. of, hence my request to use it here. All I personally ask for out of our long Sympatico to Wernher von Braun’s term future is an end to the need for revelatory point of view about life international wars, a decrease in elsewhere in space (well, it’s rev- human population and a corres- elatory if you’ve never read it before, ponding revival of the natural world and I’ve Wordled it on page 47), Sagan and the environment. And all I want himself had a very quotable opinion from science is a greater under- included in the film of his novel standing of the universe, better Contact (which also won the Locus healthcare and faster broadband Award for Best First Novel in 1986): speeds. But at the farthest reaches of “If it’s just us, it seems like an awful our practical knowledge about the waste of space.” Yes, I know it’s cute, universe, I’m optimistic we’ll know but it also happens to be true. about the existence of extraterrestrial I’m not going to make statements life within our lifetimes long before here about the need for greater we’re able to make contact with it. investment in space as I tend to make That, for me, is the whole point of our a hash of such things, and will leave it looking out into space: to ultimately to this fanzine’s contributors who can find someone on the other end of the marshall those arguments far better line for us to talk to. than I. My guest-editing of this One of the earliest paintings that fanzine was, as before, a fun thing to knocked my head right out of the be asked to do, particularly when it park at age twelve, at the same time I provides the chance to showcase had constellation maps all over my some brilliant photography and bedroom walls, was the Dave Hardy illustration, as well as a high standard illustration on the cover of this of fanwriting. Thanks again to all fanzine: it’s from Challenge of the contributors, as well as James, Chris Stars which he co-authored with Sir and Claire for letting me have this gig Patrick Moore in 1972. Carl Sagan a second time. bought the original, and at a Novacon Space: this fanzine has plenty of auction I acquired what Dave tells me it. Enjoy.

The origins of the US space programme: Wernher von Braun’s V2 rocket. David A. Hardy, 1972.

6 The LoC Box OUR READERS WRITE AGAIN... Letters, lightly edited by Claire Brialey

early all fanzine editors hope for hard about all of that and indeed be response; I’ve known a few who don’t moved to response, we weren’t quite N like letter columns, but very few of us sure what that response might be. We publish fanzines for the sake of one- knew that our contributors were way communication. And so we writing about personal experiences publish things that we like or otherwise and that it hadn’t been easy for all of find thought-provoking, in the context them to do; but obviously we couldn’t that we think other people will find know what other personal experiences them interesting too and may in turn and perceptions might be raised for be moved to tell us relevant things that readers, and how they would then they find interesting and, ideally, to react – including whether they would pick up the topic and continue the react against anything, or anyone, conversation. they were reading. In the previous issue we published I was also concerned about this some material that we thought was not because, as it happened, all of our merely interesting but also important – contributions on this subject last time addressing questions of personal came from women. (James had asked rights, responsibilities, behaviour and a number of people, both men and ‘R is for Rocket’. safety in SF fandom – and although we women, who had previously expressed Mathieu Struck, 2009. hoped that people would want to think opinions on some aspect of these issues

7 if they would write something for us; that contact details are still hidden but not everyone felt able to do so away at the bottom of p.10? Anyway, within the deadline, or that they could nice-looking zine and highly readable sufficiently get across the points they in appearance and in contents. If I’m felt were most important, or com- to produce a letter it’s within this fortable about doing so at all.) That hour or not all, so apologies to the might have affected the perspectives of perpetrators of much good stuff the material or the response. I had which I doubt I’ll mention. several conversations during Eastercon The Front Section: actually I have which were very engaged with the to digress straight away, thanks to subject matter and particularly Lloyd Penney’s mention of “a friend in recognised the importance of the issues; New York state that sells cds of old some of those conversations were about radio shows.” He’s lucky. Here in the editorial responsibility and also about UK old radio programmes are a highly the responsibility of contributors and endangered species. The BBC, home of respondents. I’m still pondering some of nearly all our radio drama, archived those comments but I’d like to very little. Various enthusiasts have underline that the editorial team shares banded together to salvage what they responsibility for what we publish, and can from home recording, and the more generally that I think everyone BBC did find them useful when it should be equally responsible for their appealed for missing episodes of the own actions and held to be so, long-running soap The Archers; regardless of their gender. Volume 3 of their ‘Vintage Archers’ So I’d like to thank everyone who release is devoted to lost episodes wrote to us on this subject not only for recovered from radio fans. The their considered comments but also for ‘diversity’ website has a section their honesty, their recognition of the devoted to collecting old radio potential sensitivity of the subject, and programmes. for generally recognising that there’s a If you need convincing of the difference between disagreeing with richness and wonders of radio drama, someone’s opinions and denying their consider SF adaptations such as A experiences. And, since these are Canticle for Leibowitz or The Glamour, personal responses too, I’ve mostly and non-SF originals such as The Day included the comments on this as Daniel O’Donnell Got Married or Alan received and I haven’t commented Plater making socio-political myself in between the letters. This confrontation hilarious in Just a doesn’t necessarily mean I agree with Matter of Time. all the points made; it just means that I However, the collectors’ group think everyone else ought to have the seems to be aging and dwindling, with chance to read them as intended. several members either passing on or There was another risk with the being beset by personal problems. In previous issue, which is that publishing science fiction, their expert Penny articles on such serious subject matter Fabb was taken by leukaemia a couple might overshadow the rest of the of years ago, which is sad (and fanzine, or might make it difficult for slowing my own microscopic people to respond to other articles. I researches into the field) and may should obviously have more faith in our well endanger the survival of some readers; but nonetheless thanks to our programmes against her wishes I’m correspondents, who all proved quite sure. Although Journey Planet isn’t able to work out what interested them the place to plead for some sort of to read and what felt like the right national preservation effort for radio balance for them to comment on. I’d drama as a whole (I think it’s a also like to thank all our contributors to forgotten treasure-house, but unlike the previous issue, again, and to this theatre etc. the broadcast media one – and of course our guest editor aren’t regarded as fine art unless Pete Young. scripted by Dylan Thomas) I wonder Now, your turn at last. would someone like the Science Fiction Foundation be interested in the science fiction? I’d welcome David Redd suggestions. A beautifully stylish Table of Contents The City of London: great. For me for us printfolks, yes indeed, and is it absolute perfection would have ungrateful of me to complain point out included mention of the literary

8 characters: Ackermann, Arthur view that everyone should have Ransome, Tambimuttu, Moorcock and freedom without responsibility, as Meltzer, our own George Locke… But with the NHS having suffered mission there’s more than enough to keep me creep from curing sick people to happy, with perhaps Mike Perschon becoming a safety net for drunks and just nudging ahead of other con- druggies. (Over-simplification alert.) In tributors here. Just. the countryside, people have been The Back Section: don’t get me given a ‘right to roam’ over virtually started. About twenty years ago I all the natural environment, with one looked into possible eco-fascism for a result being that the untrained and story whose various drafts became a ignorant can endanger themselves, series, and I think the gradual loss of others, the livelihoods of others, and safety in conventions is part of the the very natural environment they are larger problem which is, basically, supposedly enjoying. (The lesson from ecological. More recently I’ve studied the Kinder Scout mass trespass nature conservation and know that as winning the right to roam can be seen a general rule species only survive by on Google Earth today: let in the losing the genetic material of troops and they’ll trash the place.) individuals born damaged or unfit. (In There are horrified country people nature, losers get eaten.) What this driven to proposing that visitors to tells me about current society is no the countryside should have to pass a nicer than I found it two decades ago. test before they could be allowed to Look at conventions fifty-plus visit; I’m not inventing this, and it years ago. Can we date the changes in seems to me that convention behaviour? At Supermancon, I recall organisers are going to find reading, the uninhibited behaviour of themselves in the same position. Pass a London contingent was a shock to an exam in social behaviour before others. Thirty or so years ago, in attending a con? Post a bond for good convention chat one fan (not someone conduct? You see what’s coming. You I knew) could mention an activity and can’t force free people to be say, it was all right because it was only responsible without taking away some at home – our shared understanding of their freedom. being that behaviour in public still Today a convention, tomorrow the followed certain standards. Cruising world. To get your combined occurred but people could say no. passport/ID card you’ll have to pass Forward to today, and there’s an issue an exam in citizenship, post your of safety at cons. (Something good conduct bond to be allowed to escalating here.) People want freedom vote, and sign up to taking full to do what they like where they like, financial responsibility for all the Aleister Crowley philosophy, and misbehaviour, road accidents etc. – the space around a person is that and not have any penalty points on person’s whether it’s in public or not. the card unless you want to lose it. I accept that some anti-social Then con organisers could say behaviour such as drunken violence “National ID card required” to has a centuries-long history, even in members in the hope that harassment the centre of Haverfordwest, but problems would be confined to the growing up post-war I’d hoped we streets outside. were getting away from all that. Now The alternative, the nice conserving it’s back and getting worse. SF way, is to have Inappropriate conventions, like society generally, are Behaviour Officers, social workers and still subject to the same nature street pastors on hand to defuse the conservation rules that I’ve been problem situations. Do you believe looking at. This is where I think the that conventions – or the world – will disease is nasty but, as with the virus have the resources or personnel to set invasion in Eric Frank Russell’s Three that up? to Conquer, for ordinary individuals As you see, I’ll be very interested to the cure is as bad as the disease. New see the responses Journey Planet gets rules for our conventions would be to your Back Section. I may even have the least of it. to write a science fiction story about I don’t want to sound National it. Front or Nazi – my personal politics – 16 April 2010 favour independence – but our society Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, UK seems to have generated a consensus

9 Lloyd Penney anonymously had been less stressful This issue looks very much like an and more enjoyable, without being issue of Exhibition Hall. The two titles assaulted. I’ve never heard of that are starting to merge a little; not a kind of experience at Canadian con- complaint, but an observation. A ventions; but then no one’s usually so section on London is a good idea, with forthcoming to say that they were this current London Worldcon bid on sexually assaulted at a con. The idea the go, and the back section highlights of CONfidential is a good one, but I some problems I wish I could help would wonder if fans can stay by a with. phone to offer information, support I have been reading about modern- and sympathy, or simply have a day zeppelins, and how they seem to recording handle the incoming calls. I be viable in transporting up to a ton have tried to be a friend to those in of cargo at speeds approaching trouble, and I do believe that I can 85mph. Yet I hear very little about have female friends. I know that I them, and they seem to be must monitor the level of comfort permanently stuck in the experi- should I be close, and that I would mental stage of development. They never go further than what I perceive seem to be also stuck in steampunk to be that level. As a result, I do have fiction, with not much chance of lots of female friends, and I am becoming a reality. pleased with that, and careful. There is an awful lot of history in I hope that writing about these London, more than a thousand years bad experiences at conventions has of it, and interesting to read that some helped those who have been assaulted of it is fictional and legendary, just to feel somewhat better, and will like anywhere else, I imagine. The instruct over-eager guys that women history of London, plus some of the are not for you to simply take and do ghost stories, will make going to with what you will. This is a topic that London in 2014 all the better. should be revisited regularly. Given how many conventions have – 27 May 2010 a steampunk theme, and seeing how Etobicoke, Ontario, Canada many steampunk conventions are happening (Victoria, British Columbia and Parsippany, NJ over the last Anne Gray couple of weeks; Dearborn, MI this I found the pieces in the latest coming weekend), no one can say that Journey Planet on sexual safety (or steampunk is dead. However, it non-safety) of cons very interesting, certainly has changed, and I can’t see and most of them very thoughtfully many original steampunks being very written. Though I see you are happy with that. It’s become too encouraging people to LoC rather popular, so much that Disney has than discuss this online, I thought I embraced it. I know of people upset might share a few online discussions with steampunk in the Magic on a related topic that I thought went Kingdom. well earlier this year: Conventions may seem to be ‘The Safety Dance: Helping End islands of civility, as we’re all there to Sexual Harassment at have a good time, but we know that Conventions’ by Jer Lance we are humans, and sometimes we go ( users.livejournal.com/jer_/ a little too far. We find ourselves in 370098.html ) social situations that we never asked for, and that we’re not experienced my response: ‘Ending Sexual with. Harassment at Cons’ by Anne K.G. Conventions usually have their Murphy own security force, and I have to ( netmouse.livejournal.com/ wonder if we must ask that our 674877.html ) convention security people have some and Carrie's further call for training, or be clearly marked for specific suggestions on how to anyone in trouble or in an insecure improve things: ‘Fandom is not situation to go to and ask for help. We your personal Hands-On Museum‘ seem to need convention police more by Carrie Dalton than convention security. I wish the ( myopicgreen.livejournal.com/ convention experiences of Pepper, 38153.html ) Kari and those others who contributed

10 We will be having a panel titled ‘How many of which are still extant. There’s to Con without the Creepy’ at a little garden in Seething Lane where Penguicon this year, led by Greg the Admiralty Houses – Pepys’ home Williams, Jer Lance, Carrie Dalton, and when he worked for the Navy – once K.T. Fitzpatrick. Other related pro- stood. In the diary you can read about jects include the Con Anti-Harass- the view from the ‘leads’ ( roof) where ment Project, www.cahp.girl- he drank and sang songs with the wonder.org, and the BackUp project, same neighbour he argued at other backupproject.org. times with over whose shit had While the discussions above have overflowed the primitive arrange- focused on harassment, rather than ments in the communal cellar (17th rape, I see many of the same themes century sanitation – you don't want to involved in terms of helping people be know.) The well-known passages aware that they are not alone, that about the Great Fire afford an insight they can seek help and hope to receive into the visual geography in a city that support, and that they are not being had no tall buildings, other than the unreasonable to think that they medieval St Paul’s cathedral or the deserve to be free of unwanted Tower, or thoroughfares broader than attention, advances, and assault. the width of two horse-drawn Though as conrunners we also carriages. Pepys talks about the glow concern ourselves with trying to and the smoke, visible from his educate the well-intentioned but windows and also, fearing his own clueless on how not to trap someone home might be at risk, hiring a horse and make them feel threatened, it is and cart to take all his furniture and not the responsibility of the victim to valuables out of harm’s way into the educate his or her assailant on exactly countryside – his wife's uncle’s house why no means no. We all need to take in Bethnal Green! responsibility for spreading, and By way of a change, and two enforcing, that message. hundred years later on, you can read Thank you for publishing on this of a different London in Dickens. This rather serious topic. place, mud streaked, dilapidated and – 13 April 2010 overcrowded, its streets a polluted Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA miasma of chimney smoke and foul river-borne stenches is much more visible, particularly in the City itself. John Nielsen-Hall Tony Keen's article refers to a London I enjoyed everything. I think JP is almost invisible by comparison. Prior probably the best fanzine anyone is to reading it, the only Roman putting out right now, but I am antiquities I knew of in the City were singling out for special mention bits of the walls and a few things in James’ ‘Comic Heroines’. I haven't the Museum of London in the read any of these comics or Barbican. It is a vexation to me that I collections, and I have never been very am now so deeply embedded in interested in comics at all, but it is Wiltshire that searching for these testament to James’s skill that he can things would mean a major expedition engage me in these plot summaries to the capital, rather than a diversion and brief critiques. I might even seek on the way home from work. Thanks, some of these out, who knows? Tony, for telling me things I didn't I was very pleased with the know. London section. I lived in London for The Back Section: I don't go to 18 years (1969-1987) and at some many cons, but that doesn't prevent stage I became besotted by its history me from holding views. Certainly, – particularly when I lived in Cable James' modest proposal seems like a Street. In those days I could walk to good idea, but what have we come to work in the City through many ancient that it should even be necessary? The streets and alleyways, still there writer of ‘When Fandom Is Not Such a however changed, and there was Safe Space’ brought tears to my eyes. always something new to discover, But honestly, would it not be usually by reading about it. One of the better if women were not so lacking in greatest sources was Pepys' diary. He self-confidence that they can feel walked everywhere (if he didn't go by intimidated and oppressed in this boat) and the diary is full of place way? Truly, I don't understand when names and churches and taverns, the writer describes her assailant as

11 “big and strong”. This is a fan we are Anon talking about: not many of us work I think you have a fantastic idea in out, you know. The ‘big’ probably CONfidential. I think it would be an translates as ‘fat’ and the ‘strong’ was especially valuable resource for probably the impression he made teenagers and young people, who before he took his kit off! Why the often don't know how to assert fuck didn't she just clock him one? I themselves and tell someone to leave know, I know, she didn't want to make them alone, or even that they can. a fuss. Can you imagine this situation Most of the articles on the topic with the roles reversed (c'mon – you dealt in part with an inability to read SF, don't you?). Can you imagine communicate the point at which a bloke who really didn't want to have attention ceases to be flattering (if it sex, which I accept could be pretty ever was in the first place) and begins unlikely, not wanting to make a fuss? to be annoying and then threatening. My point is that what's really needed The CONfidential idea bridges this is not a helpline, but self respect, communication gap for someone like assertiveness training and basic self the writer of the last article – whose defence. It ought to be on the National story, as she points out, probably Curriculum and it would be more would have turned out very diff- useful at cons than polite bondage erently if she had been able to turn to workshops. somebody without worry that she While I am being this offensive, I'd would be ‘bothering’ them. This is like to offer a comment to the writer such an important point. Women in of ‘Why I Don't Go To Cons’. She particular are still so conditioned to writes: “I felt physically unsafe. And I please people – to avoid making a felt stupid for feeling so, because of fuss, to put their own needs last, to the parading corsets through the bar assume blame when something goes and the women strutting their stuff wrong, as several of these stories and the men all over getting tits illustrate. stuffed in their faces, making me feel My reaction to the ‘Why I Don't Go like sex was the done thing and I am a To Cons’ article was mixed. On my prude.” I have to say that by the first reading, the article seemed to sound of it, on that occasion at least, suggest that women bear some sort of sex was the done thing and so you responsibility to keep the male animal were a prude. You witnessed the at bay by dressing and behaving power of your own sex, the ease with modestly. The phrase “women putting which it’s possible for women to the wrong image out there” partic- reduce men to vulnerable gibbering ularly irked me. (What's the ‘wrong children incapable of rational thought, image’? What's the ‘right’ one? Who and you seem to have felt threatened says so and whose business is it by it. anyway what other women are doing?) Likely these paras will prove to be Women have traditionally been placed very foolhardy of me to have essayed. in the role of gatekeepers of chastity, But since the JP editors have been and the last thing they need is yet enlightened enough to bring this more directives on how they ‘ought’ subject into the open, I think I can do to dress and behave. no more than bring my true views But when I mentioned these squirming into unaccustomed thoughts to James, he suggested that I daylight as well. Censor me if you will, consider it not in the light of placing but if there is to be actual progress on blame, but as someone's private the issues raised by the three articles, thoughts, rarely expressed – and when you really have to do more than open he pointed that out, I went back and a helpline and say tut at the un- read the article quite differently. I reconstructed nature of male liked that idea; I think the writer was sexuality. Women have to be proactive courageous for putting the thoughts and assertive around socially and out there. The first thing I noticed on emotionally inept men, such as, I my re-read was that she makes a admit, are very numerous in fandom point of stating as one of her generally. I just don't think there is concerns that cons create an atmo- any other way. sphere which threaten to resurrect the – 19 May 2010 old canard that a woman dressing or Ramsbury, Wiltshire, UK acting a certain way is ‘asking for it’ – and if I'd paid more attention to that,

