I’m tired of waiting for the next Byrnes Woder Book Club, so I’m kicking it off this time.
Here we have a classic example of 50s children’s space ephemera. It came out in 1959, so it just makes it into the 50s. It is post-Sputnik. Rockets and space have been really real for a couple of years. Space cadets and blasters were out, pragmatic plans for reaching the moon were in, even for children.
But there are no astronauts yet, the future was still full of spacemen (and women). Spacemen were going to build the space station – the first step on any trip to the moon. And the trip to the moon was going to be an expedition, not just a quick visit. Three rockets, teams of men, six weeks of habitation and exploration.
It’s a pity it didn’t happen this way. It was quicker and cheaper to go for the Direct Ascent – one rocket straight to the moon.
Today we have the ISS, but it’s a pragmatic vehicle rather than a futuristic, 2001-esque toroidal science wonder. We could have had our spinning station space.
Right now the ISS weighs about 376 tonnes (going metric for the easy math). It’s about 50 meters long. There’s a lot of other stuff bolted to it, but let us be pessimistic about weight here.
Wernher von Braun‘s original space station was going to be about 75 meters in diameter. That’s 1.5 times the current length of the ISS. It’s a torus, so 2πR = πD ~= 236 + 75 x 2 (two full diameter struts) = 386 meters of space station for the torus and two habitable struts.
We know 50 metres of space station weighs 376 tonnes. So based on the ISS the complete von Braun space station would weigh about 2,900 tonnes.
The Space Shuttle can carry about 24 tonnes to the Low Earth Orbit where the station would sit. For 2,900 tonnes that equates to 121 missions. The Shuttle has flown 132 missions. Just saying.
But the shuttle was doing other things! Yes. But imagine all the other launches that have happened. I googled around for the total mass humanity has put into orbit, but I couldn’t find a number (if you know it, tell me, please). Suffice to say it is multiples of this 2,900 tonnes I have calculated.
What I’m saying is that we could have a decent, toroidal space station orbiting above us, inhabited by spacemen (and spacewomen) working towards the next big leap, be it mining the moon, mining asteroids or journeying to Mars.
At night it would be the only star in the sky telling us that although we might be tiny and alone, we are not trapped on this little world of dwindling resources.
[Update: I wanted to include some images from the book, but my copy is too brittle to spread out on a scanner. I got permission from John Sisson to use some of his scans which you can see below. If you're a fan like me of 1950s space ephemera you need to check out his site Dreams of Space.]
