Into Space – COUNTDOWN

I still can’t believe it we won! But here we are at the Global Space Center. Actually, we’ve been here for nearly three months and all because of a little essay. We were the winners of a school competition to write a one thousand word essay on the differences between the early days of space exploration and the Apollo missions, and space travel in the 2090s.

Because Earth moves, the planets appear to move around the celestial sphere in an irregular manner. In Ptolemy’s Earth- centered universe these irregularities had to be explained by small epicycles, as shown below.
Mars
Venus
Sun
Mercury
Earth
Saturn
Moon
Jupiter

Our prize is almost unbelievable: a trip around the entire solar system in one of Global Spaceway’s three luxury liners. We’ll visit each planet in turn, landing on some of them and visiting the colonies and museums, fly- ing past others, occasionally landing on a satellite or two and eventually arriving at the deep-space station out beyond Pluto. Then we transfer to a supply ship which will take us to our farthest-flung colony on the world called Phoenix, which orbits the nearest star to us, Proxima Centauri. The whole trip will take about six weeks!
After packing and saying good-bye to our families and school friends, we checked in at the Global Space Center to begin our crash course on astronautics and the basics of astronomy.
We seem to spend an awful lot of time jogging and swimming and, of course, eating all the right things. Although we are only tourists we still have to pass a medical before they will let us set off on the tour. We have to be fit because weightlessness does funny things to the body. The blood pools in all sorts of odd places, and all the muscles, including heart muscles, tend to relax. So we have to learn how to exercise in space.

In between bouts of exercising we have been learning about astronomy and its early history. A long time ago astronomers were sure that the Earth was the center of the universe around which the planets and the Sun re- volved. It’s not surprising that they made that mistake. After all, they saw the Sun rise and set, and watched the planets wander through the constellations, so it was commonsense to think that they were in the middle of everything. Around the year 170 A.D. the astronomer Ptolemy strongly supported this theory and so it was promptly named after him. The Ptolemaic system was considered accurate for more than thirteen hundred years! But in 1543, a Polish astronomer, Nicholas Copernicus, theorized a revolutionary new concept of the solar system, with the Sun at its center, and the Earth as a minor attendant circling around it. The Church was outraged. Not only did this new theory remove the Earth from its central role but it also gave the planets imperfect orbits, and that was seen as a direct challenge to God’s own perfection. Some brave astronomers supported Copernicus-one was burned at the stake for his belief – though others challenged him.

The cleverest astronomer of that period, Tycho Brahe, who had a false nose made out of gold and wax after losing his real nose in a duel, refused to believe Copernicus. And yet it was Tycho Brahe’s own work which eventually proved that Copernicus was right. When Galileo turned his crude telescope toward the night sky in 1610 he found four tiny moons circling Jupiter. So everything did not circle the Earth! He also noticed that Venus had phases like the Moon which could only be accounted for by using Copernicus’ theory. Galileo became an enthusiastic supporter of Copernicus, so enthusiastic that the Church, again angry at the perceived challenge to God, promptly forced Galileo to denounce Copernicus. The Church then imprisoned Galileo in his own house, where he remained a prisoner until his death.

Copernicus was finally proven correct when Johannes Kepler used Tycho Brahe’s observations to show that the planets moved around the Sun in elliptical, or oval- shaped, paths, and not in Ptolemy’s perfect circles. The solar system was at last recognized as being the Sun surrounded by six planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. It was only centuries later that Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto were discovered and joined the family. Astronomers also went on to discover that the Sun is just a star with an average temperature, of an average size, that exists quietly in an insignificant corner of an insignificant galaxy.

At first glance the stars appear to be a mad jumble of points of light. However, if you look at them carefully, it will soon become obvious that they make up easily recognizable patterns. These are called constellations and there are eighty eight of them. The best known are probably Orion and Ursa Major (also known as the Great Bear, and The Plough or the Big Dipper) and even non-astronomers can learn to recognize them. The planets themselves appear to wander through a number of constellations with very well-known names, such as Gemini, Leo or Aquarius, which make up the Zodiac.