12 I might have read the rest of the using African-American troops, and as article in a similar spirit. What also a result the Confederacy wins but is struck me is that many of the so exhausted that it soon collapses, to sentiments expressed are similar to be replaced by African-American rule. the current conversation in feminist This was published in Alternative circles, at least in the US, about the Histories: Eleven Stories of the World rise of so-called ‘raunch culture’ and As It Might Have Been (ed. Charles G. its effect on women, particularly girls Waugh & Martin H. Greenberg), but and younger women – its insistence can now be found in The Mammoth that things like porn stars as role Book of Alternate Histories (eds. Ian models and pole-dancing classes are Watson & Ian Whates), a volume that empowering actions, rather than does demonstrate that there is more things which suggest a very limited to alternate history than ‘Hitler wins’, definition of sexual expression, and ‘Confederacy wins’ and Zeppelins (see one which is restrictive to many my forthcoming review in Strange women who, like the writer of this Horizons). article, don't necessarily want "to live I also have to add a couple of up to this bastion of convention corrections to my piece. First, Lewis womanhood." Spence did not himself originate the I did think – even on the first legend that Boadicea is buried under reading – that the article made a good King’s Cross station, though it seems point that elements from con to emerged from people who had read programming to people's dress might his book, which situates the final create a sexually charged atmosphere battle between Britons and Romans in which may make some attendees the local vicinity. Secondly, I’m afraid I uncomfortable, but I'm not sure where got the two naves at St Helen’s the line can be drawn. I'm not in favor Bishopsgate the wrong way round – of conventions, which are primarily the one on the left of the photo was social events, enforcing some kind of for the convent, and that on the right written code of conduct, which I've was the local parish church. heard suggested before. I can't come – 11 June 2010 out in favor of regulating adults' Tonbridge, Kent, UK behavior to that degree even if the failure to do so means some people are less comfortable (and by Ben Yalow extension, I guess less safe) than they Some thoughts on ‘Graf Zeppelin’: might be. overall, it was an interesting viewpoint I hope people who respond to the on an alternate history. However, I'm pieces take time for careful reading still a bit skeptical of the plausibility and consideration first. We respond to of some of the scenarios. anything based on our own The first scenario listed assumes experiences and expectations, of that the Bismarck task force sees course, but this is particularly true for Norfolk/Suffolk in time to avoid being this topic. I know that even in what I met by the Hood group. My problem thought to be my own measured with that is that this would require initial response, I jumped to at least keeping an air screen up continuously, one conclusion about the Eastercon once the task force knew it was being article which I don't think is entirely shadowed. And that would require fair on further reflection. constantly turning into the wind to – 24 April 2010 launch/recover aircraft, which would (name and contact info supplied) slow the motion along the line of advance. And the carrier couldn't even operate at full speed for that, since if Tony Keen she did she would become separated I’m not sure what I can say in from her gunnery screen, and become response to the pieces in the back of vulnerable to surface attack from Journey Planet #6. But I’m very glad Norfolk/Suffolk (as HMS Glorious, and you published them. RAdm Sprague's Taffy 3 demon- On to more pleasant discussions. I strated, operating carriers near enemy refer Steve Sneyd to Suzette Haden ships with guns was not healthy for Elgin’s 1986 story ‘Hush My Mouth’, in the carrier). So either the Bismarck which the Union rejects the notion of task force can keep aircraft up and

13 detect Hood/Prince of Wales, or can Stephen’s article was scholarly as well evade – but not both. as very informative. The scouting scenario also I enjoyed the choice of artwork, assumes that the British carrier particularly the ‘arm wrestlers’ on p. aircraft would be intercepted by an air 23. Is the ‘House collective’ image on screen. There weren't enough fighters p.50 one of Banksy’s works? It looks to keep any plausible screen up like his style. As you may know, he continuously (with ten fighters, created a lovely one in Newman Street especially a short ranged platform like on a gable end wall of shops or the BF 109E, I don't see how you can houses adjacent to the post office keep enough airborne to maintain yard. This was then obstructed by coverage, without constantly Westminster council, who did not like launching new fighters, which ends up the title ‘One Nation Under CCTV’. back in the launch/retrieve cycle I also enjoyed the info on mentioned above). steampunk, which sounds like what The other scenario listed assumes I’d hoped Anti-Ice and The Difference that carrier aircraft from a single Engine would be like. carrier could make a plausible threat – 17 April 2010 against a manoeuvring warship at sea. Chingford, London, UK This might have been true of a US carrier near the end of the war; it Claire: wasn't true of anyone at the beginning We received this letter from John (with of the war, and Graf Zeppelin carried a his usual generous contribution of relatively small air group. Assuming it postage stamps) six weeks before he was the variant with the Fi 167s, the died, at the age of 79. Like many of his number of attack aircraft was about friends in SF fandom and the variety half of what an American Essex of other communities in which he was carried. active, we’ll miss him. And we’ll miss It's certainly possible that Graf his letters. Zeppelin would have made a difference – but it took the US/ Japanese navies many years of Steve Jeffery practice to figure out how to use The first impression is that that is a carriers for sea control (and it's really spectacular cover from Michelle unclear if the RN ever mastered that). Guererro and, especially when seen in So assuming that a navy with a single the context of other recent zine cover carrier would have learned enough to images in efanzines.com, makes handle the task is somewhat Journey Planet #6 look more like a optimistic. small press magazine than a fanzine. But, overall, it was a great article, An impression that's reinforced by and gave me a chance to rethink the Elle Harrow's back cover image and Bismarck scenarios. Thanks for the (highly readable) contents page. running it. Love the cute illustration on p.4 too. – 29 May 2010 Who are Michelle Guererro and New York, USA Elle Harrow by the way? If, as I suspect, part of the agenda (do we say manifesto, or is that a step too far, John Birchby even for the Garcia/Bacon alliance?) of I was most impressed with Stephen Journey Planet is to bring interesting Burke’s article on the Graf Zeppelin, new contributors and artists to our which was new to me as I only knew attention, then a note on the of the rigid airship of that name – contributors would be a nice idea. In which I saw flying over Wembley in the meantime there's Google... Is that the latter 1930s. It flew over the the right spelling for Michelle's garden I was in on a lovely bright surname by the way? Google only warm day, and the fuselage echoed to comes up with a Michelle Guerrero, the beat of the engines which were who is a member of the femmefatale mounted on outriggers. Many years and solidarts collectives. later I was reminded of it when I saw There are several comments about the first Star Wars film in zeppelins in the letters column ‘cinemascope’ in Soho – when the following on from your last alternate great ship appears to fly overhead and histories issue. In the wake of nearly a keeps coming out of the screen! week when all air transport has been

14 grounded due to an incontinent other group of people, whether it be Icelandic volcano, I wonder if we other hobbyists or work colleagues, would have had this trouble if we had and this really shouldn't have been a proper airships. After watching a surprise, but it set me back more than documentary last night, I suspect not, a little, especially the realisation that, since it appears that the real problem for some, fandom and conventions of volcanic ash to jet engines is that it might not be regarded as a physically is largely ultra-fine airborne silica safe place. (why aren't the redtops suddenly Partly, I think, it's because it's panicking about silicosis?) and can always appeared that women fans are, melt into sticky droplets of molten as a whole, often more socially glass at the pre-heat temperatures confident and aware than some male inside jet engines, and deposit on the fans. A sweeping generalisation I intake and turbine blades. know, even if that confidence I'm not a great WW2 history or sometimes shades uncomfortably into militaria buff, but if there's an the sort of fetishistic exhibitionism interesting sounding documentary on that has put me off going to certain I tend to watch it. Stephen Burke's cons. Not out of prudery, but rather fascinating article on the Graf that, in quite a few cases, such Zeppelin read like the sort of informed displays are aesthetically unappealing speculative documentary that I keep and not a little embarrassing in a an eye out for. Sometimes I wonder public space. how we ever won the war, and then I I would be horrified if I felt that read something like this and realise any fans thought that this was either it's probably because we were less an invitation to, or an excuse for, worse at making strategic decisions unwanted advances, let alone actual than the other side. assault or even rape. But perhaps I Linking this issue's London theme have an unwarranted cosy view of and that of the last, I've often fandom that, touchy-feely as we can wondered what it would be like if be with people we know, there are Wren's plans for rebuilding London as boundaries we know not to cross. The a properly planned city after the Great articles on this topic showed this isn't Fire were actually carried through, and always the case. (There's an article by not bogged down in interminable Sandra Bond in a recent Quasiquote wrangles. If the plans are anything to that shows how fans can be just as go by it would have been spectacular, inept and hurtful in other, non-sexual, although whether the carefully ways.) planned views and vistas would have James's idea seems sensible but survived the onslaught of 1960s office with the rider that if there's any blocks is another question. In fact indication of actual assault or threat, Wren's proposed radial symmetry of then rather than try to handle it long avenues, radiating from the new ourselves, the professionals or police St Paul's, reminds me oddly of should be called. Philadelphia and the long open – 3 May 2010 approach to the Museum of Modern Kidlington, Oxfordshire, UK Art. One of my favourite women in Chris replies: comics isn't strictly even yet a woman I'm actually working on getting (and sadly never gets to be). It's the Michelle (who is a, wait for it, high transsexual Wanda in Gaiman's school student) and Elle (one of Sandman: A Game of You. Sharp, Michelle's classmates) to get their sassy, kooky and at the same time Deviantart pages set up! I ran across intensely vulnerable, she comes across them at an art exhibit at the local as a fully rounded person. As does small museum which did a Best of the Hazel, who appears in the same series District event where they both showed and whose story continues in another pieces. My cousin Claire introduced me later book. And I have a real soft spot and they've given me a few pieces. I for Delirium, perhaps even more than really think they should be doing more for her older sensible sister Death. art for folks, but they've got other OK, now the tough bit. I'm aware interests that seem to be taking up that fans are just as much a mixture their time. of the socially aware and inept as any

15 Pamela Boal those parts that carry trains. Britain was fine in ’79, so I took my Churches, buildings, etc. etc. Our family to the Worldcon in Brighton. capital city is a treasure, and Our daughter, just short of her incidentally the Thames is now twenty-second birthday, had worked arguably the cleanest capital city river behind a bar in London, so was well in the world. equipped to fend off unwanted – 22 April 2010 attention. Nevertheless, those Wantage, Oxfordshire, UK attentions were so offensive and so persistent that she has never become Claire: a fan. Although the items by Kari and Croydon was amalgamated into Anon make me sad they do not Greater London in 1965, I gather (so it surprise me. Well done both for was part of London by the time I was sticking around and finding a born in Kent). What I hadn’t realised compatible fandom. until looking that up was that Croydon True fandom is a different place appears in the Domesday Book and is today; in ’79 there were still only a reckoned to have been a settlement for small minority of females accepted as some centuries before that. 1960s fans in their own right. Despite the architecture has quite a bit to answer soul searching about the lack of for, so I’m oddly pleased to know female representation in fanzines and someone thinks of Croydon as a literature, there are considerably more pleasant small town. ‘Small’ doesn’t females recognised as fans today. quite fit now, at least not for someone Societal norms have changed; it is brought up in East Anglia… understood that females having fun Staying at least slightly in the past, with their mode of dress are not we conclude with a letter on issue 5 saying “Come and get me; I'm that arrived just a little too late to be available”. Alas, it would be naive to included in issue 6: expect that alcohol-fuelled young men are any better at controlling their basic instincts or that young women Mike Meara are any better equipped to deal with As someone who seeks variety, I am them. I think the idea James offers is a not surprised that I have some good one. If I were able to attend cons problems with your themed approach I would certainly volunteer to help to Journey Planet, especially when new young fans safely get the fun out there is so much material in each of fandom that I have enjoyed. issue. It’s like being served a meal While I, as a true Londoner, am consisting of a huge portion of just happy to welcome Claire as a one dish, and being expected to eat it Londoner, Croydon for me will always all. However tasty the dish, one tires be a pleasant small town a few miles of it eventually. And the dish this time outside of London. Do you happen to is tasty indeed, although it’s served on know when Croydon was swallowed a plate that’s logically impossible. up by Greater London? I found that the tastiest morsel I enjoyed the different looks at was John Scalzi’s hilarious story. It London and wonder could one ever would make a terrific film of Time exhaust its many facets? As a child Guardians battling a team of obsessive living in Southfields, part of the assassins who are stuck in a Hitler borough of Wandsworth, I had access loop. Such a film could be achieved on to two commons, three major parks a modest budget, and I and my and a number of small parks and popcorn would be first in the queue to recreation grounds, all within walking see it. This would have to be in an distance – given that in those days alternate universe, of course, since three miles was a reasonable walking such films never get made in this one. distance to a healthy child. The parks Next, my critical fork found Steve and gardens of London are a volume Green’s delightful TOFF report. I was on their own. able to convey my appreciation to Mr Then, of course, there are volumes Green in person at Corflu, for which in the museums and galleries. The he was much pleased. He was also histories attached to the theatres are amused at my suggestion that the often entrancing. Hidden London, young Peter Weston bore a striking mews and courtyards, Underground similarity to the young Eric Idle. No London – far more extensive than Carol Cleveland in that photo, though,

16 so I guess that proves she’s not a fan, it’s quite understandable that she not in that universe anyway. would wish to, you might say. But no: Another appealing titbit was the I’m talking about the T-shirt for Spinrad film saga. Lots of research Atlanta 1995 – a Worldcon which went into this, I feel sure. Including never happened in our timeline – Marilyn Monroe was a masterstroke; which she picked up for £1 at an I’m a sucker for anything involving auction. Or at least, that’s what she her. I can’t help feeling I would have told me. She wore it again at Corflu in enjoyed it even more had I known Winchester. I have to watch her all the more about film and therefore picked time when she wears it, in case the top up more of the divergences. A fine half of her slips sideways through a piece of work which bears re-reading. wormhole in space-time, taking the Flagging a bit now, and with rest of her with it... incipient mental indigestion, I find I – 29 March 2010 just have room for a few slices of Spondon, Derby, UK Bacon. The first, in which James discusses Luft ’46, had the delicious Thanks also to: Farah Mendlesohn flavour of polystyrene cement. I too (“Great issue. Thank you for the made those Airfix kits as a lad, and I particularly splendid articles on also had at that time a series of London”), and all those who offered to pocket-sized hardback books detailing help in some way with the the fighter planes of World War II, CONfidential scheme or other prac- wherein I was fascinated to read of tical action. weird and wonderful aircraft such as James describes. If kit models of these If you want to appear here next time, had been available back then, my joy send your letters: would have been complete, but By email to: instead I had to make do with the [email protected] Me262 (in my view more beautiful than the Spitfire) and the rocket- By post in Europe (c/o James) to: powered Me163 Komet, which were 55 Cromwell Road, Croydon, pretty cutting-edge in themselves. Surrey CR0 2JZ, UK I picked at the rest, before By post in North America (c/o regretfully leaving it unfinished. But I Chris) to: 962 West Weddell Drive, greatly enjoyed what I did have. Apt. #15, Sunnyvale, CA 94089, In conclusion, I should mention USA that Pat now spends some time actually living in an alternate universe By post from anywhere else in the – or at least, the top half of her does. world to whichever of those Married to me for almost forty years, addresses you prefer.

17 Edited by James Bacon instantinstant fanzine

irst, some comments from James: I fascinated you, and what you found sent out an e-mail full of questions, special about it. F and I know many readers are just too busy to respond so I’m always grateful Jim Mann: Arthur C. Clarke’s The City to those who do. Interestingly, I am and the Stars is one, especially the pleased that the respondents are sequences near the end where the ‘doers’ here. Jim Mann is a conrunner characters find out the true story of of the highest echelon, currently our history. This book is one I always running Programme for the 2011 point to when someone asks me which Worldcon. I was impressed with the books I think inspire sense of wonder. Hugo awards ceremony in Montreal More recently, Alastair Reynolds’s that he and Ian Stockdale managed. books (not just Revelation Space, but Dave Angus builds planets, literally, others such as House of Suns) have but smaller. He’s contributed to con done a great job in that they, unlike programming as well as being an some books, give a feel for how big artist and I’m always fascinated by his space really is. And I also like Stephen work, and was so pleased he res- Baxter’s novels, and think several, acme ponded – a fan who I’ve conversed such as Ring, really invoke a sense of with greatly in email but rarely in wonder. person. Lynda E. Rucker is on the path of a professional author, and Mark Meenan: There’s not one book Caroline Mullan is currently running as such – but I liked the problem- Foundation. Mark Meenan is in- solving stories in alien environments credible, a conrunner but also more. I (eg. Isaac Asimov’s Robot stories, saw his work in 2005 in Glasgow and Arthur C. Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust), had the pleasure of working with him as well as First Contact stories, most in 2009, and he is a very focussed recently Ken MacLeod’s Learning the achiever. World. What I love is that these folks have taken the time to reply – it gives Caroline Mullan: Poul Anderson’s Tau me an insight into them, and reminds Zero. Sense of scale of the universe, me that we’re here because of the and the possibility of falling off the books. I wonder if all conrunners edge. should have to answer similar questions if they actually want to run Dave Angus: This question’s a bit like an SF convention. Basic principles. I’m judging the Miss World competition. here because I like the books that take There are different kinds of beautiful me away and yet also bring me home women. I can't point to any one book with the message. but several must have had some effect. From my early days of reading Is there any one book you can SF I guess it was books like Galaxies pinpoint as giving you that sense of Like Grains of Sand by Brian Aldiss wonder about space? Tell us why it and the old hardback Captain W.E.

18 Johns series. Analog, too, was quite Jim Mann: What works for me is both formative, as was Isaac Asimov: I SF that shows how wonderfully thought his short story ‘Nightfall’ was fascinating, beautiful and strange the true genius and would make a first- universe is, as well as some of the rate play. And a story being set on great things we can do. I don't know another world reminds me of Hal of anything that spoils it, although Clement’s planet Mesklin, from maybe SF that gets it all wrong, that Mission of Gravity: strange new makes the whole universe seem small planets fascinate me and makes me and mundane, which is more an issue want to know what’s out there. with movies and TV than written SF.

Do you think that science fiction film Dave Angus: What’s always worked and television has added to that for me has been my powers of sense of wonder, or made outer imagination. What’s always screwed it space seem more commonplace? for me has been the petty tyranny of the trivial (no money). In other words, Jim Mann: Probably both. A lot of it Mundania. has made space seem commonplace – which isn’t a bad thing, in that I think Are you interested in/fascinated by by making it commonplace, it has a outer space beyond a setting for lot of people now assuming that “of fiction – stars, planets, cosmology or course we’ll go into space”, rather astrophysics? than questioning our doing so. But there are times when it still invokes a Jim Mann: Yep – I like reading books sense of wonder. A few Doctor Who on cosmology and astrophysics (and stories have done so. And the physics in general). Stargate: Universe episode ‘Light’, where the starship needs to plunge Caroline Mullan: Yes, there isn’t time into a star to refuel itself, also did a to do this as well as everything else, good job of invoking sense of wonder. but I still read the articles about cosmology and physics that come my Mark Meenan: Not really. By and large way. they’re in two separate compartments for me. Dave Angus: Oh, definitely! I build planets (check out my website Caroline Mullan: Made it more com- www.daplanets.co.uk), so what monplace. Your imagination (fed by fascinates me most is exploring alien the printed word) is richer than planets and the forms they might someone else’s vision realised on a take. Having said that, if I become screen, in my opinion. And many passionate about a subject there’s a modern space operas are written as if learning spin off into other areas they want to be films which is not which is necessary with planetary good for sensawunda – see comment formation anyway. Star formation is below. one example. A lot of the cosmology and astrophysics I have trouble Dave Angus: Yes it can add to my getting my head around, but one of sense of wonder although I wish it my favourite ways of ending a day is would do so more, and to as many to blow my mind with an outer space people as possible before it’s too late. documentary – such as cosmology or Particularly documentaries at the astrophysics – while under the expense of soap operas and those influence of a good bottle of red wine. bloody property programmes, though You feel an all-understanding, all- the film Avatar was a good try at a knowing benign being even if you sensawunda. I do feel disturbed when remain largely clueless and there is an an outer space news event is relegated incremental gathering of knowledge, to the rear behind news such as however small. Hope this answer Dierdre shagging Grant, or whatever’s appeals to your sense of humour. going on in EastEnders. Is there a link that exists for you Tell us what worked for you and between real science and science whether there was anything that fiction in this way? spoiled the dream. Jim Mann: Cutting edge physics and

