Space travel

Cover. Rockets: Sulfur, Sputnik 
and Scramjets, by the blogger

In every instance the take-off hits him as a severe shock, for he is hurled just as though he had been shot aloft by gunpowder to sail over mountains and seas. For this reason at the outset he must be lulled to sleep immediately with narcotics and opiates. His limbs must be arranged in such a way that his torso will not be torn away from his buttocks   nor his head from his body, but the shock will be distributed among his individual limbs. Then a new difficulty follows: extreme cold and impeded breathing. The cold is relieved by a power which we are born with; the breathing, by applying damp sponges to the nostrils.
— Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630), Somnium.

Suppose we have a barrel filled with a highly compressed gas. If we open one of its minute stopcocks, the gas will stream out of the barrel in a continuous jet, and the elasticity of the gas (it is this elasticity that pushes the gaseous particles into space) will likewise continually repel the barrel… By means of a sufficient number of stopcocks (six) it is possible to control the exit of the gas so that the motion of the barrel or an empty sphere will depend entirely on the will of the stopcock operator, which is to say that the barrel will execute any desired curve and in accord with any law of velocity whatsoever.
— Konstantin Tziolkovskii (1857 – 1935), Notebook, 28 March, 1883, when he wrote this.

Mankind will not remain on the earth forever, but in the pursuit of light and space will, at first timidly penetrate beyond the limits of the atmosphere and then conquer all the space around the sun.
— Konstantin Tziolkovskii (1857 – 1935), Selected Works, 14, quoted by Korolyov, written 1911.

Mankind’s first great step forward into outer space involves flying beyond the atmosphere and creating a satellite of the earth. The rest is comparatively easy, even escape from our solar system.
— Konstantin Tziolkovskii (1857 – 1935), writing in 1926.

That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.
— Neil Armstrong (1930 – 2012), US astronaut, stepping onto the moon, 1969.

God did not create the planets and the stars with the intention that they should dominate man, but that they, like other creatures, should obey and serve him.
— Paracelsus, Concerning the Nature of Things, c. 1541.

It is perhaps reserved for us to become the Columbuses of this unknown world. Only enter into my plans, and second me with all your power, and I will lead you to its conquest, and its name shall be added to those of the thirty-six states which compose this Great Union…
“Suffer me to finish,” he calmly continued. “I have looked at the question in all its bearings, I have resolutely attacked it, and by incontrovertible calculations I find that a projectile endowed with an initial velocity of 12,000 yards per second, and aimed at the moon, must necessarily reach it. I have the honour, my brave colleagues, to propose a trial of this little experiment.”
— Impey Barbicane, President of the Gun Club in Jules Verne (1828 – 1905), From The Earth To The Moon.

As currently envisioned, a solar sail is a huge lightweight spacecraft made of metallized Mylar or Kapton, more like a silvery kite than a Spanish galleon. Much as the conventional sail is propelled by wind, a solar sail is pushed by photons of light through the vacuum of space. The craft starts off slowly; in an orbit around the sun, every second a sail measuring 150,000 square meters might accelerate by only .5 millimeter per second.
— Elizabeth Corcoran, Scientific American, April 1989, 55.

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