life: what is known as the 'Wolf Trap'. This mini-laboratory was originally called 'Bug Detector' by its inventor, but his collaborators re-christened it 'Wolf Trap' because their chief is called Professor Wolf Vishniac. The Wolf Trap is also supposed to make a soft landing on another planet and then extend a vacuum tube with a very fragile tip. When the tube touches the ground, the tip breaks and soil samples of all kinds will be sucked into the vacuum created. Once again the probe contains various sterile culture mediums which guarantee every kind of bacteria a rapid growth. This multiplication of the bacteria makes the liquid medium cloudy and the pH value of the liquid also changes. (The pH value is the degree of acidity of an acid.) Both changes can be easily and accurately measured—the cloudiness of the liquid with the help of a beam of light and a photo-cell, the change in the acid content by an electrical pH measurement. These results would also enable us to make conclusions about existing unknown life.
Millions of dollars will be spent on the NASA programme and co-ordinated research for the investigation and proof of extraterrestrial life. The first bio-probes will be sent to Mars. Undoubtedly man will soon follow the mini- laboratories which are the forerunners. The senior officials of NASA are unanimous in saying that the first astronauts will land on Mars by 23 September, 1986, at the latest. This precise date has a reason. 1986 will be a year with little solar activity Dr von Braun supports the view that men could land on Mars as early as 1982; the NASA does not lack the technical resources, but only an adequate and unbroken financial grant from the American Congress. In addition to all the USA's current responsibilities two money swallowers such as the war in Viet Nam and the space programme are a heavy burden even for the richest nation in the world.
The plan for travel to Mars exists. The Mars space-ship has been designed. It 'only' needs to be built as well. A model of it stands on the desk of an unusual man in Huntsville—stands in front of Professor Dr Ernst Stuhlinger. Stuhlinger is Director of the Research Project Laboratory, which is part of the George Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama. He employs over a hundred scientific collaborators in his laboratories. In them they experiment in plasma-, nuclear and thermo-physics. The scientists also occupy themselves with the basic research for projects pointing into the future. The research for the electric rocket motor of the future is for ever linked with the name of Dr Stuhlinger. He is the designer of the Mars space-ship which will carry men to the red planet in our century.
Dr Stuhlinger was brought to the USA soon after the Second World War by his friend Dr Wernher von Braun; in Fort Bliss they made rockets for the American Air Force. Accompanied by 162 fellow-countrymen, the two rocket pioneers moved to Huntsville after the outbreak of the Korean War, in order to conjure up a project such as even America, accustomed as it is to gigantomania, has never seen before.
In those days Huntsville was a small sleepy nest on the edge of the Appalachian Mountains. With the arrival of the rocket men the little cotton town turned into a circus. Factories, rocket-testing platforms, laboratories, giant hangars and corrugated iron offices shot up from the ground breathtakingly fast in a few years. Today more than 15,000 people live in Huntsville; the little town has woken from its sleep and the Huntsvillites have become enthusiastic space fans. When the first Redstone rockets thundered away from the testing platform, many Huntsvillites ran down into their cellars in a panic. Nowadays, when a Saturn rocket is tested and a roar fills the air as if the world was coming to an end in the next second, nobody takes any notice. The Huntsvillites always carry their earplugs with them, just as Londoners carry their umbrellas. They call their town simply 'Rocket City' and if Congress will not grant the hundreds of thousand of millions of dollars demanded for space travel, they get bad- tempered and start agitating.
The Huntsvillites have every reason to be proud of their 'Germans' and the NASA, for Huntsville has grown into the biggest NASA centre of all. Here the rockets that make headlines all over the world are thought up and designed, from the little Redstone to the gigantic Saturn V. Up to now the USA has invested around 10 milliard pounds in the Moon programme. 15 Saturn V rockets have been commissioned for £54,000,000. At launching the tanks are filled with some 880,000 gallons of highly explosive fuel, which develops a propulsive force of 150,000,000 horse power. The giant rocket weighs almost 3,000 tons. In Huntsville some 7,000 technicians, engineers and scientists of related disciplines are working under Wernher von Braun towards the great goal, the conquest of space. In 1967 around 300,000 scientists of all kinds were working on the USA's global space programme. More than 20,000 industrials firms are working for the greatest research undertaking in history.
The Austrian scientist Dr Pscherra told me during a visit to Huntsville that the research groups constantly had to develop new 'articles' which had never before been produced anywhere in the world.
'Look here!' he said and showed a large cylinder from which came a humming, rumbling noise. 'In there we are conducting lubricating experiments in an absolute vacuum. Do you know that we cannot use any of the countless lubricants produced in the world? They lose all their lubricating qualities in space. With available lubricants even a simple electro-motor stops functioning after at most half an hour in airless space. What else could we do but invent a lubricant which works perfectly even in an absolute vacuum?'
A terrible groaning and whining came from another room. Two tremendous vices, firmly anchored to the floor, were trying to pull a 4-in.-thick sheet of metal to pieces.
'Another series of experiments that we would willingly dispense with,' said Dr Pscherra, 'but our experience has shown that existing metal alloys do not stand up to the stresses of space. So we must find ones that meet our requirements. That is the reason for these tensile probes and fatigue experiments under every conceivable kind of space situation. We also have to develop new welding techniques. The welded joints must be subject to cold, heat, vibration, tensile-strength and pressure tests, so that we can find out the limits at which a welded joint breaks.'
The hostess who accompanied me looked at her watch, Dr Pscherra looked at his watch, everyone was looking at their watches. The NASA personnel, of course, don't notice it any more; the visitor finds it curious at first, but he soon gets used to it, for looking at one's watch is a standard gesture of the NASA personnel at Cape Kennedy, Houston and Huntsville. They always seem to be making a countdown: four ... three ... two ... one ....ero.
Rides and walks through the halls, corridors and doors led, after many more security controls, to a Mr Pauli, who also comes from German-speaking Europe and has been working for NASA for thirteen years. I had a white helmet bearing the NASA symbol crammed on my head; Mr Pauli took me to the testing platform of the Saturn V. The simple words 'testing platform' mean a concrete colossus that weighs several hundred tons, is several storeys high, has lifts and cranes leading to it, and is surrounded by ramps in which a bewildering network of many miles of cables is installed. Once it is ignited, Saturn V makes a din which can be heard 12 miles from the launching ground. The testing platform, deeply anchored in rock and concrete, rises as much as three inches from its base during such trials, while 333,000 gallons of water per second are pumped through a sluice for cooling purposes. Merely for cooling trial rockets on the testing platform, NASA had to build a pumping works that could easily supply a city the size of Manchester with drinking water. A single firing test costs a cool £500,000! Space does not come cheaply.
Huntsville is one of the many NASA centres. The reader should note them because later they may become the departure stations for space flights:
Army Research Centre, Moffet Field, California.
Electronics Research Centre, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Flight Research Centre, Edwards, California.
Goddard Space Flight Centre, Greenbelt, MD.