19 astrophysics can invoke the same kind dwindles into the scenery in which the of sense of wonder as SF. story is set, rather than being an essential element of it. Caroline Mullan: Yes. The fact that a science fiction writer has tried to stick Dave Angus: I’ve read or watched to the rules underlying the universe Starship Troopers and read Consider helps your faith in the story. Phlebas. There are bound to be diff- erences because the authors are Have you read classic ‘space’ novels different, particularly in terms of (such as the Lensman books, Starship politics, Heinlein and Banks being Troopers, the Foundation series, the examples. I don’t know about Sector General series, etc.), and later preferring one at the expense of the novels set in space (such as Consider other but Iain M. Banks’s Culture Phlebas, Revelation Space, Ender’s really appealed to me and I do wish I Game and the Vorkosigan series)? lived in that sort of civilisation. Would you say there are significant differences in style and message – How do you think that space as a what were your preferences and setting for science fiction has been why? affected by the mood and opp- ortunities of the time for real space Mark Meenan: Yes. It’s only a general- exploration and space travel? Was isation but the earlier examples the mood of the time you read the tended to have the engineers/ stories more relevant for you than scientists (or doctors in the case of when they were written? Sector General) as an enlightened guiding force whereas the more recent Jim Mann: To a degree, yes. But I also tend to be more realistic and have the think it’s been influenced by a societies/situations having to deal growing understanding of what it’s with self-serving individuals/groups, really like out there. From a scientific be they politicians, corporate bodies perspective the universe is much etc. The age of the reader plays a part richer, complex, and stranger than we here, I think – I would still recommend ever imagined it to be in the 1940s. some of the older books to a younger reader – I think for the sense of What are your favourite ‘space’ optimism that exists in many of those science fiction stories? They can be stories. any novels or stories set in space, by any authors; although I’m hoping Jim Mann: One big difference is that that, like me, some of you have a modern space novels seem to have far favourite from an earlier era and more detail worked out about the one more recent (mine are, res- worlds and societies. I'd also say that pectively, James White’s Sector the best modern SF also portrays the General (1957), and Mark Long and reality of space better. Compare ‘Doc’ Nick Sagan’s Shrapnel (2009), which Smith, where in some sense space is a is a comic, in fact). backdrop, and the inertialess drive pretty much lets the characters ignore Jim Mann: I listed a number above. it as they zip through it, to the rich, But just to give a fuller list here: complex universe of Alastair Rey- Alastair Reynolds: House of Suns, nolds’s ‘Revelation Space’ series, as an Revelation Space (and sequels); example. Stephen Baxter: Ring; Iain M. Banks: the ‘Culture’ novels; Vernor Vinge: A Caroline Mullan: Yes, all of the above Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in and more. The early ones are often the Sky; Arthur C. Clarke: The City and about people grappling with the the Stars, Rendezvous with Rama; Poul nature of the universe, and so in a way Anderson: Tao Zero; Robert Heinlein: the nature of the universe becomes an Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, Time for essential element of the story. The the Stars. I could go on, though it’s later ones are more likely to have hard to actually define what’s meant space and a rich plot and characters by ‘space SF’, since I'm not sure all SF who are people, but often the char- just set in space counts as ‘space SF’ acters don't engage with the actual here. I wouldn’t list Leigh Brackett or universe so much as with other Ray Bradbury, for example. I love Jack characters. So the universe sometimes Vance's works set in space, but is

20 Planet of Adventure really ‘space SF’? general exploration of our stellar neighbourhood out to about a hun- Caroline Mullan: Naomi Mitchison's dred light years. I modelled Betazed, Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962, but I the home world of Star Trek’s read it much later); Poul Anderson’s Counsellor Deanna Troi too, then a Tau Zero (1967), travel to the end of time travel voyage across the galaxy to the universe – as above; C.J. Cherryh's two thirds of the way round the rim – ‘Company Wars’ books: Downbelow the first passion of my life was Station, Rim-runners, et al, and dinosaurs and Lower Cretaceous Earth Merchanter's Luck (mostly ’80s and was there – and then the opposite side ’90s); Elizabeth Moon’s short stories in of the galaxy to see Pangea. Then I Lunar Activity (1991); Stephen Baxter's suppose we could continue on to Titan – space shuttle to Jupiter (1997); whatever else awaits me in Heaven. Greg Egan's Diaspora (1998) – travel to the end of the universe! (Don't ever let Lynda E. Rucker: Yes! Well, maybe. anyone tell you the women don't go I've spent pretty much my whole life there, and if you get lists of all male longing to travel in space. As an authors it might be worth asking why atheist, I suspect that the idea of the respondents either didn't read, or travelling in space fills me with the don't remember, the women.) same sense of the numinous that a religious person would feel at the Would you take the opportunity to thought of visiting their holiest sites. travel in space? Why? Where would I am awed by the natural world, and you want to go? our origins are out there somewhere in the universe. I used to imagine I'd Jim Mann: If you asked me twenty be very reckless about it – I'd go even years ago, the answer would have if it were extremely dangerous and been yes. Now, the answer is “only if untested. I’d certainly hop aboard an we develop a space elevator or a trans- alien craft, no questions asked. In porter, because I don’t really want to recent years, I seem to have either undergo all those G-forces.” grown more attached to Earth or more cowardly or perhaps a combination of Mark Meenan: I would love to see the both, because I don't feel nearly as Earth and Moon from space. much bravado when I think about it as I once did. Nowadays I am less willing Dave Angus: Yes. But given the to take a big risk to do it. Obviously present state of space travel and my it’s not going to become a routine age, it would be limited to orbiting the form of transportation in my lifetime, Earth. I’d like to do another John so I guess it’s kind of moot. Glenn who went up again when he was Where would I go? Anywhere. I old and I’m on the verge of that. That don't care. I used to think I'd like to would still be a fantastic experience take a space voyage when I was very and a professional one. I’ve modelled old, as I was dying, slipping off this all land parts of this planet and built mortal coil while gazing into infinity. it a couple of times, not to mention But again, I seem to have changed and older versions such as Lower decided I like Earth too much. Now I'd Cretaceous Earth, and I could finally rather check out while sitting in the see the real thing for myself. A friend sun, someplace gorgeous. is more adventurous, being certain And having said all that, if that he would accept a one way trip to someone were standing right in front Mars if it was offered. Finally if there of me, making me the offer, it’s hard is an afterlife and it turns out to be a to know what my choice would be… benign one, for me I would like my soul to do a Grand Tour of the worlds Finally, have you read any recent SF I've modelled, which would be: the works that were reflective of the Moon, Mars, terraformed Mars if time current world, or which included a travel is available and our species was message or a metaphor? up to it; Io, Europa, Titan, then twenty- one light years out to 82 Eridani to see Jim Mann: I’ve just finished James if the Earthlike world I modelled – or Morrow’s S h a m b l i n g T o w a r d s something Earthlike – is there, foll- Hiroshima, which certainly includes a owed by the nearest three Earthlike message and reflects on our current planets to Sol – I've built three – and a world.

21 BEGINNINGS Jean Martin

ver since I was a little girl, I was the flights of imagination that others fascinated by the heavens. The sun, have created. E moon and stars held some celestial I was born in the 1960s, the magic and I was just in awe at the decade when the Space Race was at its beauty, diversity and vastness of fever-pitch. I was too young to really God’s creation. However, at the time, understand what was happening; I these heavenly bodies all seemed so was two years old when men first far away, mysterious and unknowable. landed on the moon, but I could feel Unlike things on Earth that are the excitement that we were living in tangible and a part of daily life, historic times and entering into a new galaxies and universes seemed like era of human accomplishment. The the realm of science fiction to me world has simply not been the same then. since we have ventured into space, Nowadays, space exploration is and t seems like the sky is not the more commonplace and reaching for limit anymore. Homo Sapiens history A crescent moon is the stars is a more realistic goal. Since has constantly been about explor- visible in this view of childhood to this day, I’ve had a ation. We are a curious species and I Earth’s horizon and lifelong interest in astronomy (which am sure we will continue to expand atmosphere, led into my love of science fiction) our horizons into as yet undiscovered photographed by an Expedition 16 crew and have kept up with progress in destinations. member on the this field of endeavour. I’ve read, Galileo was my first inspiration, International Space watched and listened to topics about but it was Carl Sagan’s Cosmos TV Station. NASA, 2007. the actual science of space as well as documentary series from the 1980s

22 that really changed my life. His Huygens mission to Saturn (and one depiction of a beautiful and har- of my first views of the Ringed Planet monious universe and our place in it from a portable telescope), heard was inspiring and resonated with my Frank Drake talk at Foothill College positive view of life. I also have an about his Drake Equation for predict- enduring thirst for knowledge and he ing the possibility of extraterrestrial presented so many different themes life, listened to a Stanford scientist from atoms to stars, from history to about cosmic microwave background the modern day, and from art to radiation, and had the privileged of science. One of the segments that watching the British theoreticist captured my interest was Johannes Stephen Hawking live, at the San Jose Kepler’s attempt to explain the Center for the Performing Arts (which planetary motions using the concept is coincidentally where I also saw of the “music of the spheres.” Patrick Stewart several years So I thought of majoring in previously). Andy and I also went to astronomy or some related field in Lick Observatory for one their special college, but there was only one music events and got to use their university in the Philippines that had telescope to see the Ring Nebula. We an observatory, and my parents said also both liked to watch for satellites that it was not a field you could live (using a tracking program) and even off of. And being near-sighted, prone got to see the International Space to motion sickness, and not a US Station (ISS) with a space shuttle citizen (not to mention not living in docked to it when we were in the west the US), I thought there was no way I coast of Wales. We saw it very bright could ever become an astronaut. More overhead as it whizzed by really fast a recently, I’ve realized that I wouldn’t few times. Due to the way the ISS have been a good scientist anyway revolves around the Earth and the because I’m more right-brained than high level of light pollution in San left-brained, and I’m better with words Francisco’s Bay Area, viewing it in a and ideas than with math and caravan park off of Cardigan Bay was technical details. vastly superior to seeing it here. Still, I have far from given up on Writing and editing for the Bay astronomy. I have an amateur’s love of Area online news zine Science Fiction/ the romance of space and its San Francisco as well as befriending exploration, and a lifelong learner’s more people like myself in fandom passion for expanding my knowledge has also spurred on my attending on this and various other subjects. astronomy events. Through the After I moved to the US, I joined Klingons, I discovered their yearly the Planetary Society and through “Day of Honor” celebration at the them was able to enjoy Space Camp at Chabot Space and Science Center in NASA Ames in Mountain View for one Oakland. I haven’t been to this event day several years ago. This is sadly no in a few years; but last year I did go longer there, but I still remember the back to Chabot for the Greater Bay feeling of weightlessness using the Area Costumers Guild’s “Starry Night Zero-G tank… it was like flying in of Steampunk”. I was able to use the space. And the Lunar-gravity sim- telescopes there again (one time I saw ulator… where I discovered that my Jupiter with four of its moon across ballet dancing skills worked really its equator like a diamond necklace) well. I also remember going back to and finally even got to see the NASA Ames to visit one of the clients planetarium show, which I thought of the high-tech public relations firm I was more enjoyable than the one at was working for, and got to try out the California Academy of Sciences. I the Mars Rover simulator before it was able to cover one of the Space was even implemented (and I believe it Elevator Games at NASA Ames (based is now available for public use). on one of Arthur C. Clarke’s ideas). But it wasn’t until a few year ago Also through SF/SF, I was able to when I dated a Welshman who had a attend Yuri’s Night (celebrating Master’s Degree in Spacecraft Engin- cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s achieve- eering (and who worked briefly for ment as the first man in space) at Intelsat) when I started attending NASA Ames twice. This event com- more space-related events and bines science and technology with art lectures. I got to see scientists talk at and music in a very Burning Man-like NASA Ames about the Cassini- atmosphere. At the first one I went to

23 in 2007, I got to hear Anousheh telescope was a lot larger than I Ansari speak about her experience as expected. Also last year was the first one of the first self-funded space annual SF/SF picnic, which was held at tourists and the first self-funded the Rosicrucian Museum in San Jose. woman to fly to the ISS. She showed Their planetarium show was an footage of her at the ISS (she looked interesting blend of mysticism and beautiful and happy) and her landing science as it focused on the ‘Mythraic back to Earth (which brought tears to Mysteries’. It just goes to show that my eyes). Here’s a woman who’s only humans throughout history have been six months older than me, and also interested in astronomy, albeit from a from a foreign country, who did not more superstitious angle. let anything get in the way of her So far this year, I’ve only gone to dream of going into space. I so admire one space event for SF/SF, a lecture by her strength, courage, resourcefulness Jill Tarter, Director of the Center for and determination. SETI Research at the SETI Institute in Inspired by her, I am now in the Mountain View. I was thrilled to meet process of taking the small step of such an important figure in the search traveling to Florida to see one of the for extraterrestrial intelligence and last Space Shuttle launches later this who was the basis for Jodie Foster’s year. This has always been a dream of character Ellie Arroway in Carl Sagan’s mine and I know I would regret it if I novel and the subsequent movie don’t see it at least once. It is sad that Contact. I also met one of Jill’s SETI these flights will come to an end and colleagues, Seth Shostak, at BayCon a that funding for space exploration is couple of years ago. He was actually a dwindling. But it seems like comm- judge at the masquerade competition, ercial space ventures are now going to which our group won for Best take its place. Presentation. Life is funny like that Which leads me to thinking and sometimes. planning for the bigger step of saving While I enjoy doing all these and waiting for Virgin Galactic or things in and of themselves as part of other space tourist-type flights to get my life, they hold a bigger place in the off the ground… literally. I suppose I larger scheme of it all for me. These should try my hand at the Zero-G remind me that we are all Earthlings planes first. I’m afraid that motion and share this wondrous planet, and sickness might prevent me from really, we live in just a small part of enjoying that much, and discouraging the greater cosmos. There is not only me from my more ambitious goal. a bigger universe out there to explore; They’re not called the “vomit comet” but also, we need to take care of our for nothing. Perhaps I’ll never get to ‘home’ and make peace with one do any of these but it’s good to another. We may be alone or there dream. might be life ‘out there’ but we are I also got to meet the second man more alike than not and we are all in on the moon, Buzz Aldrin, at the 40th this together. Our accomplishments in anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission the field of space exploration show us at the USS Hornet (docked in that we are capable of incredible feats Alameda), which was the aircraft and can be successful in achieving our carrier that recovered the three dreams. A proof of this is When We astronauts from the ocean. I wrote Left Earth, an amazing account of the about this for SF/SF last year, which space program with gripping footage also happened to be the International and excellent interviews. The Year of Astronomy (IYA). I bought an documentary shows that mankind has official ‘Galileoscope’ through an IYA- the expertise, courage and ingenuity certified organization. This was a to collaborate toward common and modern replica of the telescope that worthy achievements. Galileo invented and shows what he So, in summary, what does space would have seen as the first person to and space exploration mean to me? It see the skies in much closer detail. I makes my life richer and more had to put it together myself, with a interesting here on Earth, helps me lot of help from my friend Mike. Also, connect with like-minded people, and last year, I got to go to an astronomy gives me hope for a positive future for camping party at Fremont Peak near mankind. And maybe I’ll even get to San Juan Bautista for my friend fly to the stars one day; and if not Bryan’s birthday. The observatory’s myself, then future generations.

24 OUR FUTURE IN SPACE James Shields

s a child I was always fascinated by cost, high frequency manned everything to do with space. Aren’t all launches, the shuttle proved over- A kids? complicated and unreliable, requiring On of my favourite childhood books major overhauls between missions. was called The Next Fifty Years in And far from being safer than Space by the very great Patrick Moore. conventional launch vehicles, the I’m sure a few of you will have read it. Challenger and Columbia disasters It was written in 1976, a year after showed up flaws not just in its design, Apollo and Soyuz mated, promising a but in the entire culture at NASA. great future of cooperation in space. This year, President Obama Sadly the book was out of date cancelled the Orion programme, which almost before the ink was dry on its was to be NASA’s replacement for the pages, as the Space Shuttle was beset Space Shuttle. In my opinion, Orion by delays and hold-ups, missing its was ill conceived, trying to recreate launch date by several years, and Apollo from left-over shuttle parts, plans for permanently manned space and its cancellation is no great loss, stations would only have the Russian but it does mean that for the first space programme to keep them alive time in its history NASA is left for another twenty years. without a manned space programme. ‘Liftoff Space The Space Shuttle is possibly the The Russians seem to be doing Shuttle Discovery’, most amazing machine ever built, but only marginally better. They had been (STS-131). sadly it fell far short of our hopes for developing an interesting reusable Chris Hagood, 2010. it. Instead of heralding an era of low spacecraft called Klipper. At one point

25 it looked like Europe and Japan might It’s been compared to the barn- have been joining the project, but storming days of flight, when the only budget cuts have meant the project way normal people could get in a has been on hold since 2008. Their plane was in the back seat of a two manned space programme has had its seater at an airshow. There was no funding cut to the point where all it destination, you just went up, saw the can do is keep churning out Soyuz earth from above, and went down rockets to ferry cosmonauts to the again. Let’s face it, even for the likes International Space Station. As nobody of us, used to routine air travel, that else will have any rockets that can would be a pretty mindblowing carry people to the station after the experience, but in the early twentieth shuttle retires later this year, it’s century, it would have been life- certainly in the interests of the ISS changing. partners to make sure that the station But I’m not sure if the com- is still serviced, and most importantly, parison to air travel is a valid one. make sure their astronauts can get With aircraft, it’s a fairly natural there. If the Russians were to start progression that you can take an ramping up the price they charge for a existing design, make it a little bit seat, it would serve everyone else bigger, give it a longer range, and off right. you go. Every once in a while rev- Of course, there’s also the Chinese olutionary changes like jet engines space programme, but they are out in will come along, but it’s a pretty the cold as far as the rest of the world natural progression from the Wright is concerned. Their manned craft is Brothers to the Airbus A380. really just a re-badged Soyuz, anyway. However, in space things are a By Patrick Moore’s timetable we little bit different. There is a certain should not only have permanent bases amount of progression that suborbital on the Moon and Mars by now, but hops can make, getting passengers a also have astronauts exploring the little bit higher, and experiencing moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Mr. weightlessness for a little bit longer, Moore looks to be a very long way off but at some point someone will have the mark. to make a leap from a hop to a jump So it seems that the future of into orbit, and it’s a very big leap. I manned spaceflight lies in the hands have no doubt it will happen even- of the private sector, which some tually, probably on the back of a would argue is where it should have government sponsored prize fund. been in the first place. I’m sure Of course, there are plenty who everyone reading this is well aware of argue that the way into space is not Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne and the on a rocket but an elevator. Roald Ansari X Prize. This has formed of the Dahl was possibly more prophetic basis of Virgin Galactic’s bid to carry than he could have imagined, and fare paying passengers into space next there are prizes for developing the year. A whole host of others are science of space elevators too, though hoping to do likewise. so far developments leave a lot to be However, in case you’re thinking desired. We have lots of fancy “problem solved”, they still have a theories, but a long way to go to put long way to go. To win the X Prize, them into practice. Constructing a lift SpaceShipOne just had to make a cable from carbon nano-tubes is a nice jump over 100km. While this is the idea, but so far we’ve only been able official definition of Space, it’s a long to make tubes a few microns long. way from the ISS or even a stable Once we figure out how to make them orbit. All a $200,000 ticket on a bit longer, then weave them into a SpaceShipTwo will get you is about six cable 38,000km long, we then have to minutes of weightlessness before an use conventional rockets to transport hour long glide back to Earth. that cable to space, and somehow feed Still, it would be pretty amazing. it back down to Earth. Once we’ve You would see the curvature of the done that, the first robot cable Earth below, and the sky above would crawlers will probably just be be black, and you might even see stars dragging more nanotube cables up to if you turned off the cabin lights. It make it strong enough to support might be a good idea to save the larger payloads. After that, larger inflight meal for the way down, crawlers can bring up real payloads, though. and if it all works we will have easy

