How centuries of scifi sparked spaceflight Alex MacDonald
I want to tell you a story about stories.
And I want to tell you this story
because I think we need to remember
that sometimes the stories
we tell each other
are more than just tales
or entertainment or narratives.
They’re also vehicles
for sowing inspiration
and ideas across our societies
and across time.
The story I’m about to tell you
is about how one of the most advanced
technological achievements
of the modern era
has its roots in stories,
and how some of the most important
transformations yet to come might also.
The story begins over 300 years ago,
when Galileo Galilei first learned
of the recent Dutch invention
that took two pieces of shaped glass
and put them in a long tube
and thereby extended human sight
farther than ever before.
When Galileo turned
his new telescope to the heavens
and to the Moon in particular,
he discovered something incredible.
These are pages from Galileo’s book
“Sidereus Nuncius,” published in 1610.
And in them, he revealed to the world
what he had discovered.
And what he discovered was that the Moon
was not just a celestial object
wandering across the night sky,
but rather, it was a world,
a world with high, sunlit mountains
and dark “mare,” the Latin word for seas.
And once this new world
and the Moon had been discovered,
people immediately began
to think about how to travel there.
And just as importantly,
they began to write stories
about how that might happen
and what those voyages might be like.
One of the first people to do so
was actually the Bishop of Hereford,
a man named Francis Godwin.
Godwin wrote a story
about a Spanish explorer,
Domingo Gonsales,
who ended up marooned
on the island of St. Helena
in the middle of the Atlantic,
and there, in an effort to get home,
developed a machine, an invention,
to harness the power
of the local wild geese
to allow him to fly –
and eventually to embark
on a voyage to the Moon.
Godwin’s book, “The Man in the Moone,
or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither,”
was only published posthumously
and anonymously in 1638,
likely on account of the number
of controversial ideas that it contained,
including an endorsement
of the Copernican view of the universe
that put the Sun at the center
of the Solar System,
as well as a pre-Newtonian
concept of gravity
that had the idea
that the weight of an object
would decrease with increasing
distance from Earth.
And that’s to say nothing
of his idea of a goose machine
that could go to the Moon.
(Laughter)
And while this idea of a voyage
to the Moon by goose machine
might not seem particularly insightful
or technically creative to us today,
what’s important is that Godwin described
getting to the Moon not by a dream
or by magic, as Johannes Kepler
had written about,
but rather, through human invention.
And it was this idea
that we could build machines
that could travel into the heavens,
that would plant its seed
in minds across the generations.
The idea was next taken up
by his contemporary, John Wilkins,
then just a young student at Oxford,
but later, one of the founders
of the Royal Society.
John Wilkins took the idea of space travel
in Godwin’s text seriously
and wrote not just another story
but a nonfiction philosophical treatise,
entitled, “Discovery
of the New World in the Moon,
or, a Discourse Tending to Prove
that ‘tis Probable There May Be
Another Habitable World in that Planet.”
And note, by the way,
that word “habitable.”
That idea in itself would have
been a powerful incentive
for people thinking about how to build
machines that could go there.
In his books, Wilkins seriously considered
a number of technical methods
for spaceflight,
and it remains to this day
the earliest known nonfiction account
of how we might travel to the Moon.
Other stories would soon follow,
most notably by Cyrano de Bergerac,
with his “Lunar Tales.”
By the mid-17th century,
the idea of people building machines
that could travel to the heavens
was growing in complexity
and technical nuance.
And yet, in the late 17th century,
this intellectual progress
effectively ceased.
People still told stories
about getting to the Moon,
but they relied on the old ideas
or, once again, on dreams or on magic.
Why?
Well, because the discovery
of the laws of gravity by Newton
and the invention of the vacuum pump
by Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle
meant that people now understood
that a condition of vacuum
existed between the planets,
and consequentially
between the Earth and the Moon.
And they had no way of overcoming this,
no way of thinking about overcoming this.
And so, for well over a century,
the idea of a voyage to the Moon
made very little intellectual progress
until the rise of
the Industrial Revolution
and the development
of steam engines and boilers
and most importantly, pressure vessels.
And these gave people the tools to think
about how they could build a capsule
that could resist the vacuum of space.
So it was in this context, in 1835,
that the next great story
of spaceflight was written,
by Edgar Allan Poe.
Now, today we think of Poe
in terms of gothic poems
and telltale hearts and ravens.
But he considered himself
a technical thinker.