It’s not just the constellations that have names; the stars do too, at least the bright ones do. It would be impossible to give every star a name because there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth! So most of them just have numbers and letters.
Because the Earth moves around the Sun, and is tipped slightly over to one side, we don’t see the same constellations all year round. Instead, the sky changes its appearance with the passing seasons, which means we can only see certain stars and objects for limited periods, until they reappear the following year. But they’ve told us that once we are in space we’ll be able to see all the constellations at once.

As well as exercising and learning a bit about the universe, we’ve all been fitted for space suits to wear whenever we go outside. Our suits have three different layers. First is an undergarment which has thin plastic tubing woven into its fabric. Water flows through the
HOTOL viewed from above and the side, showing its sleek lines.
tubes, cooling and ventilating the wearer’s body. The next layer is a tight pressure suit, covered with layers of puncture-resistant insulating fabric – a thick bulky material. The final layer is a compact life support backpack, which supplies oxygen, ventilates the suit and circulates the supply of water to the undergarment. Fixed on the pressure suit are a fishbowl-like helmet and a chest-mounted computer which monitors all the equipment in the suit and alerts its wearer to any problems. When we are wearing the suit in space it won’t actually feel as if we’re wearing it, because we’ll be floating inside it – our feet floating above the insoles of our boots and our arms waving around inside the sleeves. Although the space suits are quite light and thin, they still seem very bulky and strange after wearing ordinary clothes.

We’ve spent hours in a massive, dark swimming pool called a “neutral buoyancy tank.” It simulates the effects of weightlessness – great fun! They even let us construct things in the tank with special tools so that we can pretend we are real astronauts. The ship that will take us up into Earth orbit subjects us to only 3gs on take off. Much less than the 8gs that astronauts had to endure on the Apollo missions. Just for fun they let us take a spin in a restored centrifuge, a sort of capsule on the end of a long metal arm. It simulates the stress and acceleration of a rocket launch by spinning around at terrifying speeds. It felt as if someone was pushing hard against my chest, and my body felt much heavier. The operator threatened to turn the dial up to 5g, but changed his mind as we’d probably all have been sick! I guess he didn’t want to clean up the mess.

The space center itself looks like a huge airport. It has passenger reception lounges, a control tower, bunkers, emergency vehicle hangars, fuel storage facilities, restaurants, observation balconies, support buildings, and assembly hangars – but no launch pad! I couldn’t imagine how we were going to get into space without a launch pad. It seems that we don’t need huge rockets to get people into space anymore. Instead we use spacecraft which combine the features of an airliner and a rocket. They can carry thirty passengers at a time

The HOTOL spaceplane has replaced fuel-guzzling rockets; it takes off just like a conventional airliner, then climbs up into space, sucking in oxygen from the atmosphere as it leaves Earth behind.

and they use the network of long runways to launch them. Our HOTOL 8 spacecraft doesn’t carry a huge tank of heavy liquid oxygen, like the chemical rockets. Instead HOTOL scoops oxygen out of the atmosphere as it climbs. The oxygen then combines with the liquid hydrogen carried in a small tank, ignites, and produces thrust via a cluster of rocket engines at its rear. This means we don’t have to be launched vertically like the Saturn V rockets. Instead we hurtle down the runway on a kind of trolley which lets go of our ship at the take off point to let it climb like an airliner, until it is high enough to engage its rockets. It returns to Earth like a plane, too. HOTOL actually stands for Horizontal Take off and Landing. It’s a much safer and more comfortable way of getting into orbit than sitting in a cramped cabin on top of thousands of gallons of highly explosive fuel!

We board HOTOL in two days’ time. Once we are in orbit around the Earth, our passenger cabin will be released into space like a satellite and will be captured by an orbital ferry. The ferry will then climb to a higher orbit and dock with one of the many space stations that has a hotel. There we’ll study the Earth and get accustomed to the strange sensation of weightless- ness before transferring to our nuclear powered luxury liner, the Gagarin, named after the first man in space. Then we’re ready for our first port of call – the Moon.

Yesterday we had our medical examination. They tested blood pressure, hearts, hearing, and eyesight. It was a great relief when we all passed safely and no one had to miss the tour. Just forty eight hours to go. Time to write a few more postcards, and make sure that I’ve packed everything.

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