26 and cheap access to space. That’s the that should be destroyed or damaged. theory, anyway. The tricky bit is Most critically, they will need to be putting it into practice, and 38,000km able to care for crew members injured really is quite a long way to go by – turning around and rushing home cable. just won’t be possible. Once we’ve sorted out the getting President George W. Bush set the into space problem, we return to the Moon and Mars as our target, and I’m question of what we do when we get sure both will be visited, but I expect there. If the space programme is being that commerce-led space interests will driven by commercial interests, then push straight past them and head for the objectives will have to be the asteroids which have enormous profitable ones. During the “barn- potential for exploitation, and while storming” sub-orbital phase, the only the Moon and Mars have a fraction of feasible profit motivation will be once Earth’s gravity, making it easy to get in a life-time trips by fairly well-off your work into space, the asteroids individuals. There seem to be no have almost none, making them the shortage of these at Virgin Galactic, ideal source of raw materials for space and other potential operators are also construction. Many are rich in iron, a finding plenty of clients. very suitable construction material, However, once there’s a comm- and most of the needed materials for ercial manned route to orbit, a whole living in space can be found in lot of possibilities will be opened up. asteroids and comets. The first thing up for grabs will be The main asteroid belt between lucrative contracts to service the Mars and Jupiter may contain only 4% International Space Station. There are of the Moon’s mass, but it is the ease also numerous proposals for space of access that makes it attractive. hotels, but aside from tourism, what There could be hundreds of small can you usefully do in Earth orbit? human colonies all running mining Well, there are hundreds of operations, and trading with other universities and corporations that colonies for materials they don’t have compete to get their research projects access to. The availability of plentiful on the limited number of space supplies of raw materials could see agency missions. Presently, if their huge orbital cities develop, that will project needs human input, all they house tens of thousands of people can hope for is that an astronaut will living permanently in space. These be able to find time for it during the could be orbiting the Sun with the mission, but they would be love to be asteroids, close to their raw materials, able to send up their own researcher or they could be set into elliptical to be fully dedicated to the project. orbits that would take them between There are many areas from medical Earth and the asteroid belt at regular research to materials science where intervals, picking up or dropping off this could be of huge benefit. There people at the Earth end of the orbit, are also manufacturing processes that and building new sections to allow for benefit from weightlessness, so low population increase at each pass of cost access to space might make these the asteroid mines. commercially viable. It’s possible that By this stage I’m sure we’ll also our future space hotels will have a have a permanent settlement on Mars, wing off to one side for researchers. and we may even have started Will we one day have giant terraforming the planet to make it rotating stations like the one from more Earthlike. Thicken the atmos- 2001: A Space Odyssey? I don’t know – phere a little, and add some it possibly depends on how long it greenhouse gases, and it could warm takes us to get beyond Earth orbit, for to the point where you could go once we do it’s questionable how outside with just an oxygen mask much need there will be for such a instead of a spacesuit. Of course, the station. environmentalists will be up in arms Once we do get beyond Earth, and about destroying the ecosystem of I’m sure we will, we’ll be faced with a Martian bugs... whole new set of challenges. Ships will I’m sure this brings us well need to be totally self contained with beyond the next fifty years. Where will the ability to deal with any emergency. we go beyond that? The gas giants and They will need to repair themselves, the outer Solar System would certainly fabricating replacements for anything be possible, but will we have the

27 motivation to go there? The huge seems only a matter of time before volumes of gases in the atmospheres one that could be habitable by of Jupiter and Saturn might be one humans is found. At that point, the reason. These could be used to fuel temptation might just be too great to interstellar spacecraft. expand beyond our own little system. Will humans ever head for the It’s perhaps a little sad how few of stars? Well, that’s a tough one. Patrick Moore’s predictions have come Assuming we don’t discover faster- to pass. The next few years will either than-light travel any time soon, it’s see the blossoming of private manned going to take a very large leap of faith spaceflight, or will see us retrenching to get in a spaceship when you won’t back to an Earthbound species. I be around to see its destination. certainly hope for the former. Would you want to condemn your It may take more than fifty years – descendents to a difficult life in a possibly a lot more – but as a science cramped, dangerous environment? On fiction fan, I have to believe mankind the other hand, extrasolar planets are can have a future among the stars. being discovered at such a rate that it

In my own view, the important achievement of Apollo was a demonstration that humanity is not forever chained to this planet, and our visions go rather further than that, and our opportunities are unlimited. – Neil Armstrong, 1999

28 THE BRITISH SPACE PROGRAMME Nicholas Hill

pace means many different things to dred minutes, passing over Britain one many different people. For some, it is a day; a satellite built in Britain, S the thrill of astronauts orbiting the launched by a rocket designed and Earth in the International Space built in Britain, and launched into Station or stepping foot on the Moon; orbit from a site in Australia. The for others, the spectacle of the giant satellite was called Prospero, and the rockets that launch them there. For launcher called Black Arrow – built in the scientist, there are the stunning a hangar in Cowes on the Isle of pictures from the Hubble Space Wight, tested at the Needles at the end telescope or the pictures of volcanoes of the island, and transported to on Saturn’s moon, Io. For the men in Woomera for its launch. the pub, there is Sky television; and There are two questions: how did One of a series of there is the even more successful but we ever come to have a satellite images taken by more overlooked revolution in launcher in the first place, and why British space communications. What was Britain’s did we abandon it? enthusiast Robert role in all of this. In the early 1950s, it became Harrison. His Icarus I want to concentrate in the main apparent that the days of the strategic Project in 2009 utilised a helium on a corner of Britain’s history now manned bomber were soon going to weather balloon and long forgotten by anyone but a be over as a consequence of the a Canon PowerShot handful of enthusiasts: the launcher progress being made on surface to air camera, launched programme of the 1950s and 60s. missiles. It soon became clear that the from his back garden Unknown to the man in the street, a ballistic missile would replace aircraft. in Swindon, Wiltshire. satellite circles the Earth every hun- In those days, Britain still saw itself as

29 the early 1950s, Desmond King-Hele was asked to investigate the poss- ibility of reconnaissance from satellites – but, of course, at that time there was no way of launching a satellite. That didn’t prevent him from investigating the possibility of a launcher based on a first stage using Blue Streak, a second stage using a rocket called Black Knight, and a small solid fuel third stage. Indeed, he went as far as calculating the payload – approximately one ton in low Earth orbit. He wrote this up on a paper dated May 1957 – five months before Sputnik was launched into orbit. An Australian first one of the ‘Big Three’, and if a missile These studies were developed day edition was needed to deliver the ‘inde- further so that when the Government commemorating the pendent deterrent’, then we would announced that Blue Streak was to be launch of an ELDO have to go ahead and develop one. converted to a satellite launcher, Europa rocket at This was easier said than done. Saunders Roe had an impressive Woomera in 1969. Britain had spent a good deal of time brochure prepared for what it called and money on missile work, but this Black Prince. This was an unofficial was almost exclusively defensive, name – in Ministry papers it was resulting in the deployment of such referred to by the more mundane title missiles as Bloodhound (in service in of BSSLV, or Blue Streak Satellite the UK from 1958 until 1991, and in Launch Vehicle. Again, by the stand- Switzerland until 1999). After long ards of time, it was a very competent debate, it was decided to use launcher – a ton into orbit in 1960 was American technology – Rolls Royce a substantial payload. acquired the S3 motor from The Ministry of Aviation draw up a Rocketdyne (part of North American schedule whereby the first orbital Aviation, who had produced the attempt would have taken place in Merlin engine under licence in the 1964. But political and financial war), anglicised it as the RZ1, and realities intervened. It was all very redesigned it as the RZ2. Two of these well for the Government to decide to motors were to power the missile. The convert the missile into a satellite technology for the tank was the same launcher, but how was it going to be as that of the Atlas missile, and was to paid for? Total development costs be built by de Havilland Propellers. were put at around £60 million – The complete vehicle was to be called which might sound peanuts today, but Blue Streak. can be multiplied by a factor of Blue Streak was a controversial around twenty-five to put into today’s military project, although the reasons inflated currency, making one and a for that are better discussed half billion, at a time when Britain was elsewhere. Suffice to say that in April a good deal less well off than it is 1960, it was cancelled as a military today. The Ministry of Defence were project. At the same time however, the not going to fund it, the science Government announced that budget certainly could not afford it development would go ahead as a (the development costs would have satellite launcher – but whether this swallowed up the entire UK science announcement was to deflect criticism budget without blinking), and the that the money spent so far had been Treasury was chafing at paying for wasted is an open question. even the ‘tick over’ costs. And herein lies one of the inter- There was another possibility: esting parts of the saga. The Royal international co-operation. Find Aircraft Establishment (RAE) was a someone else who would be prepared large autonomous Government to shell out for the development costs. establishment in Farnborough – Commonwealth countries were soun- famous in its time for, among other ded out, but apart from Australia, things, the investigation of the which was providing the facilities at crashes of the Comet airliner in the Woomera, there was no interest – 1950s and the role of metal fatigue. In perhaps an indication of how little

30 significance the Commonwealth had a 50:50 mixture of UDMH and normal become by then. France, on the other hydrazine, again pressure fed, using hand, was very much interested. A helium under pressure. There were party of French officials toured the three chambers, one main chamber British rocketry facilities in Sept- and two smaller ‘vernier’ chambers. ember; parties of British technical Europa’s performance was about the experts visited Paris. In January 1961, same as the earlier Black Prince a brochure for an Anglo-French design, but two years later in launcher was produced, with the gestation. British second stage replaced by a The first phase of the develop- French design, and with a small ment programme began with the British third stage (although one firing of three single stage Blue interesting variation was a third stage Streaks. A dummy nose cone was designed by Saunders Roe using liquid added for ballast, and the vehicle’s hydrogen/oxygen). A conference was appearance if it had been developed then held at Lancaster House in as a missile would have been very London to persuade other European different. With the exception of a countries to join the consortium. hiccup in the last few seconds of the To say that the rest of Europe was F1 flight, they were textbook launches. lukewarm would be an under- F1 succumbed to ‘slosh’ – this statement – there was very little happens when the vibrations of the enthusiasm for the project, but one by rocket cause the liquid fuel to slosh one they came on board, and by 1962 back and forward in the tanks. If the the preliminary convention had been frequency of the vibrations is the signed to set up the European same as the natural slosh frequency, Launcher Development Organisation, resonance occurs, and the sloshing or ELDO. As well as Britain, France suddenly becomes much greater. The and Australia; Germany, Italy, Belgium sloshing eventually defeated the and the Netherlands had joined, autopilot’s attempts to keep the making seven members in all. vehicle on course, and it suddenly ELDO was a text book case of how tumbled end over end. Despite this, not to set up a joint technical prog- the vehicle stayed intact, leading ramme. The Secretary General was a someone to remark that it must have politician rather than a technical man; been built too strong! indeed, there was no one in overall Later flights had less success. F4 technical command of the new was Blue Streak with dummy upper vehicle, christened Europa. The story stages, and the launch began goes something like this. The British successfully enough, but then the converted all the old Imperial Australian Range Safety Officer, in a measurements of Blue Streak into rather controversial decision, decided metric, and arrived at Woomera with it was heading outside the range their manuals written in English. The boundaries and pressed the destruct Brits, of course, could only speak button. F5 was a repeat of F4, but with English. The French, who were a happier outcome. Then came the building the second stage, arrived launches with live French and German with their manuals written in French, stages, which all failed as the upper and would speak only French. The stages refused to ignite or simply Germans, responsible for the third exploded. Finally, on the tenth launch, stage, arrived with their manuals all the rocket stages functioned as written in German, and presumably designed – but ... the test satellite had to be trilingual. As for the failed to reach orbit. The fault this Italians, who were providing the test time lay in the Italian part of the satellite and its fairings... design. The French second stage used The fairings were supposed to be dinitrogen tetroxide with UDMH jettisoned during the second stage (Unsymetrical DiMethyl Hydrazine). burn. A cable ran from the fairings There were four chambers, and they down to an electronic timer, con- were pressure fed rather than pump nected via a plug and socket. This had fed, which meant relatively heavy fuel worked successfully on previous tanks. Pressure for the tanks was launches (before the third stage provided by a steam generator. The exploded, that is), but this time it German third stage used dinitrogen failed. Post flight analysis by the RAE tetroxide with Aerozine 50, which was discovered the reason. Previous plug/

31 launcher lost control after around a hundred seconds and broke apart. Post flight analysis revealed another problem: electrostatic charges had built up on the fairings; the air inside had been heated in the ascent, and in the low pressures the charge was able to arc across to the third stage, disrupting the electronic guidance. The technical review panel set up by ELDO was scathing about the engineering of the German stage (which today seems something of a surprise) and of the earthing of the electronic systems. The report concluded that: “...the main technical problems lie in the third stage. Its design is complicated and its wiring needs to be thoroughly revised. Its integration has been particularly deficient. Three major systems in this stage have not been qualified: the sequencer, the middle skirt separation system, and the guidance computer. The latter, moreover, which is a prototype product, is not flightworthy.” After eleven failures, Europa was abandoned. The tank section of Blue Streak F12 lies in the jungle of French Guiana, its stainless steel still gleaming. From the ashes of Europa, the phoenix of Ariane would emerge. The technical failures of ELDO were matched by its political failures. The project had been instigated by a British government trying to find a use for a failed missile, but the Con- servative government had been replaced by Harold Wilson’s Labour administration in 1964. The nose cone of Blue sockets had been connected and The Wilson government was not a Streak, Britain’s disconnected several times. This one fan of the rather grandiose projects it abandoned missile was new, and fitted well. Too well. The had inherited: there was an economic project, at the air trapped between the plug and crisis, and the Treasury had opposed National Space socket was sufficient in the near the likes of Concorde and ELDO from Centre in Leicester, vacuum of high altitude to blow the the outset. Now it was to receive a England. plug out, disconnecting it. The lack of sympathetic hearing. Wilson believed a retaining ring says something about that Britain’s technical talents would the engineering standards of the be better employed elsewhere – which vehicle – exacerbated by each indi- is a reasonable point of view. Un- vidual country being in charge of its fortunately, the UK was bound to own particular section, without Concorde and ELDO by international anyone in overall technical command. treaties – the compensation it would This was not quite the last flight have to pay if it were to abrogate these of Europa – a new purpose built treaties might well outweigh the cost launch site had been constructed at of completion. Instead, the Gov- Kourou in French Guiana. Europa had ernment embarked on a policy of foot been extended by the additional of an dragging, hoping to kill ELDO as a apogee stage to enable it to put a result. One of its first acts was to satellite in geosynchronous orbit, and renegotiate the financial terms – to an equatorial launch site was needed. demand its money back (a tactic that Lift off was successful, but the would be used by a later Prime

32 Minister in rather similar circum- a vehicle powered by four Rolls Royce stances!). RZ2 motors instead of the two of Blue The situation was further exa- Streak. This was quite a sensible cerbated by the French. To be fair to option, but not really acceptable the French government, it was one of politically. It was dismissed on the the first to recognise the imp-lications grounds that Europe lacked ex- of geosynchronous com-munications perience in liquid oxygen/kerosene satellites, and for this Europa, or technology (it is hardly the most ELDO A as it was also referred to, was sophisticated of technologies!) and quite inadequate. In 1965, the French because it “represents from the proposed aban-doning ELDO A and engineering standpoint a compromise replacing it by a much more advanced with the EUROPA I and II vehicle design, ELDO B. This would have system”. The RZ2 motor was one of liquid hydrogen/oxygen upper stages. the few features of Europa that had In true French style, they announced worked right from the outset! The that they would stop funding ELDO A, winning contestant was a French since it no longer represented value design, and ‘Europa III’ would become for money. Britain responded by Ariane – but that is another story. saying that the treaty specified ELDO HSD (Hawker Siddeley Dynamics, A, and not any other design. Thus the into which de Havilland had become French were refusing to fund ELDO A; subsumed) came up with some last the British were refusing to fund gasp attempts to keep Blue Streak ELDO B. Legally, the UK Government going. One proposal was to use the were correct. ELDO B was held over as American Centaur upper stage – the an aspiration for the future. first liquid hydrogen rocket developed Indeed, the British went further, in the US. Technically quite inter- and said they would fund ELDO A and esting, and with a useful payload – but only ELDO A, since that was what they a complete lack of interest from the had signed up. The hope was the Government. To be fair, finding a result would be the collapse of ELDO. launch site might have been a Instead, the Wilson Government found challenge, as the French would itself paying out a lot of money for probably have been unwilling to allow something it knew to be quite in- the use of Kourou. adequate. The technical failures put Another idea was to strap three pressure on the budget, which meant Blue Streaks together side by side. The further rows about money. ELDO motors of all three would ignite at lift lurched from crisis to crisis, with the off, but the outer two would top up British managing to alienate the other the core section during flight, so that six members quite effectively, to the when empty, they would drop away despair of the Foreign Office. leaving a fully fuelled Blue Streak to Somehow ELDO survived, due carry on upwards. This idea might mainly to the tenacity of the French, have been technically feasible, but until the failure of F11 at Kourou. At would have been an expensive option, that point, it became clear that not as Blue Streak did not come cheap. only was Europa inadequate as a Another limitation would be that the launcher, but also that after nine years factory at Stevenage only had the of development and eleven launches, capacity to built four Blue Streaks a it still was incapable of putting a year! This was taken up by Stephen satellite into orbit. A new requirement Baxter in his story ‘Prospero One’, was drawn up for a Europa III (Europa originally published in the science II was the original vehicle plus the fiction magazine Interzone (#116, apogee stage needed for a geo- October 1996), of which more will be synchronous orbit), to be capable of said later. putting at least 750kg into geo- But what has this to do with the synchronous orbits. real Prospero and the Black Arrow One option was an uprated launcher? This story runs parallel to Europa. Various configurations were the Blue Streak story, with one very modelled, with various strap on important connection. boosters and liquid hydrogen upper The technology that ended with stages. They would have fulfilled the the cancellation of Black Arrow began criterion, but at considerable cost, and back in German during the Second with a vehicle incapable of being World War. As well as the V2 or A4, stretched any further. Another was for the Germans were working on other

33 rocketry projects – one being the the Ministry of Supply, and based at rocket propelled fighter, the Me163 or Westcott in Buckinghamshire. There Komet. This used hydrogen peroxide were the Alpha, Beta and Gamma (as known as High Test Peroxide, or series of motors. HTP) as a oxidant, and the British The idea of Rocket Assisted Take became interested in hydrogen Off (RATO) soon died as jet engines peroxide technology for rocketry and became more powerful. The idea of other uses (one being submarines!). the rocket interceptor did not, and the One problem was that hydrogen Air Staff issued a requirement for peroxide needed a catalyst for de- such an aircraft. Saunders Roe, based composition, and the catalysts used in Cowes on the Isle of Wight, insisted had been distinctly messy. The British that a small turbojet was also needed solution to the problem was both to ‘get you home’ once the rocket fuel unique and elegant. The HTP was was exhausted, and were awarded the forced through a silver plated nickel contract, producing the SR53. This did gauze, the silver acting as the catalyst. exactly what the Air Ministry had The gauze was not that thick – a asked for – but the snag was that such matter of a few centimetres. At the an aircraft was by now inadequate, as other end of the gauze, the HTP had it was too small to carry radar, and so been converted to steam and oxygen could only operate in daylight and at a temperature of well over 500°C. good weather. A larger aircraft with an Indeed, the HTP could be used in this interception radar was needed, and fashion as a monopropellant, but this Saunders Roe came up with the P177, was not very efficient. A much better also with a de Havilland Spectre idea was to inject a fuel such as motor. kerosene into the hot gases, which Development of the P177 was well would burn in the liberated oxygen. A under way when the much maligned further advantage was that there was 1957 Sandys Defence White Paper was no need for any external ignition published. The P177 was one of the device: at those temperatures the fuel projects cancelled by Sandys, but it is burned spontaneously. The ratio of easy to see why. The nuclear threat HTP to kerosene was 8.2:1, meaning was moving from bombers to missiles the kerosene tank was very much – interceptor fighters were then smaller than the HTP tank. redundant. In addition, the UK had Any choice of rocket fuel involves spent a lot of time and money some degree of compromise – as developing guided missiles, and the indeed does any engineering decision. (highly successful) Bloodhound Rocket fuels are generally extremely surface to air missile was about to be corrosive and need very careful deployed. Missiles are less flexible handling. Often the fumes are than manned aircraft, but once poisonous. Some are cryogenic. deployed, the cost is minimal. There Compared with many other fuels, HTP was no contest. was relatively easy to handle if the To return to ballistic missiles ... correct precautions were taken. when Britain, America and the Soviet Certainly the British safety record was Union were first developing long very good. It also had the advantage range weapons, there were many that if spilled, the best way to get rid unknowns. One of these was the re- of it was simply to flood the area with entry problem. water. To send a warhead over a distance Although Armstrong Siddeley had of 2,000 miles or more means that it produced two rocket motors powered will send most of its trajectory in the by liquid oxygen (the Snarler and vacuum of space. It will also be Screamer), in 1952 the decision was travelling of speeds well in excess of taken that all future UK liquid prop- four kilometres per second. The ellant motors would use HTP. Many problem comes when it re-enters the small motors were developed, mainly atmosphere at the other end. As for rocket assistance for aircraft – the everyone knows, most meteorites are Sprite, Super Sprite, and the Spectre vapourised when they hit the atmo- from de Havilland, the Skorpion from sphere. (The heating is usually attrib- Napier, the Stentor from Armstrong uted to ‘friction’, but it is not: the Siddeley, and so on. HTP motors were majority of the heat produced comes also developed at the Rocket Pro- from adiabatic compression of the air pulsion Establishment (RPE), part of in front of the vehicle.) There were

34 two questions: what shape should the body of a nuclear warhead. The RAE at re-entry vehicle (REV) take, and how Farnborough opted for the low drag should it be protected from the heat? entry body. A sphere is aerodynamically un- There was only one way to find stable: it will rotate in a spiral fashion. out whether the design was correct – The alternative shape was a cone with fire a model REV out into space and a rounded base. This could be used so see what happened when it came that it entered blunt end first (‘high back. That needed a reasonably drag’ configuration) or sharp end first substantial vehicle to propel it that (‘low drag’). Examples of the ‘blunt high. First thoughts revolved around end first’ would be the Mercury, the use of solid fuel motors, but the Gemini and Apollo capsules. The ones available were all too small – heating effect was not so severe for they would have to be clustered The body of a Black the high drag configuration, as it together in a very clumsy arrange- Knight rocket, the UK’s began to lose speed in the higher, ment. The alternative was a liquid first home-grown attempt at a re-entry more tenuous, part of the atmosphere. fuelled rocket. vehicle circa 1955, at The low drag configuration had its The contract to build the vehicle the Royal Museum of peak deceleration much lower in the was given to Saunders Roe, who Scotland in Edinburgh. atmosphere, and as a result got hotter already had experience with HTP from It is approximately 11 – but decelerating as late as possible the SR53 rocket interceptor. The metres tall. was a better option for the re-entry motor was to be made from four Gamma chambers which had already been developed at RPE, and the job of developing the new motor, called the Gamma 201, given to Armstrong Siddeley. The vehicle was christened Black Knight. Code names for projects being developed by the Ministry of Supply were made from a colour of the rainbow plus some totally random word. Thus, for example, the war- heads considered at different times for Blue Streak went under the names of Orange Herald, Green Granite, and Red Snow. Other exotic names included Violet Club, Indigo Hammer, and Yellow Sun. Black Knight was not a military weapon, but a research vehicle – hence ‘Black’ instead of a rainbow colour. Thus also Black Arrow and Black Prince (the satellite launcher which combined Blue Streak and Black Knight). ‘White’ was never used. Black Knight was a very simple vehicle, as its main function was to lob the dummy re-entry heads as high as possible. There were four small fins for aerodynamic stability, with pods on two of them. One pad contained a transponder to help in tracking; the other held an electronic flash gun, set to flash every four seconds. Long exposure photography (all the flights were held at night) could record the vehicle’s track for post flight analysis. Each of the four chambers could be swung in one plane only, which was radial to the vehicle. By swivelling them in combination, the vehicle could be steered in any direction. The Black Knight body was built in Cowes, and the engine bay in Anstey,

35 Rocket testing site, High Down on the Isle of Wight.

near Coventry, where Armstrong light. The low drag re-entry head had Siddeley had a rocket motor testing another useful property: it was what site. The assembled vehicle was then would today be described as ‘stealthy’ taken to High Down, at the western – in other words, it had a very low end of the Isle of Wight, overlooking radar cross section. On the other the Needles rocks and lighthouse. hand, the wake of ionised gas behind Here it was erected in a gantry, filled the head did reflect radar. Further with fuel, and static fired (without series of experiments followed, being released!). The vehicle was then codenamed ‘Gaslight’ then ‘Dazzle’, shipped out to Woomera for firing. All working in co-operation with the the launches bar one took place on Americans. Improvements were made clear moonless skies, so that the to the vehicle: a small second stage progress of the re-entry head, looking was added in the form of a Cuckoo exactly like the streak of a meteorite, solid fuel motor. Unusually, this was could be photographed and tracked not fired on the way up, but on the by radar. way down, just before re-entry. It was The first launch, BK01, took place thus mounted ‘upside down’ on top of in September 1958: it appeared to be a the main stage. text book launch until the last few Another improvement made was seconds of flight, when the vehicle the replacement of the original appeared to explode. This was another Gamma chamber by the small classic example of how something chamber from the Stentor motor relatively trivial could wreck a flight. which powered the stand off missile, Apparently a false signal was picked Blue Steel. This new motor, the up by the aerial to the self destruct Gamma 301, was more efficient and mechanism, triggering the explosive was capable of a higher thrust. charges which fired manganese In all, twenty-two Black Knights dioxide into the HTP tank. were launched, all but one as part of The second flight, BK03 (BK02 the re-entry studies (BK14 was used to never flew) was a completely success- test the range facilities for ELDO). RAE ful re-run of BK01. had long considered ways of con- The first flight with a separating verting Black Knight into a satellite re-entry head was BK04, which val- launcher, but the vehicle was really idated the low drag choice. Whilst too small to be used as the main Black Knight had now done the job for stage. Thus evolved Black Arrow – a which it was designed, several other ‘small satellite launcher based on interesting phenomena had come to Black Knight technology’, as the RAE

36 might be due in part to the ‘start stop’ nature of the funding. There were four launches in all: two failures, two successful. R0 failed probably due to a break in one of the control wires in the feedback mechanism to one pair of engines. Instead of making small corrections to keep the vehicle on track, the motors swung back and forward to their full extent – something that can be seen quite clearly in the film of the launch. This eventually overpowered the control system, the vehicle tumbled, and was destroyed by the Range Safety Officer. R1, a repeat of R0, was a complete success. Neither of these were orbital attempts – each had a dummy third stage. R2 was the first orbital attempt, which failed due to a leaking valve in the second stage. The loss of gas needed to pressurise the HTP tank meant the motors shut down pre- maturely. By this time, the new Conservative Government of Edward Heath had decided to cancel Black Arrow, but R3 was almost ready for launch. Per- mission was given for this to go ahead, and so Britain’s only satellite was launched after the programme had been finally cancelled! Prospero will continue to orbit for at least another hundred years, and passes over the UK roughly once a day. But Prospero also showed up the limitations of Black Arrow. It weighed a mere 66kg. By the time allowance had been made for the structure, solar cells, battery, tape recorder and trans- A Black Arrow launch report put it. mitter, there was very little left over vehicle in the rocket Black Arrow’s first stage motor, for any useful scientific payload. park at Woomera, the Gamma 8, was effectively a And that, as they say, was that. South Australia, doubled up version of the Gamma 301 Now for the post match analysis. similar to the one that from Black Knight, using eight Firstly, was the UK correct to launched the UK’s chambers in place of the four of Black abandon Black Arrow? The answer, first satellite in 1971. Knight. The second stage also built on sadly, is yes. The point of a satellite work Saunders Roe had done for other launcher is to launch satellites – and projects, and was powered by a two the problem was that no one in the UK chamber motor. The only new part of wanted to launch satellites. The main the design was the solid fuel third functions of satellites are earth stage, the Waxwing (the Superintend- observation and communications. ent at the RPE was a keen ornith- Earth observation means mapping ologist, hence all the motors which terrain, military reconnaissance, and were produced there were named weather observation. There is no way after birds!). Black Arrow could launch a payload Black Arrow was approved late in which might fulfil any of these the life of the Conservative Gov- functions. ernment; it was put ‘on hold’ for a Could an enlarged version of Black long time by the new Labour Gov- Arrow been of more use? There were ernment – indeed, some of the two very sensible proposals (from the problems in the unsuccessful firings technical point of view!) which

37 involved replacing the first stage related. motor with a motor using the large An anecdote: When the initial chamber from the Stentor motor. This development of Blue Streak had would give a thrust of around begun, the Ministry of Supply wrote to 92,000lbs as against 50,000lbs, the Treasury asking for money to making for a much more capable begin work on the ‘underground launcher. But even for this vehicle, launcher’ (what would today be called there would have been few, if any, a missile silo). No, said the Treasury, it applications. hasn’t been decided by Ministers. But Could the UK have built a the latest Defence White Paper launcher large enough to put a specifically mentions that Blue Streak respectable payload into geostationary will be launched from underground orbit? Up to a point. The RPE at sites, replied the Ministry of Supply. Westcott had test fired several rocket Well, said the Treasury, we’re not sure motors using hydrogen as a fuel; whether a White Paper actually building a second stage for Blue constitutes official government policy, Streak similar to the American and so we’ll come back to you on that Centaur or the ELDO B design would one. be technically feasible. Even so, strap The Ministry of Supply got its on boosters for Blue Streak would money in the end, but all these have been needed: four stripped down constant queries and delaying tactics Black Knight vehicles would have done by the Treasury meant that the that job nicely. The resultant vehicle project moved much more slowly than might have been able to put 700– it need have done – and often delays 800kg into geostationary orbit – quite end up costing more money in the good by 1970s standards. A bigger long run. hurdle would have been an equatorial Another anecdote: this concerns a launch site, although the tip of Treasury memo on Black Knight, Australia – Cape York, near Darwin – written soon after the military had at one time been considered by cancellation of Blue Streak: “On ELDO. balance I think I recommend approval Could the UK have put an of this proposal – just. Any doubts I astronaut into orbit? The Gemini have are stilled by one further capsule, which is about the smallest consideration which may appear manned vehicle capable of doing cowardly but is, I believe, realistic: I anything useful, weighed around do not think we have any hope the 8,500lbs. The original Black Prince present moment of killing the Black design had a payload of around Knight series of experiments, and 2,400lbs, and even with tweaking the even if we had, to persuade Ministers design as much as possible, it still to do so now would ruin our chances would not have been enough. The of killing the Blue Streak launcher liquid hydrogen design mentioned project, for we could not hope to above could probably have coped, but persuade Ministers to face the at a cost. Developing such a vehicle political odium of two further would have cost at least £250m, at a cancellations close together. Black time when the entire annual defence Knight, although pretty expensive … budget, amounting to 7% of GDP, was is at least working successfully. It has around £2,000m. had a good press. It provides a useful The subject of money brings us to vehicle for a certain amount of another major obstacle: the Treasury. incidental upper atmosphere research The influence of the Treasury in the of the kind Universities can share in. British Government should never be Its cancellation would be very strongly underestimated. All Government opposed in the Ministry, would draw a spending has to go through and be great deal of adverse criticism in authorised by the Treasury. The public – after all, we have now got system in America whereby Congress- over the most expensive early stages men or Senators can insert projects – and would only save less than £1m a into legislation simply does not exist year. Far better, I think, to keep our in the UK. And the Treasury was – and sights on the larger fish, Blue Streak, still is – implacably opposed to Blue than to spoil Ministerial appetites with Streak (both military and civil this smaller fry.” versions), Black Knight, Black Arrow, Firstly, the condescending tone of ELDO, and anything else vaguely space ‘a certain amount of incidental upper

38 atmosphere research’. Secondly, political sense, and most would have ‘pretty expensive’. There is a story – been very hostile to the Wilson probably apocryphal – that when the Government, blaming it for most of Americans asked how much the whole the cancellations. Part of Baxter’s Black Knight programme and re-entry story involves the burning of studies cost, they were told that the blueprints and the cutting up of partly total was £10m. They queried this. built Blue Streaks at Hatfield whilst Surely a zero had been left off the the count down proceeds at Woomera figure...? And finally, the cynicism that for the first and only launch of British forcing the cancellation of Black astronauts – a clear reference to what Knight would jeopardise the chances was thought to have happened after of killing Blue Streak. the TSR2 cancellation, although Similarly, progress on Black Arrow whether that is an urban legend or not was delayed and hindered by the is difficult to discover. (The full story Treasury. When a project looks as with annotations by Simon Bradshaw though it may well be cancelled, then can be found at homepage.mac.com/ the Treasury will only allow funding sjbradshaw/baxterium/prospero. on a three monthly basis – in other html ) words, avoiding long term financial Ironically, however, it was not the commitment. Thus if Saunders Roe Wilson Government that cancelled had spent their allocation ten days Black Arrow but the new Heath early, then they had to sit and twiddle Government in 1970. Baxter fingers their thumbs – or go on spending the Right Honourable Anthony money without any guarantee that Wedgwood Benn (as Tony Benn was they’d get it back. known as in those less demotic days) Never underestimate the power of as one of the villains, but as Minister the Treasury! of Technology, he was one of the But why was the Treasury so much supporters of Black Arrow. (A Trea- against the programmes, and why sury memo in the late 1960s bemoans were Whitehall and Westminster so the failure of their latest attempt to apathetic? The Wilson Government engineer the cancellation of Black came to office at a time of financial Arrow, and notes that the “Minister of crisis, a crisis that deepened and Technology defended his corner very resulting in devaluation of the pound successfully.”) in 1967. Projects such as TSR2, The reasons for the cancellations Concorde, and ELDO were regarded as were much more mundane: neither ‘prestige’ projects, wildly expensive, Black Arrow nor Europa could put a and with little or no hope of an useful payload into orbit, there was no economic return (and they were right market for satellites in Europe, and about that!). But the antipathy was not Whitehall saw the projects as money confined to the Government; in post pits – and who can blame them? colonial, post imperial Britain, the Could an indigenous launcher generation brought up on Dan Dare programme be restarted? In a word, and Biggles had turned their back on no. the Final Frontier. We were no longer Although Britain still has engin- interested in competing in the Space eers, they lack what is called ‘tacit Race. knowledge’ – in other words, people Baxter’s story, referred to earlier, who have worked in a particular field is of interest, not from a literary point know what works and what doesn’t. of view, but because it encapsulates Newcomers have to find out by trial perfectly the view held by many of the and error. engineers who worked on the projects A second problem is the lack of at the time. They felt betrayed by the facilities – rocket test sites need to be politicians, who were not interested – remote from civilization. Can you indeed, were actively hostile to – their imagine, in this NIMBY age, the shiny new toys. This was due to not reaction to a proposal to re-open the knowing the reasoning behind the rocket test site that overlooks the cancellation of the projects, and lack Needles lighthouse? of information gives rise to rumour And a final problem – where in the and speculation, which can often grow world would you launch it from? into conspiracy theories of one sort or But for anyone who thinks Britain another. Engineers are often very is no longer in the ‘space business’ - conservative in both a social and a just Google ‘SSTL’.

39 THE SPACE RACE, MARK II Liam Proven

nless you’re a denialist, hiding behind It's all likely to go epically pear- a wall of adamant refusal to listen to shaped real soon now. As in, within a U mere facts and solid peer-reviewed generation or two, not centuries into science with the creationists, you have the future. to face up to something. But we’re all devoted science We’re fucked, we residents of fiction readers here, right? The path to Planet Earth, unless we pull a very big the future lies off-planet, as any bunny out of a tiny and pretty spotty twelve year old fan knows. shagged-out hat. Rockets taking off on a pillar of fire, It’s not all about climate change, just like Heinlein and the hypothetical although that’s heading off the rails deity intended, taking us to other even faster than the most pessimistic planets. predictions. We’re also busily filling The snag is that while the gov- the oceans with rubbish, chopping ernments throw money at bigger and down and burning all the forests, better toys for obliterating hapless turning streams and lakes into Middle Eastern countries (but not each Virgin Galactic’s stagnant stinking green slimeholes other, ’cause we’re all friends now – Sir Richard Branson with fertiliser runoff, and generally honest) and bailing out criminally shows off the WhiteKnightTwo overpopulating the hell out of a inept and avaricious bankers, and aircraft that will rapidly faltering planetary ecosystem. occasionally witter on about pointless carry SpaceShipTwo And never mind not showing any sign crap like biofuels, the big ones are into sub-orbital space. of stopping or even slowing down – oh unfortunately not spending much on David Malkoff, 2008. no, the rate of rapine is accelerating. space any more. It’s cheaper to send

40 robots than people, but the current The big small but famous and foreseeable generations of robotic company is, of course, Burt Rutan’s space probes are little more than very- Scaled Composites of Mojave, slightly-smarter remote-control cars California, whose SpaceShipOne was with fancy cameras. They’re all well lifted to the edge of space by White and good, and I for one hung on every Knight and thence made a short word of news of Spirit, Opportunity, ballistic hop out of the atmosphere, Cassini, Beagle and the others, but and thus won the Ansari X-Prize of ten they aren’t going to be building any million US dollars. And this was back asteroid mines in a timeframe anyone in 2004 when ten million bucks was a reading this is likely to live to see. lot of money, although even then they India and China are both throwing spent more than two and a half times resources at spaceflight, partly as a that much to actually build the thing. badge of national pride, but both are Happily, Microsoft co-founder Paul enormous struggling countries with Allen footed the bill. incomprehensibly vast numbers of Allen is one of the cooler com- hungry mouths to feed. puter billionaires: after a near-fatal It’s the fat bloated old West that fight with cancer, he stopped running has the big money and the thriving computer companies and started satellite industry, but neither India’s doing fun stuff, like building the Chandrayaan-1 nor China’s Shenzou-5 world’s coolest private yacht, the are poised to shake up the current Octopus, with two helicopters, four hegemony of big American aerospace tenders and a submarine with its own companies with both government and onboard dock. Blofeld would be sick military backing, and the European with jealousy. Some of Allen's other Space Agency and Glavcosmos, interests are distinctly relevant to Russia’s contract agency for space Journey Planet and SF fandom in affairs, trotting along behind. general, though: he finances Seattle's But several smaller American Science Fiction Museum and the Living private companies are. In particular, Computer Museum, an important two of them have already got there collection of historic vintage and repeatedly gone into space. computers. And directly salient to this What’s interesting is the relative article, he also bankrolled Scaled amount of hype that the two have Composites. achieved. I don’t for a moment wish to Both companies have designed knock Burt Rutan and his company. and built two different models of What they have achieved is fantastic: spacecraft: an early, limited version SpaceShipOne was a remarkable and a successor model that’s bigger, technological feat which blurs the more powerful and has considerable lines between aviation and space future potential. Other than that, flight. With the backing of Virgin, it though, the techniques they are using should become commercial, taking could hardly be more different. tourists into space slowly and One uses radically non-traditional comfortably. The snag is, they won't technology, focussed on lobbing stay long. tourists out of the atmosphere for a SpaceShipOne and the as-yet- few minutes, but with no way of unfinished SpaceShipTwo are space- actually putting anything there planes, but they can only reach a little permanently. Despite this, it has over Mach 3 and skip out of the received a massive amount of press atmosphere. To get into orbit, you coverage, worldwide publicity, need to be doing better than Mach 25 massive backing and investment from which requires about sixty times more both individuals and large companies. energy. The other is doing things in the The Space Transportation System traditional style: big white phallic orbiter, better known as the Space symbols that take off like, well, er, Shuttle, slows down markedly to re- rockets – only lighter, cheaper, built enter at about ten times that speed – with new technology and a judicious which would instantly incinerate a leavening of commodity parts. returning Virgin Galactic flight. Smaller, faster, cheaper than Low Which goes to show that jumping Earth Orbit ever was before. And the briefly into space is impressive, hard chances are that unless you're a space to do and jolly expensive, but staying nut, you've never heard of them. there is a very great deal harder.

41 INTO THE SUPERUNKNOWN the DEATH OF HARD SF, AND WHY THIS IS POSSIBLY A GOOD THING Alastair Reynolds

sn’t it about time we took Hard SF off area inside a nightclub, one which into the back yard and put it out of its already has a strict door policy. I misery? I don’t hate Hard SF, though. It It’s not been very well lately, it would be strange if I did: I grew up would seem. It has a dreadful image reading the stuff. In fact, my early SF problem, and besides, there’s that reading consisted of little else, to the embarrassing business of the name. point where I had scant idea that this It’s supposed to connote the serious, was a highly specialed subgenre, scientifically-rigorous aspect of the rather than simply the thing SF was. subgenre, but all it succeeds in doing Blame Arthur C. Clarke, I suppose – it is sounding like a big, crudely- was his short fiction that did it. Early scrawled Keep Out sign nailed to the exposure to seminal Clarke works big SF treehouse. The genre, already such as ‘Transit of Earth’, ‘Into the an impenetrable form to many, Comet’ and ‘A Meeting with Medusa’ apparently feels the need to cordon wired the perceptual inputs of my off a part of itself that’s even more formative brain in such a way that ‘Transparent Blue’. exclusive, with even more stringent meant I could really only ever think of Sue Jones, 2009. entry-requirements. It’s like a roped- that type of story as the default mode

42 of SF. Later exposure to Asimov’s whims of supernatural entities. The Robot stories offered only a variation world of tomorrow would be unlike on the same theme. that of today, and not merely by the SF, for me – as defined by these accumulation of many trivial details. It templates – was fiction set in a could even be radically, wrenchingly technological, generally space-bound different. It might be good, it might be future, in which characters – usually bad, it might be a combination of the engineers or explorers of some sort – two, but it would not be merely the were put in situations where a present writ larger. mystery or dilemma would be first This is still the mode of SF that I presented, grappled with, then find it most easily to get excited resolved, all in terms of scrupulous about, and the type most likely to attention to scientific accuracy. Being induce genuine sense of wonder. It’s eight years old, I didn’t know very also, not accidentally, the type of SF much in the way of actual science. that I’m perhaps best known for What I did have – hazily – was a writing. I’m not surprised by that; notion that there was a fundamental given that I have a background in the distinction between this thing called sciences, and my stuff does tend to science and this other thing called involve future settings and a goodly magic. Dragons, wizards, warlocks, amount of technology and space and their ilk failed to interest me then, travel, it’s entirely understandable and they don’t hold much fascination that I’m assumed to be both an for me now. admirer and producer of SF at the Scientist figures on the other hand Hard end of the spectrum. But my – Spock, the Doctor – loomed large as relationship with the form is a good role models. The SF I was reading deal more complex than that, and served both to validate this rationalist encompasses as much dissatisfaction worldview and to offer gentle as it does unbridled affection. instruction in the scientific method: I don’t read much of it now. There bold enquiry, the ruthless sifting of is perhaps less of it being written than possibilities, the discarding of false thirty or forty years ago, but my hypotheses. It also offered me my turning away probably has more to do first dawning insights into the sheer with changing reading tastes than the mindblowing scale and antiquity of amount of the stuff still out there. the universe. It was through SF that I Interzone, which I started reading in grasped the existence of other my late teens, had a lot to do with planets, other solar systems, the widening my reading tastes within the possibility of other intelligences genre. Gradually I began to realise that elsewhere. I might have decided to a lot of Hard SF was in fact quite become a scientists without SF to spur crudely written, as well as being me on, but if nothing else it made that politically unpalatable. Interzone also career path all but inevitable. opened my eyes to Cyberpunk, which I broadened my reading somewhat was shaking up the entire field at the as I went into my early teens, but not time. The works of William Gibson, radically so. I devoured James White, Bruce Sterling and so on struck me as Bob Shaw, Harry Harrison and Larry radically fresh and exciting, much Niven, and in my later teens I more so than the sort of “Trad” Hard discovered the likes of Gregory SF I was finding at the time. Benford, Joe Haldeman and John Round about then I seem to Varley. All men, of course: there have remember trying to read an issue of never been that many women writers Analog, and being appalled at how drawn to the form, although there are babyish and crude the contents more now than there were back then. seemed. It struck me as pandering, And not all of these writers were wish-fulfilment rubbish. In hindsight, I purveyors of Hard SF by first suspect I probably wouldn’t have inclination, but much of their work nearly so negative a reaction now – I was still grounded in that same sense was probably blanking on what was of speculative rationalism I’d first enjoyable and fun about some of the encountered in Clarke and Asimov. stories – but at the time Cyberpunk Science and technology would seemed to offer everything that I bootstrap each other into the future; wasn’t finding in Trad Hard SF. It was the world was knowable and governed sharp, invigorating stuff about the by laws of nature, not the capricious real, coming future, not some lost

43 dream of conquering the universe. None of these works was exactly Better still, there was a lot of actual Hard SF but they were un-equivocally science and proper science fictional science fiction. Looking back now, in speculation going on. I was getting the these genre porous, post-New Weird, sense of wonder jolt from Cyberpunk post-slipstream times, some of them that Trad Hard SF just wasn’t probably look harder than they did at delivering any more. In fact, it seemed the time. The critic and editor Gardner fairly obvious that Cyberpunk wasn’t Dozois has often spoken of “Core SF” necessarily functioning as an or “Centre-core SF” and I would alternative to Hard SF, it was showing suggest that these works sit squarely what Hard SF ought to be like, done in that tradition. They may not be properly. bolted together with the engineering This was rammed home by the rigour of a Hal Clement or Robert publication of Sterling’s magnificent Forward novel, and they may not have Schismatrix, a solar-system space the didactic intent of an Asimov or opera as drenchingly supersaturated Clarke story, but they are essentially with real scientific speculation as books set in universes which run anything I’d ever read. If Clarke and according to scientific principles. Asimov had rewired my brain at eight, Impossible or unlikely things may Schismatrix came in, opened my skull happen – space may get folded, and did the same thing again when I people may travel back in time – but was twenty. As I’ve said elsewhere, it the implication is that these are not felt as if every previous SF novel, even supernatural events; they are things the ones I’d loved and been influenced that happen according to physics as it by, had been done in black and white. is understood at the time that the The effect for me was as if Sterling books are set. Crucially, though, it had found SF’s colour switch. There doesn’t have to be a physics that was, for me, absolutely no going back. dovetails easily with our own. It might If Schismatrix blew my mind, it even be a physics that appears wrong had the unfortunate effect of or nonsensical based on our current rendering almost all conventional understanding. forms of Hard SF hopelessly dated Isn’t this contrary to the very and ineffectual, at least to my cyber- spirit of Hard SF? Shouldn’t we be hardened sensibilities. Unless it championing SF that tries as hard as it stimulated the same area of my brain can to operate within the parameters Sterling had managed to light up for of established science, rather than the first time, I couldn’t take it opening the floodgates to fanciful seriously. Generally, most of it was speculation, speculation that might found wanting: I read little of Clarke’s well take us into the realms of what, later novels and bailed out on Asimov. in the here and now, appears to be The problem was one of impossible? suspension of disbelief. Schismatrix I suppose it depends on what you had that rare quality of convincing want your SF to do. Let’s consider, strangeness. It was realistic enough to briefly, two very different works about feel plausible, but tinged with the colonisation and growing sufficient exoticism, sufficient off- independence of Mars, in the coming hand wierdness, to have the authentic centuries. On the face of it, Kim texture of direct reportage from the Stanley Robinson’s Martian Trilogy future. That quality, more or less, was (beginning with Red Mars) i s what I was now looking for in SF, and thematically similar to Greg Bear’s not finding in sufficient quantities. It Moving Mars. Both works begin with a was out there, if I looked hard enough: scrupulously realised vision of a especially in the wave of books that settled Mars, drawing on cutting edge might loosely be termed post- planetary science and an acute cyberpunk. I got it in Michael awareness of the social and Swanwick’s Vacuum Flowers, Greg technological challenges that would Bear’s Eon, and a handful of other need to be met in establishing a works, generally with futuristic, space- colony on another world. Both works borne settings and an emphasis on then go on to explore the political exploring ideas about human tensions between Mars and Earth, as evolution. It’s a shiver of recognition, the colony struggles towards a feeling that this is what the future independence. In both cases, colonial will actually feel like. delegates travel back to Earth so that

44 we may glimpse the contrasts between something of a paradox. The first kind the old and the new worlds – a of hard SF – typified by Red Mars – template that goes at least as far back endeavours to honour our existing as Clarke’s Imperial Earth, and understanding of the universe by probably further. sticking close to respectable In other respects, though, the “textbook” science. There’s nothing works couldn’t be more different. wrong with this at all, and if you’re Despite some stuff later in the trilogy writing about life fifty years from about theory of mind, Robinson pretty now, or even a hundred, it might be a much assumes that our current view perfectly valid strategy. It’s more or of the universe is correct and, if not less the pattern I’m following in the complete, then nor is it seriously current book in progress. deficient. The underpinning physics of Yet what about a book set several Blue Mars, which extends into the centuries, or even thousands of years twenty third century, is essentially in the future? Given the pace of that of Red Mars, which commences scientific discovery since Einstein, it only a decade or so from now. There seems highly unlikely that our current have been breakthroughs in materials view of reality is going to be the end science, a pulsed fusion spacedrive, of the story. In fact, we can be fairly advances in longevity, and there’s sure that it won’t be. The theories that some talk about an interstellar replaced the Newtonian cosmology – expedition, but there’s been no General Relativity and Quantum shattering paradigm shift, nothing to Mechanics – offer an incomplete compare with either relativity or description of reality, and what’s quantum mechanics in the twentieth worse, they refuse to play nicely century. together. While there have been any Moving Mars soon takes a very number of potential candidates for a different tack, depicting the Theory of Everything, we don’t seem emergence not just of a new, radically to be all that closer than we were strange kind of physics – one which is thirty years ago. In fact, with being researched by scientists on Mars cosmologists worrying about Dark – but the application of that physics Energy, with string theory tieing itself to bring about a startling new in ever more complicated knots, and technology. This new applied science particle physicists not quite sure permits the characters to literally what’s going to pop out of the Large teleport Mars out of the Solar System. Hadron Collider, the game is still This is obviously impossible given our thrillingly wide open. current state of knowledge, but in Besides: even if by some chance Bear’s book it is our worldview that is we did stumble upon a Theory of shown to be incomplete. Crucially, Everything tomorrow, we wouldn’t Bear makes it all appear plausible, at necessarily know if we had, and it least while we’re turning the pages. wouldn’t stop people proposing Although the events that happen are competing theories that they claimed truly bizarre, they flow logically from were in some way more self-consistent the underlying premise of his new or elegant. We’d also be no closer to imagined science. One of the ways in understanding a whole raft of which Bear lends his inventions complex emergent phenomena, such credibility is to latch onto some as consciousness or the origins of life. genuine real-world speculative idea Everything in our experience of and use it as an imaginative seed from the last three hundred years suggests which wilder speculation can flourish. that our current worldview will be In Moving Mars, that seed is the replaced by something else, and that intermittently fashionable notion that this process will continue. Of course, the universe can be understood as a our current science might continue to kind of self-sustaining software be useful for certain applications, just program. The scientists in the book as Newton’s equations are still learn how to hack into this program applicable to many situations. But we and selectively tune some of the know they’re not exactly right. It parameters. seems to me that any SF novel set in For me, this third kind of SF has the reasonably distant future ought to always seemed ultimately the most reflect this inevitable stampede of convincing in conveying the elusive intellectual progress, even if that feel of futurity. In fact. here lies means scaffolding the book with a

45 kind of make-believe pseudo-science. or landing slender, tail-finned rockets This might only require a single amid the craggy mountains of the sentence in the entire book – after all, Moon. The technical details were we don’t spend out entire waking lives rigorously conceived given the talking about GR and QM. Well, most knowledge of its time, but most of of us don’t. But in my view, if the those stories are now little more than writer wants to suggest a convincing quaint period pieces. Smith’s work, by futuristic ambience, some thought has contrast, remains thrillingly, to be given to this. intoxicatingly readable. Because it was It’s here that I find Trad Hard SF so weird, because it was so detached lacking – mostly – because it so often from what might be called the shirks this imaginative burden. It’s orthodox fifties worldview, it’s largely not just in the science, either. Social immune to technical obsolescence. In institutions, organisations, politics their very bizareness, his stories feel and customs are bound to mutate in like authentic documents from some unexpected, unsettling ways. Much impossibly-distant era of cat people, will stay the same, but much will alter. planoforming and psychic projection. Any SF which doesn’t reflect this Much the same could be said of welter of change never has a hope of Herbert’s Dune, which, for all that it feeling genuinely futuristic. For me, a may have been somewhat tarnished successful SF novel has to feel like an by its sequels, still has a freshness – a immersive, 3-D experience. I may feel compelling strangeness – lacking from disorientated and a little perplexed, many contemporary works. There but I shouldn’t feel like I’m reading a isn’t much in the way of the sober thinly-disguised version of the extrapolation of trends going on in present, scaled up to interstellar Dune, and the science of space- proportions. So here’s that paradox: warping and spice ingestion doesn’t the more “realistic” a futuristic SF bear much resemblence to anything in story aspires to be, the less “realistic” our current knowledge-set. But one it will seem. If you make something suspects that Dune doesn’t feel any rigorously plausible all the way more or less futuristic than it did through, it will be plausible but it forty years ago, for all that the fore- won’t feel convincing. ground narrative is barren of modern In other words, I want some weird SF tropes such as nano-technology with my fries. and computers. It’s also still There’s a problem here, of course. massively popular, and not just within By and large its weirdness that puts the established SF readership. It’s a people off SF. And I’m saying it needs book without an obvious shelf-life. to be more weird to work. That it The same can’t be said of all of needs, on some level, to feel im- Clarke’s novels. Earthlight, A Fall of plausible. If it doesn’t, it’s not being Moondust, The Sands of Mars – even adventurous enough. later novels such as the afore- I think there’s a bit more going on mentioned Imperial Earth – seem little here than just tailoring SF to meet my discussed now, but these are precisely exact reading tastes, although I would those which fit most neatly into the obviously approve of that. An mould of Hard SF as an exercise in adherence to rigorous Hard SF, I’d rigorous, extrapolative speculation: argue, is the enemy of longevity. Trad Trad Hard SF, in other words. By Hard SF withers and dies with contrast, when Clarke allowed the appalling swiftness, and doesn’t get science to bend a little, as in re-read very much. Childhood’s End, The City and the One of my favorite short story Stars, even Rendezvous with Rama writers is Cordwainer Smith. Smith’s and 2001: A Space Odyssey (all of work, in my view, represented a kind which contain intrusions of human or of controlled lunacy. It can’t, in any alien “superscience”) he produced reasonable sense, be called Hard SF. works which, while dated in some While Smith was churning out nuggets aspects, are still read and admired of beautiful madness like ‘The Game now. The mystical side to Clarke’s of Rat and Dragon’, or ‘The Crime and imagination, while perhaps in conflict the Glory of Commander Suzdal’, his with the Hard SF writer’s instinctive near-contemporaries in the hard SF desire to keep things as notionally arena were writing thrilling stories “correct” as possible, bestowed on about bolting together space stations, these books an imaginative dimension

46 which has enabled them to engage SF – and perhaps nowadays we don’t with generations of new readers. No even need the qualifying “core”. This one really cares about the “dusty is just SF doing what it does best: moon” hypothesis upon which A Fall taking inspiration from science, of Moondust is based, since we now playing fair with it to a degree, but know that it was incorrect. We also not being afraid to break the rules or know that the real Mars isn’t at all like assume that science will evolve, often the Mars of The Sands of Mars even into something unrecognisably though that book was written with the different, if that’s what the story best knowledge available at the time. requires. As Soundgarden put it, it’s Yet the themes of cosmic trans- about going into the “superunknown.” cendance and loss of innocence I don’t hate Hard SF, no. running through Childhood’s End and Occasionally, when someone like Greg 2001 still resonate with us now. Egan pulls out all the stops, I can still What I’d argue is that Clarke’s get a real jolt of sense of wonder from most enduring works weren’t actually it – or at least a sense of bracing Hard SF at all, but something softer, cosmic vertigo. Egan’s hardly a typical more yielding – something that places practitioner of the form, though. them closer to Dune, or even Yet at its most inflexible, when it Schismatrix, than it does to – say – Hal displays a stubborn refusal not to Clement. Once or twice I’ve jokingly break the laws of physics, or deviate proposed the emergence of something from the holy scripture of the called Ductile SF, to identify the fertile contemporary textbook, Hard SF risks middle-ground where Hard and Soft being a creative and commercial dead- SF interact. However, since I’ve end. It fails as immersive fiction, already suggested that any kind of because it lacks the necessary intr- ring-fencing within the genre isn’t a usion of weirdness. And because it particularly useful thing, I’ll let that fails to escape the prison of the time one quietly die. (Total number of it was written, it has little hope of Google hits for “Ductile SF” as of June longevity. 2010: one, in an interview with me. I So perhaps the time really has think the universe may be trying to come to put it out of its misery. I tell me something there.) don’t think that would be at all a bad Rather, I think, Gardner Dozois thing. said it already when he spoke of Core

You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering. – Wernher von Braun 47 NOTES: `SPACE IN` SPACE OPERA Dick ‘Ditmar’ Jenssen and Bill Wright

The following observations were culled are concerned, could correct). But to from Dick ‘Ditmar’ Jenssen’s cover object on those grounds would be nit- notes in Bill Wright’s fanzine picking, because the stories are meant Interstellar Ramjet Scoop, December as entertainment and the plethora of 2009, available at eFanzines non-scientific and bad-scientific (efanzines.com) errors are irrelevant to Hamilton’s intentions. ontrary to what many older fans Dick ‘Ditmar’ Jenssen might have believed when they were C young, early Space Opera by such Postscript: greats as E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, A.E. Van Vogt and Ed Hamilton is not science Post-Sputnik fans are fiction. For science must conform to right to question current well-established, validated theory, or at least, if supposedly The science in tales by belonging to future discoveries, must Edmond Hamilton. be at least plausible. So little real science is present in those early Now that we’ve ventured past stories that they must be labelled Earth’s sheathe of air ‘fantasy adventure’. But they do possess one key, defining character- We know a lot more about istic of SF; which is a sense of wonder. what is ‘Out There’. If one can shove disbelief well below the conscious level, then the early Bill Wright epics of space opera are pure, immersive, entertainments – set in what must be an alternate universe. For example, in Ed Hamilton’s ‘Captain Future’ stories, every planet, and almost every moon in the solar system is habitable and inhabited. Each possesses an atmosphere, breathable by humans. Temperatures may be high or low, but never ineluctably inimical to human life. Vast oceans of water, some in an unceasing turmoil, exist even on the outermost planets – Uranus’s moon Oberon is one such storm-raddled location. Sentient alien life, some of high intelligence, abounds through the solar system. Interplanetary space flight is a hazardous undertaking because of the incredibly vigorous space-currents in the luminiferous ether, which tend to converge to a curious volume in the solar system where ships are trapped, to float eternally adrift in The Sargasso Sea of Space. And so on. These are errors which any of today’s final-year high school students studying physics can identify (and so far as watery oceans on the outermost planets and moons

48 Mission: Atlantis Ang Rosin

hen Mum suggested we all travel to and then we looked at the schedule: Florida this year to celebrate her 60th we’d booked our holiday for just W birthday my family’s reaction was about the worst time if the intention “Disney!”, while mine was “NASA!”. of the holiday was to see a rocket in I’ve an interest in the history and flight. Disappointed, I abandoned the politics of space travel more than a idea of a family day out and my “good gosh golly wow look at the size brother and I decided we’d definitely of that rocket” wish to see hardware go there for the day just to see the but the Space Shuttle is the first facility, taking anyone else who mission that took place in my seemed enthusiastic at the time with personal time frame. I remember the us. initial manned launch (I was ten years Then Eyjafjallajökull erupted in old), the Challenger disaster and the Iceland and our much-anticipated, launch of Hubble. Plus I knew that the once-in-a-lifetime, family celebration programme was coming to an end was just another casualty of that soon and that this could be a damn volcano. The kids were crushed, vanishing opportunity. Mum doubly so, but we rescheduled In the year running up to the trip I the holiday. It turned out to be at just worked on my family to try and drum the right time to see the last launch of up enthusiasm for a day out but the Space Shuttle Atlantis. ‘The Rocket Garden reaction was mixed. By Christmas I I checked that tickets were still at Night’. Samantha had a few people agreeing it would be available and we booked a day trip for Decker, 2010. cool if we could see a shuttle launch the whole extended family, much to

49 The reconstructed Saturn V.

Mum’s disgust as she was hoping she encouraged to arrive as early as could stay at home with my eight year possible. We got there at about old niece who professed no interest in 7.15am giving us two hours free space at all. before we had to queue up for our The volcano smiled favourably on coach to the viewing site. We hopped our rebooked trip and we found on to a guided bus tour with the first ourselves in a Kissimmee hotel car stop the Apollo/Saturn V Center. park at 5am on 14 May, waiting for Immediately herded into a darkened our tour bus. Kennedy locks down on informative experience and already shuttle launch day and there are a lot fairly jaded (we’d been on the Disney of people to move around so you are treadmill for a week by now) I expected the children to develop information fatigue. How wrong could I be? After a fascinating introduction to the history of the Apollo missions we passed into the second part of the display – a simulator. Not the traditional “this is what it’s like to fly in space WHEEE!” type of simulator, oh no, this was a countdown in the Apollo firing room, complete with the effects of the rocket firing on the building. Incredible! By now, completely over- simulated, we passed into the main body of the exhibit, centrepiece a reconstructed Saturn V. Good gosh golly WOW! Look at the size of that rocket. Stretching the length of the floor with the command module tiny in the distance the sheer scale of space operations suddenly became Been there, done reality and my family would have won that, bought the gold if we entered a synchronised t-shirt... jaw-drop competition. We wandered

50 around gawping at the other notable bearing discussion. artefacts of the missions. Which brings to me to try and By the time we’d finished describe the launch itself. It’s an marvelling at space suits, peering at overused phrase but I think the best moon dust and buying space tat for way of putting it is “truly awesome”. gifts it was 8.30 and with my wanting Even I was wondering how good to go to the Rocket Garden and something would have to be to justify everyone else wanting to see the IMAX a six hour wait to stand six miles presentation we set off back to the away but not only did it live up to, it main visitor complex. There we exceeded my expectations. With the missed the IMAX presentation by firing of the boosters the inert dot about five minutes, had a look at a swells and comes alive, surrounded by mocked-up Space Shuttle (which, the steam from the combination of frankly, is big but it’s no Saturn V) the rockets and the noise dampening and got into the bus queue. This system… As it lifts into the air there stretched all the way back to the is streak of light and you forget that Rocket Garden, meaning that at least I you are so far away that you can’t got to see that. Two hours later we hear anything, well, until thirty were at the causeway, the closest seconds later when the sound wave public viewing area to the launch site reaches you, the ground rumbles and at just six miles away. you watch the ship arc into space with After queuing again, this time for the huge grin on your face. My grin a burger and a drink, we settled down stayed in place even through the long, for the wait. Atlantis was on pad 39A long queue to get back off the and a distant dot, albeit a fairly causeway after the launch. sizeable one. The wait was enlivened The pro-trip adults named it the in my case by the public address highlight of the holiday so far. My system and I closely followed the niece declared it an excellent day, my countdown hold points (we got there nephew loved it, and even Mum was after T–3 hours) meaning I was aware, impressed and was glad we’d done it. but my family not, that a ball bearing This was the final launch for had been found at T–9 and holding, Atlantis, but there are two more would it be a mission critical scheduled launches, Discovery on 1 problem? It turns out not and the November 2010, and then Endeavour countdown continued, after about will be the last shuttle mission, twenty minutes of fascinating ball scheduled for 26 February next year.

The final launch of Atlantis on STS-132, 14 May 2010.

51 WOMEN IN SPACE the PROGRAM THAT ALMOST STARTED TWENTY YEARS EARLIER Anne Gray

n April of this year, four female their job in space.” astronauts had a rendezvous in NASA started admitting women to I space. Dorothy Metcalf–Lindenburger, its astronaut program in 1978. Stephanie Wilson, and Naoko Twenty years earlier, people were Yamazaki went up on the space already asking how women would shuttle Discovery to the International perform as astronauts, but the Space Station and met Tracy Caldwell prevailing attitudes were very Dyson, who had arrived on a Russian different at the time in the United Soyuz capsule three days earlier. It States. was the most women who have ever Not as much so in the Soviet been in space at the same time, but Union, where the first woman the media gave it almost no attention. astronaut, Valentina Tereshkova, flew Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate into space in the Vostok 6, on 16 June administrator for space operations, 1963. But she was not a pilot, her said, “Maybe that’s a credit to the performance was unfairly criticized, ‘Space… The Final system, right, that I don’t think of it and the next Soviet woman to go into Frontier in HDR’. as male or female? I just think of it as space was not until August 1982, Peter Talke, 2010. a talented group of people going to do when Svetlana Savitskaya participated

52 in the Soyuz program. Savitskaya was At the time there was no plan at a pilot, and was also the first woman NASA for women to become astro- to take a space walk, in July of 1984. nauts, but Lovelace spoke as though Her first flight was followed less than the Women in Space program was a a year later by the first trip into space very real possibility, and the women of the American astronaut Sally Ride, who were approached or who heard on 18 June 1983. about and volunteered for the tests Ride was a member of the first mostly felt that their participation group of female graduates of the could help start such a program by NASA astronaut training program. demonstrating they were good The other five women who completed candidates for the astronaut program. the training in that group were Nineteen more women were recruited Shannon W. Lucid, Margaret Rhea and tested; eventually thirteen women Seddon, Kathryn D. Sullivan, Judith A. including Cobb passed the same Resnik, and Anna Lee Fisher. Ride was initial tests as the ‘Mercury 7’. Over the first into space, followed by time they became known as the Resnik, Sullivan (who was the first ‘Mercury 13’. American woman to walk in space, in It might be tempting to think that October of 1994), Fisher, Seddon, and outstanding female pilots were few then finally Lucid – all in space by and far between in 1960, but the truth June of 1985. In 1995, Eileen Collins is far from it. A women pilots’ was the first female shuttle pilot and organization call the Ninety-Nines had shuttle commander, on STS-63. She over 1,300 active members and was followed in 1997 by shuttle pilot seventy chapters across the country Susan Still Kilrain and in 2007 when that year. The FAA reported ten pilot Pamela Melroy became the thousand women involved in aviation second shuttle commander, on in America at the time, 782 of which STS-120. held commercial pilot’s licenses. The A total of fifty-four women have All Women’s Transcontinental Air orbited in space, out of some 517 Race (AWTAR) and other races, people who have gone out there, and dubbed “Powder Puff Derby” races by the Soviet and American women the male media, attracted serious named above were certainly pioneers. competition each year, with women But there were other women who competing either alone or in two- aspired to be astronauts, and were person teams. even tested and found capable, way Just over a thousand women had back in 1962. They had a groundswell served the US in World War II as part of public support, but the astronaut of the Womens Air Service Pilots program only accepted Air Force test (WASP) civil service organization, pilots, which women were not allowed which was directed by the famous to be, and NASA declared it had no pilot Jacqueline “Jackie” Cochran. requirement for female astronauts. Those pilots were instrumental in That blocked resources to a testing ferrying military aircraft during the program that could have put women war, though they did not receive in space almost twenty years before military benefits when they returned we finally did. home. All of them had their commercial pilot’s licenses, however, 50 Years Ago and many found work in industry or Dr. W. Randolph Lovelace II was as instructors after the war. They chairman of NASA’s Life Sciences influenced and inspired younger committee in 1959 and had helped female pilots such as Cobb. develop the fitness tests for the ‘Mercury 7’ – the seven men chosen to Institutional Barriers to Testing be astronauts in the Mercury space Women for Space program. Curious as to how women Some of the testing of the male would perform in the same tests, in astronaut candidates took place at the 1960, Lovelace invited record-holding Lovelace foundation in Albuquerque, pilot Geraldyn "Jerrie" Cobb to New Mexico and some at the Wright undergo the same tests as the men. Air Development Center’s Aero- She accepted, and passed the first medical Laboratory at Wright- phase of tests, then helped make a list Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, of prospective other women pilot Ohio. Another member of the NASA candidates to also undergo testing. Life Sciences committee, Brigadier

53 General Don Flickinger of the Air The Mercury 13 Pass Phase I Testing Force, was also interested in finding Cobb reported for testing at the out how women would measure up to Lovelace Foundation in February of the men. After a failed petition in the 1960. She took seventy-five different late 1950s to get NASA to consider tests over the course of six days to evaluating women as astronauts, he measure her physical capability and joined Dr. Lovelace in attempting an endurance. Cobb’s test results were end-run around NASA. They felt that revealed at an international space if they gathered data that supported medicine symposium in Stockholm women’s performance as astronauts later that year; Cobb was found to and then took it to NASA, their have “successfully completed the scientific position would be tests given to the seven men in the irrefutable. They recruited Cobb to be United States men-in-space project,” their first test subject. the New York Times reported. A note by Lovelace accompanying the test “There is no question but that women results announced that Cobb required will eventually participate in space less oxygen per minute than the flight therefore we must have data on average male astronaut, indicating them comparable to what we have female astronauts would require less obtained on men.” oxygen by weight than male ones. – Dr. Randy Lovelace, 1960 “We are already in a position to say General Flickinger sought use of the that certain qualities of the female testing facility at Wright-Patterson to space pilot are preferable to those of give Cobb access to the spaceflight her male colleagues.” simulation evaluations and –Dr. Randy Lovelace, 1960 psychological exams he had designed for testing the ‘Mercury 7’ astronauts. After the Stockholm report, Cobb’s He was hoping to set up a “girl testing was covered in a Life astronaut program” starting with magazine exclusive arranged by Dr. Cobb and a set of twelve other women Lovelace. A Life photographer had pilots he and Cobb had compiled a list attended the testing to get photo- of, but that effort was unsuccessful. graphs, so the article was a fully Unfortunately an earlier test run illustrated photographic layout. The Flickinger had helped set up for fifty- media began referring to Jerrie Cobb, eight year old pilot Ruth Nichols pictured here posing with a Mercury caused consternation in the Air Force Space capsule, as the nation’s first (possibly due to media attention) and “lady astronaut.” consequently left them unwilling to Dr. Lovelace was good friends have more women use their test with Jackie Cochran, who found out facilities. about his plans to test more women Nichols held records in speed, at his Lovelace Foundation in Albu- altitude, and distance, and was one of querque after Cobb passed her tests. the few women in the country to have Cochran offered to fund trans- flown a jet plane. In 1959 she portation and housing for those sampled some of the Wright-Patterson women to come be tested, and made astronaut tests, including weight- some suggestions of her own for lessness, isolation chamber and further candidates. She went on to centrifuge tests. She handled the tests feature two of the candidates she easily and urged Air Force personnel suggested, the attractive twins Jan to use women as astronauts, an idea and Marion Dietrich, in a Parade they apparently reacted to with magazine article that described the horror. That set the stage for denial of testing and labeled Jan and Marion Lovelace and Flickinger’s request to “First Astronaut Twins.” Cochran also use the same systems to test any described her own involvement with women. Aeromedical leadership at the program in the article and invited Wright Patterson told Flickinger women pilots to write to her directly outright that they did not think a girl if they wished to be considered as astronaut program should be candidates. The article suggested pursued. Flickinger told Lovelace he women probably would not be gave the whole program over to him astronauts for at least six or seven since the Air Force would not support years, but stated that participation in it. the tests “may” lead to a role as an

54 astronaut. verify this with later neurological Ultimately, thirteen women testing). Merriam and McConnell were passed the tests at the Lovelace simply told that they had not passed Foundation. They were all impressive the tests. Miller had sinus problems pilots, as you will see in the table at and decline immediate surgery to the end of this article. All of them correct the problem, which may have aspired to be astronauts. Only one, been the cause of her disqualification. Gene Nora Stumbough, expressed After the first phase of tests, significant doubts that the women in Cobb arranged for the second phase, space program would amount to psychological testing, to be held at the something. Three of them gave up or Oklahoma City Veterans Hospital, in lost their jobs in order to participate the lab of Dr. Jay Shurley. Jerrie Cobb, in the program. Rhea Hurrle, and Wally Funk were The six women who participated able to participate in these tests, in the initial testing but were not which included time in one of the few approved to continue were Virginia true isolation chambers in the Holmes, Women’s Aeronautical country, a sensory deprivation tank Association President Pat Jetton, Fran that suspended the subject in liquid, Bera, who had more Powder Puff simulating weightlessness while Derby wins than any other woman, eliminating sound and light from the construction firm pilot Joan Merriam, environment. The women broke all who at twenty-four was the youngest previous records for tolerance of woman in the country with an airline sensory deprivation and isolation, transport rating (ATR), Georgianna lasting upwards of ten hours in the McConnell, and Betty Miller. Holmes isolation chamber with no ill effects. believed she had been eliminated due Previously six hours in the tank was to her claustrophobia. Jetton and Bera thought to be the limit of human Jerrie Cobb alongside were both told they had a brain tolerance. In comparison, John Glenn a Mercury capsule abnormality (neither were able to lasted 3 hours in the Wright-Patterson isolation chamber, which was pitch- black but otherwise a normal room furnished with a desk and chair and writing supplies. The male astronaut candidates were never tested in a sensory deprivation chamber. Other members of the Mercury 13 were invited to optionally take the Phase II tests, but most focused on arranging their schedules to make time for Phase III of testing, which was to include spaceflight simulation tests. Lovelace arranged for Phase III tests to take place at the US Naval School of Aviation Medicine, in Pensacola, Florida. Cobb again lead off the group, reporting for testing in May. Originally the rest of the testing was scheduled for July, but Jackie Cochran, who had not been previously involved in planning that phase, stepped in and requested that testing be put off until September so she could attend it and observe. Lovelace bowed to her request. Unfortunately before the tests could proceed in the Fall, the Navy got wind that NASA might not support the women in space program (probably via a letter from Cochran, who around that time notified Lovelace she was too busy setting new flying records to attend, herself, anyway). Upon inquiry, NASA reported

55 that it had no requirement for women NASA should permit women into the to be tested, and the Navy regretfully astronaut program. The hearings, withdrew its offer to host the testing, scheduled for three days, were which was canceled abruptly with only shortened to only two. The committee cursory notification to the Mercury 13 heard testimony for women group by telegram. Jerry Cobb was astronauts from Jerrie Cobb and Jane ultimately the only member of the Hart and testimony defending the group who completed the Phase III existing admission requirements tests, though Wally Funk pursued (military test pilot status and an other opportunities for similar testing engineering degree) from NASA’s after the women in space testing George Low and astronauts John program was canceled. Glenn and Scott Carpenter, who After the tests were canceled, Jane probably knew little about the context Hart and Jerry Cobb used Hart’s of the hearing. Glenn said a number of Washington connections to arrange a sexist things about how having men meeting with Vice President Johnson. fly planes and spaceships was just the They argued that women were found existing social order, but ultimately he able to withstand more heat, noise, said he had no objection to women and vibration than men, as well as astronauts, he just didn’t see the more isolation. They weighed less, ate requirement for it. less, and used less oxygen than men The hearing could possibly have per weight. How did it make sense to gone either way, but unfortunately discontinue testing of women Jackie Cochran also testified elo- astronaut candidates? Hart had a draft quently against the idea that NASA’s letter she was hoping Johnson would program was discriminatory. She send to NASA. Instead of signing it, spoke in favor of women astronauts, after they left, he wrote “Lets Stop but only in a program that was run This Now!” across it and put it away. appropriately (by her was the im- Letters from the public followed, plication), that tested and trained however, and in 1962 Congress held a women for some period far in the hearing before a special Subcommittee future, and that did not take of the House Committee on Science resources or attention away from the and Astronautics investigating the men’s space program efforts. A young possibility of gender discrimination politician who was not well-liked in and the question of whether or not the committee took Hart and Cobb’s

A gathering of some of the Mercury 13 group at the launch of Space Shuttle mission STS-63 (piloted by Eileen Collins) on 3 February 1995.

Left to right: Gene Nora Jessen, Wally Funk, Jerrie Cobb, Jerri Truhill, Sarah Ratley, Myrtle Cagle and Bernice Steadman.

56 side of the argument, which might the National Organization for Women have been the final nail in the coffin. (NOW), which continued to petition One way or the other, the chair of the congress to eliminate discrimination committee called an end to the against women in all hiring, including hearings and declared the committee by NASA. Jerrie Cobb also continued to have found NASA’s policies to speak out against NASA’s policies acceptable. That decision would not long past the disappointing be reversed until fifteen years later congressional hearing. when the overall legal climate on The future of the US space sexual discrimination had changed. program is uncertain at the moment, None of the Mercury 13 would be but I believe we can be confident that further tested, nor would they ever go women have demonstrated their into space. worthiness to serve in any space There were a few gatherings of program. The first to prove that were subsets of the Mercury 13 group, but the Mercury 13. They deserve to be the whole group never gathered remembered for that, as well as their together in one place and time. Eileen general willingness to fight sexism Collins invited all of the women to and be outstanding pilots, showing attend her space flight launches as her generations to come how far and fast guest if they wished. Janey Hart, Irene women can fly. Leverton, Wally Funk, Jerrie Cobb, Jerri Sloan Truhill, Sarah Gorelick References Ratley, Rhea Hurrle Woltman and ‘Four female astronauts rendezvous Bernice “B” Steadman gathered to 50 years after first woman in space’, watch the launch of STS-93, in which Times Online, April 5, 2010, by Jacqui Collins became the first female space Goddard Miami. shuttle commander (Myrtle Cagle and www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/ Gene Nora Jessen, unable to attend science/space/article7087600.ece due to ill health). Georgianna The Mercury 13: The Untold Story of McConnell and Fran Bera, who had Thirteen American Women and the also taken the Lovelace tests but had Dream of Space Flight, by Martha not passed them, were also there to Ackmann. Random House, NY, 2003. see Eileen Collins command STS-93 and make their mutual dream finally Women Astronauts, by Laura S. come true. Woodmansee. Apogee Books, 2002. There is little doubt that the efforts of the Mercury 13 paved the The following two pages detail the way for later women astronauts. careers and achievements of the Especially influential was Jane Hart, Mercury 13. who became a founding member of

The Earth is the cradle of humankind, but you cannot live in the cradle forever. – Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, 1895

57 Pilot 1961 Flight Ratings, Degrees and Background and Awards Hours Records

Myrtle “K” Cagle 4,300 Ratings: Multi-Engine, Flight instructor from Airline Transport Rating Georgia. (ATR)

Jerrie Cobb 7,000 Ratings: Multi-Engine, Executive pilot from Instrument, Flight Oklahoma. First flew at 12. Instructor, Ground Earned her private and Instructor and an Airline commercial pilot’s licenses Transport Rating (ATR). at ages 17 and 18. Had flown a Delta Dagger Ferried military surplus TF-102A jet fighter plane. aircraft to countries in Records: (All in Aero South America, Europe and Commander airplanes): Asia. 1959: world record for Awards: 4th American to nonstop long-distance receive the Gold Wings flight; World light plane Award from the French speed record Fédération Aéronautique 1960: world altitude Internationale. 1949: Amelia record for lightweight Earhart Gold Medal of aircraft (37,010 feet). Achievement. 1957: Amelia Earhart Memorial Award. 1958: Named ‘Woman of the Year’ in Aviation. 1959: Named ‘Pilot of the Year’ by the National Pilots Association.

Jan Dietrich 8,000 Ratings: Airline Identical twin with Marion. Transport Rating (ATR) Noted later that Dr. Secrest Degree: University of (one of the test California at Berkeley administrators) indicated she was in the “upper 10% of the 65 astronaut applicants and test pilots who have gone through the astronaut testing programs.”

Marion Dietrich 1,500+ Ratings: seaplane, flight Like Jan, had gotten her instructor pilot’s license as a teenager. Degree: University of Served in the Civil Air Patrol California at Berkeley and ferried planes, sometimes across the Atlantic. In 1961 she was a general reporter and feature writer for the Oakland Tribune.

Mary Wallace At 22, the youngest to be “Wally” Funk tested. From Taos, New Mexico, and thus of interest to physicians since she had been raised at high altitude. Taught military personnel at Fort Still, Oklahoma.

Sarah Gorelick Degree: Denver Engineer and racing pilot (Ratley) University, majoring in from Kansas City. The only Mathematics with minors pilot candidate with such a in Physics and Chemistry. technical background, she hoped to do communi- cations work and build on her experience as an engin- eering assistant at AT&T.

58 Pilot 1961 Flight Ratings, Degrees and Background and Awards Hours Records

Janey Briggs Hart Ratings: Helicopter Wife of a US Senator from pilot’s license Michigan, and a mother of 8 children. Nineteen years of flying experience, including service as a Captain in the Civil Air Patrol.

Jean Hixson 4,000+ Ratings: high-altitude Air Force Reserves officer flying, explosive from Akron. A former decompression WASP, flew B-52s as a test experience low-pressure pilot. Also ferried planes, chamber indoctrination. helped develop automated Degree: Graduate degree pilot measurements for the in education, specializing T-31, and measured weather in Science and conditions from the air. Mathematics, University When she broke the sound of Akron. barrier she was a third grade teacher. She became known In 1957 broke the sound as the “supersonic barrier in a Starfire F-94 schoolmarm”, and C jet plane. developed an aviation curriculum.

Rhea Hurrie Executive pilot with a small (Woltman) aircraft sales and engineering firm in Houston. Participated in air races and had an interest in seaplanes.

Gene Nora Aviation instructor from the Stumbough University of Oklahoma. (Jessen) Later became a demonstration pilot for Beech Aircraft.

Irene Leverton 9,000 Ratings: Airline Forest service pilot from Transport Rating (ATR) Chicago with experience fire-fighting from the air. Charter pilot and flight instructor at a Santa Monica fixed base operation at the time of testing; taking time for the tests may have cost her the Charter work and she later left that job and relocated to LA.

Jerri Sloan 1,200 Commercial Pilot’s Air-race competitor from (Truhill) license, multiengine Dallas who ran an aviation rating, air-race honors. business called Air Services. Experience flying B-52s to test infrared surveillance equipment. Degree: University of Kansas, Aviation

Bernice “B” 8,000 Ratings: Airline Owner of Trimble Aviation, Trimble Transport Rating (ATR) a flight operation in Steadman Michigan. Won all the major Later served as president of women’s air races at least the Ninety-Nines. once.

59 SPACEWAR! VIDEO GAMING`S SPACE RACE Christopher J. Garcia

omputers and space exploration have the fact that science fiction came into always been in a tight embrace. Many greater prominence in the 1950s, C of the most important advances in the especially in the area of film. Yes, I history of computing were for use by know there was SF dating back to the Aerospace. The integrated circuit was early 1900s (I love Méliès!), but for the first put into use on missiles and in most part, young people in the ’50s the Apollo Guidance Computer (the were seeing large amounts of SF film only device that’s been both on the for the first time. It wasn’t unusual to moon and in my car). At least half a have twenty or more different SF films dozen programming languages were showing in different parts of the invented to deal with the needs of country at the same time. There were determining orbits and to handle thousands of B-movies made in the design problems. As the compu- ’50s, and a couple of dozen mainline tational needs of NASA increased, the films as well. It was also at that time computer companies kept providing when the second generation of faster and more powerful com- computer designers were coming of ‘Video Game Night, puters… which were then copied by age; the first generation had largely Invasion from the Soviets for attempted use by their been engineers who had come to Space #2’. Patrick space agency. computing either during or right after Brosset, 2009. It is also interesting to consider the War. These guys were typically not

60 young, many of them being on their been. To this day he’s the coolest guy second careers. The folks who started in the history of video games. Okay, in computers in the late ’50s and early Jordan Rechner of Price of Persia and ’60s tended to be younger, people who Will Wright of The Sims fame might had missed the War but had grown up come close. Nolan has always been a in the early days of TV, researchers star, and he rightly thought that if like Ivan Sutherland, Fred Brooks, video games were going to penetrate Marvin Minsky, Don Knuth were young the arcade, they were going to need guys coming up and out into com- space games. The controls of Com- puting’s wheelhouse in the late ’50s puterspace weren’t easy to work so it and early ’60s. never was a big seller, but you can see It should be no surprise that the it in the movie A Clockwork Orange. first real video game came out of MIT, Another guy, at almost the exact nor that the game was based on a same time, designed a game called space battle. It might shock you that it Galaxy Game. His name was Bill Pitts, was based on the novels of E.E. ‘Doc’ and along with his friend Hugh Tuck, Smith and the Toho films from Japan. they designed a simple version of Steve Russell designed one of the SpaceWar! that played on a PDP-11 first games: SpaceWar!, on the PDP-1 that was then put into a huge con- mini-computer. It’s not easy to call it a tainer. I may be the world’s greatest mini-computer because it was still the expert on the game’s inner workings. size of three refrigerators. I’ve moved Not the technical inner workings but them a few times and there’s nothing the physical nuts-and-bolts, since I mini about them. It had a large round helped Mr. Pitts put it back together screen which made it attractive for to get it up and running. It’s good, a designers to create exciting programs. lot of fun, plays much faster than The game, based on one of ‘Doc’ SpaceWar!, which is also up-and- Smith’s space fights, featured a wedge running at the Computer History and a needle flying through a star- Museum on the original PDP-1. filled background. The stars were also The most important early com- accurate from different points in puter game and the first two arcade space (a program called Expensive games were all space-related. The Planetarium provided that function) early history of arcade games is also and the laws of physics could be full of space: Space Invaders was altered to make the game more perhaps the most important. It fea- challenging or faster. tured attacking aliens and a series of Russell never copyrighted the shields that one could shoot through game (it’s doubtful that he could have if you felt so inclined. Asteroids was at that point), and Digital Equipment hugely significant in the design of Corporation sent the paper-tape out easily controlled games without overly everywhere, leading to dozens of labs simplistic storylines. Galaga was having it on all the time (when there another, and pretty much every time a was nothing important being run). new game came around that pushed This led to so many guys playing it. the technology it was somehow space- It also helped that all of the guys related. Movie tie-in games, like Dark at the various labs and universities Forces from the Star Wars universe, were sci-fi geeks. It’s weird to listen to and console games like StarFox or the Oral Histories our museum Space Harrier, all pushed the collects and to hear almost all of them technological limits. talk about SF and Star Trek and how It never stopped. The first PC the stuff they did was so cool. Ivan games featured plenty of space as it’s Sutherland specifically mentioned always been good for graphics. Games Heinlein, which made me sad, but it like Space Eggs were very popular. The was a different time. Even Linus Tor- text-based games from companies like valds, the man behind Linux, said that Infocom were often SF-themed. Two of he’d always been a big SF reader. He the three biggest sellers, Hitchhiker’s liked Asimov. That was slightly better. Guide to the Galaxy and Planetfall, In the earliest 1970s, Nolan were space-based. In fact, H2G2 was Bushnell designed Computerspace, an probably the most important of the arcade game before Pong which was text-based games. basically a version of SpaceWar! built It appears that when it comes to with a space-age cabinet. Nolan, a video games, space is always a good legend, was super-cool, always had thing!

61 MY LIFE AS A SPACE ALIEN Claire Brialey

emotional reaction rather than an The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly intellectual one. For science fiction, remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled space now serves more to free our many times over many years and under many different imaginations than to create the editorships. It contains contributions from countless conditions for a story in itself. There numbers of travellers and researchers. have been great stories of space travel The introduction begins like this: ‘Space,’ it says, ‘is and space exploration – including big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely some recent ones, like Jed Mercurio’s mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a Ascent and some of my favourite long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just Stephen Baxter novels, which peanuts to space. Listen…’ and so on. successfully work with the stuff of After a while the style settles down a bit and it what went before them in literature as begins to tell you things you really need to know… well as in history – and there have — Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, been fabulous fictional cities and 1979 space stations and other settlements on other worlds. But science fiction for me now works best when it looks at people and societies, using the ’ve written too much before in potential of the future to make me fanzines about space to be able to think more about the present. ‘St. Huberts Star I start from the beginning again. When Even in that context, though, Trail 2.0’. Adam James suggested space as a theme, I being able to envisage new worlds Currie, 2009. was immediately enthused, but it’s an orbiting other planets provides blank

62 canvas for a story – and I don’t mean particularly not when we would be that in the sense of virgin territory getting up before dawn the next day ripe for ‘discovery’ and colonisation. to go to watch Uluru change colour, There are, of course, many works of but I was only planning to go to the science fiction that tell some element Red Centre once so thought I might as of that story; personally I much prefer well wring out of it all the experiences the ones which do not present the the time allowed. What follows here is invaders (American, British or their adapted from our Australian trip extrapolated future analogues) as the report over ten years ago (Banana unquestioned and victorious good Wings #15); I still wish I could guys. But if you can start without the remember the name of the astro- history, geography, culture or even nomer who acted as our tour guide, science that the reader considers because he deserves the credit for all familiar about Earth, a reader can my sensawunda: experience from the outset the frisson Our astronomer pointed out of dislocation and possibilities that several constellations which can’t be such unfettering provides. seen from the northern hemisphere, And that’s also one of the few including Scorpio which, to my aspects of space travel that would considerable surprise, actually looked ever appeal to me: the opportunity to plausibly like the outline of a stand under a different sky at night scorpion. He also pointed out the and see different stars and know North Star (‘under the ground over fundamentally that I was really there’) and explained how to find the somewhere else in the universe. South Pole since it doesn’t have an equivalent star. (It’s easy when you can see the Southern Cross; when you can’t, it calls either for various This is the planet Earth, the planet where we live. It is exercises in advanced trigonometry, … one among millions of others in the universe. And or alternatively to just look straight it’s interesting to turn away from the Earth and up from that tree.) The astronomer imagine that we have a big telescope which will allow was so genuinely enthusiastic about us to look at other stars: stars like ours, but far his job that it was hard not to be stranger than ours. And perhaps on one such star swept up in it; when he got excited somebody is also sitting comfortably with a telescope about the stars and the planets that and is scanning the sky, hoping to catch a glimpse of he could see through the telescopes, old friends. which after all he was expecting to be — Oliver Postgate, Clangers: ‘Visiting Friends’, 1969 there, we knew we were about to see something pretty good. But even the astronomer couldn’t be as enthu- I often look at the sky. I like to gaze at siastic as the three girls from clouds, watching them move and Melbourne who ran out of super- cross and hint at layers of the latives before we even got near the atmosphere. I like to spot the moon, telescopes. ‘Wow!’ they chorused especially during daylight, because it every time he told us what we were reminds me that I’m also standing on about to see. ‘That is so COOOOOL!’ a lump of rock in space and because they repeated every time they actually the thrill has not yet worn off that saw it. And, gifts to satire that they human beings have walked on that were, the real problem with all this one too. I like to see a night sky full of was not concealing my reaction to the stars, for all that many of them are comic effect but that they left me with planes or satellites or random bits of nothing to say. Because it was. space junk – which is a marvel in All I know about Alpha Centauri I itself, really – although I don’t learned from Douglas Adams and generally know what I’m looking at; Robert Sawyer. Until now. Because and I’m a city dweller, so the whole now I have looked through a telescope sodium glare thing means that the at the southern sky and realised that second-best view of space I ever had the reason Alpha Centauri always was during a late-night power cut. looks slightly blurry is not because it The best one, though, was in the is twinkling, as we all know that little central Australian desert. I hadn’t stars do, and not even because my been entirely convinced that a night- contact lenses are fuzzing slightly, time excursion into the middle of but because – just like they said – it’s nowhere was a productive use of time, a binary star system. A binary star

63 system with – and I do realise this is glanced down, in the light of the tautological but I feel I need to torch, and saw the red sand, and Mars emphasise the impact of actually was there too. The impression of seeing this – two stars. Two stars you standing on a Martian landscape was can see so distinctly that when you reinforced so strongly that I kept look away from the telescope and expecting, each time I stepped gaze upwards to prove to yourself towards the telescope, to find the that it’s all really there, you can just Earth waiting for me in the sky. And about make them both out through my head would spin from the wonder the familiar blurriness. Two stars. of it all and my eyes would swim from Alpha Centauri. I mean… two stars! the effort of focusing through both Wow. That is so cool. my glasses and a telescope – at least I And it keeps happening. You look think that was why – and I would step at a long grey smudge through a back to find Mars still above me after telescope and suddenly all the stars all. Standing in the desert in the dark, come out in the rest of the Milky Way. the clarity of reality was suddenly You look at an apparently blank area sharper than the cold. of sky and thousands of tiny, tiny stars are arrayed in front of you in fractal patterns, so far away that they This is space. It’s sometimes called might not even be there any more. It’s the final frontier. (Except that of mind-bending. It’s awe-inspiring. And course you can’t have a final it’s quite beautiful. frontier, because there’d be nothing But we’re islanders, British and for it to be a frontier to, but as Australians alike, and even faced with frontiers go, it’s pretty penultimate. a parade of stars it’s hard not to be — Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures, appropriately insular and stay fixated 1990 on the solar system. Seeing is believing and all that, so I now believe that Mars is red – well, kind of orange I was a science fiction fan before I – and that Saturn has rings, and that got into space. Perhaps because of its Jupiter has stripes and when I can military roots, or perhaps because it focus away from all this stuff in front was all over by the time I was really of it on the lens… oh. And that Jupiter paying attention, I was a late convert has moons. And our own primary to the wonders of the space race, to moon has all these craters, which I the extent that it was only once I was could see so clearly that I expected sitting in a cinema with fellow SF fans Clangers to pop out at any moment, in the mid-’90s to watch the new and it glows and – I realise that if you movie Apollo 13 that I realised I didn’t haven’t had the experience of looking actually know what happened. As I at the sky through a telescope with wrote at the time, for all my friends it virtually no artificial light to stop you, was both fictionalised history and you may find it hard to come to terms some sort of childhood nostalgia; but with this particular revelation – it’s in for me it was all fiction and everyone space! No, it is. I mean, you can see else had been given an unfair the edge and the sky just curves away advantage by being allowed to read from it and there’s these craters like I the script first. I couldn’t bear the said and it’s white and it’s just up suspense; every few minutes I had to there, look. lean across to Noel, who was sitting And yet, while the astronomer next to me, and make quiet enquiries was setting up the telescopes and about what was really going on: falling in love with the night sky all over again, and while I was waiting my Me: Was that it? turn to see the next marvel, my eye Noel: Was what what? kept being drawn back to Mars and its Me: The disaster. Was that it? illusory twin Antares. Mars is our Noel: No, of course not. That was take- nearest neighbour, where old science off. fiction tells us the threat comes from [Pause] and new science fiction tells us our Me: Was that it then? Was that meant salvation may rest. And it was there, to happen? in the night sky, visibly red even Noel: Of course that was meant to without the telescope once I knew happen. where I could find it – and then I Me: But a bit just fell off! 64 Noel: (Sigh) Of course it fell off. You somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a see, they had these rockets … (Long microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, whispered explanation) which says, “You are here”.’) But [Pause] Hubble works for me partly because it Me: Noel … operates on such a grand scale. It Noel: (Sigh) What now? looks not just across the galaxy but Me: Why did they need to do that? Was into the heart of other galaxies; that meant to happen? through Hubble images I have seen Noel: (Extremely deep sigh) Yes, look, vast star systems whose light started that’s the command module and… travelling towards us before human (Even longer explanation) history, themselves containing thousands of stars and yet being only I still think it wasn’t my fault. I hadn’t one fraction of the vastness of the had the benefit of seeing all of this cosmos. The distances make my brain before. I didn’t know what went wrong want to leak out of my ears, but it’s with Apollo 13 or when or how the only my lack of brain power rather accident actually occurred; I didn’t than anything about the scale which even know whether the astronauts makes me feel insignificant. I have survived. Not having sat through seen many momentary glimpses of endless rocket launches in my youth the unimaginable infinity of creation, and at that stage not been bitten by and I think it’s the most wonderful the space programme nostalgia bug – thing the space programme could although Apollo 13 bears some of the possibly have given us. I am a responsibility for my eventual late microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, development – I really didn’t know how many times over, and the perspective many stages of rocket were meant to doesn’t bother me at all. fall off before the spacecraft actually settled down to the comparatively A V2 killed my grandfather, you routine flying-through-space bit. I also insensitive clod didn’t realise that the only way to get Having quoted myself, as well as the command module and the lunar Douglas Adams, several times already module the right way round for the in this article, I won’t rehearse again lunar module landing was to disengage how I came to stop worrying (because from the launch position in space, turn I suspect this will never actually the command module round and happen) and learn to love at least that reconnect. (‘Just like a man,’ I muttered part of the space programme I’d darkly in the equal darkness of the already missed; nor how emotionally cinema. ‘They get a new vehicle, they attached I’ve always felt to those have to prove they can bloody reverse stubby little Space Shuttles that it and park.’) followed it and now are about to The space shuttle excited me a bit follow Mercury, Gemini and Apollo more, because it was new and into history. If anyone has managed to suggested that space could be part of miss me maundering on about such my future as well as the past; but for subjects before, I will pause only to much of my childhood I couldn’t see exhort you to watch the Australian the original point of the space race film The Dish and the US docu- nor why everyone still kept going on mentary In the Shadow of the Moon, about it now. Indeed, it would take and indeed to read the articles in this another decade beyond the first issue by fellow fans who’ve been shuttle flight before I really began to lucky enough to see a shuttle launch. see what we’d got out of the space But it’s what makes me wish that programme, because that was how someone, somewhere, is enough of a long it took to launch and properly rich geek to make possible some focus the Hubble Space Telescope. variant of the scenario Stephen Baxter Fangirl though I am, it’s one of the proposes in Titan, where all the things that I still feel Douglas Adams museum pieces and relics left in got wrong. His Total Perspective storage are brought together when the Vortex works on the basis of showing planet most needs them for one last you exactly how insignificant you are hurrah of the Saturn V. in the universe (‘When you are put It’s what I realised had impressed into the Vortex you are given just one itself on my brain so much as visual momentary glimpse of the entire imagery that when I stared in disbelief unimaginable infinity of creation, and at footage on the news of the World

65 Trade Center towers collapsing in fire warden, off-duty and at home, 2001 I had, and still have, no better having swapped shifts as a favour to a way to describe it other than as colleague. He was forty-six, he had a watching a rocket launch in reverse. wife and five children who were all (And only later realised that Jon away in the country, and he was called Courtenay Grimwood had already William Henry Brialey. I’m the last of imagined just that image in Lucifer’s his descendents to bear his surname, Dragon, published in 1998.) and that’s just one of the reasons I It’s what made Challenger so feel it’s important to remember and shocking to me in 1986 – remember- commemorate him. ing also that the shuttle was my first Without the V2s, neither the USA contemporary spaceship. We knew nor the Soviet Union might have had how rocket launches went (even if I the space programme we remember. didn’t then know what happened But just as those space rockets that afterwards) and they involved the take my breath away were developed rocket rising inexorably from the pad from active weapons which achieved followed by a sound that indicated it that effect far more literally hundreds was ripping apart the sky, by which of times over, the space race was time the rocket itself was already hardly free of military drivers. And almost beyond sight but clearly that’s the way it’s always been: the turning to escape the atmosphere wonders of most ages have been exp- before soaring onwards to explore ressions of someone’s power and space – and absolutely didn’t involve a influence, for all that some enth- new cloud of smoke and the rocket usiasts may have invested their own ripping apart itself. efforts because they believed they You can say whatever you like were contributing to an end rather about phallic symbolism, but that than a means. Many of the currently isn’t why – despite the way my heart realistic arguments for any country – lifts with the rocket, every time, and or any private enterprise – to invest in then sticks in my throat until I know space vehicles again are equally about it’s passed the Challenger point – I’d military or political advantage. Much want to inject a note of caution into of the rationale for any future space the triumph and glory with which we exploration will be economic or an imbue the technology. Triumph and even more fundamental grasping for glory, after all, is just another way to survival. If we go back into space we say shock and awe; it all depends won’t go just because it’s there, or which side of the narrative you’re on. because we can; and we’re probably My father has a map of the area not really in any position to indulge where he grew up, or at least the area ourselves with the joy of discovery where much of his family lived while and increasing the sum of human he was growing up, since the area was knowledge. Bethnal Green in the East End of It would be an even greater London during the second world war endeavour to change human nature and he himself spent some part of the and if I really wanted to try I’d have time evacuated to a farm in Cheshire. picked some other medium than The map was completed with the help fanzine articles. But I wish more of his older sisters and some of their people would spend just a bit more aunts and uncles, and it shows a lot of time looking up, and out, into the sky addresses that aren’t there any more: and on into space; and thereby could a succession of buildings in which recover some greater sense of members of a large extended family perspective. lived and put one another up before they in turn were destroyed or made Gazing at the stars is a pleasure uninhabitable by bombs falling available to everyone, even if you nearby. And sometimes when bombs are ‘in populous city pent’, as fell members of the family died. Coleridge had it. Despite the best On 15 November 1944, like so attempts of scientists to explain the many other nights in so many cities in universe, gazing at stars will still fill too many countries during that war, us with wonder and sweet delicious bombs fell again on Bethnal Green. At confusion. least one of them fell on 78 Treadway — Tom Hodgkinson, The Book of Street, and as was often the case Idle Pleasures, 2008 people were killed. One of them was a

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