He grew up in Baltimore,
the first American city
with gas street lighting,
and he was fascinated
by the technological revolution
that he saw going on all around him.
He considered his own greatest work
not to be one of his gothic tales
but rather his epic prose poem “Eureka,”
in which he expounded
his own personal view
of the cosmographical nature
of the universe.
In his stories, he would describe
in fantastical technical detail
machines and contraptions,
and nowhere was he more influential
in this than in his short story,
“The Unparalleled Adventure
of One Hans Pfaall.”
It’s a story of an unemployed
bellows maker in Rotterdam,
who, depressed and tired of life –
this is Poe, after all –
and deeply in debt,
he decides to build a hermetically
enclosed balloon-borne carriage
that is launched into the air by dynamite
and from there, floats
through the vacuum of space
all the way to the lunar surface.
And importantly, he did not
develop this story alone,
for in the appendix to his tale,
he explicitly acknowledged Godwin’s
“A Man in the Moone”
from over 200 years earlier
as an influence,
calling it “a singular and somewhat
ingenious little book.”
And although this idea of a balloon-borne
voyage to the Moon may seem
not much more technically sophisticated
than the goose machine,
in fact, Poe was sufficiently detailed
in the description
of the construction of the device
and in terms of the orbital
dynamics of the voyage
that it could be diagrammed
in the very first spaceflight encyclopedia
as a mission in the 1920s.
And it was this attention to detail,
or to “verisimilitude,” as he called it,
that would influence the next great story:
Jules Verne’s “From the Earth
to the Moon,” written in 1865.
And it’s a story that has
a remarkable legacy
and a remarkable similarity
to the real voyages to the Moon
that would take place
over a hundred years later.
Because in the story, the first voyage
to the Moon takes place from Florida,
with three people on board,
in a trip that takes three days –
exactly the parameters that would prevail
during the Apollo program itself.
And in an explicit tribute
to Poe’s influence on him,
Verne situated the group responsible
for this feat in the book in Baltimore,
at the Baltimore Gun Club,
with its members shouting,
“Cheers for Edgar Poe!”
as they began to lay out their plans
for their conquest of the Moon.
And just as Verne was influenced by Poe,
so, too, would Verne’s own story
go on to influence and inspire
the first generation of rocket scientists.
The two great pioneers of liquid fuel
rocketry in Russia and in Germany,
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth,
both traced their own commitment
to the field of spaceflight
to their reading “From the Earth
to the Moon” as teenagers,
and then subsequently
committing themselves
to trying to make that story a reality.
And Verne’s story was not
the only one in the 19th century
with a long arm of influence.
On the other side of the Atlantic,
H.G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds”
directly inspired
a young man in Massachusetts,
Robert Goddard.
And it was after reading
“War of the Worlds”
that Goddard wrote in his diary,
one day in the late 1890s,
of resting while trimming
a cherry tree on his family’s farm
and having a vision of a spacecraft
taking off from the valley below
and ascending into the heavens.
And he decided then and there
that he would commit the rest of his life
to the development of the spacecraft
that he saw in his mind’s eye.
And he did exactly that.
Throughout his career,
he would celebrate that day
as his anniversary day,
his cherry tree day,
and he would regularly read and reread
the works of Verne and of Wells
in order to renew his inspiration
and his commitment
over the decades of labor
and effort that would be required
to realize the first part of his dream:
the flight of a liquid fuel rocket,
which he finally achieved in 1926.
So it was while reading “From the Earth
to the Moon” and “The War of the Worlds”
that the first pioneers of astronautics
were inspired to dedicate their lives
to solving the problems of spaceflight.
And it was their treatises
and their works in turn
that inspired the first
technical communities
and the first projects of spaceflight,
thus creating a direct chain of influence
that goes from Godwin to Poe to Verne
to the Apollo program
and to the present-day
communities of spaceflight.
So why I have told you all this?
Is it just because I think it’s cool,
or because I’m just
weirdly fascinated by stories
of 17th- and 19th-century science fiction?
It is, admittedly, partly that.
But I also think
that these stories remind us
of the cultural processes
driving spaceflight
and even technological
innovation more broadly.
As an economist working at NASA,
I spend time thinking about
the economic origins
of our movement out into the cosmos.
And when you look before the investments
of billionaire tech entrepreneurs
and before the Cold War Space Race,
and even before the military investments
in liquid fuel rocketry,
the economic origins of spaceflight
are found in stories and in ideas.
It was in these stories that the first
concepts for spaceflight were articulated.
And it was through these stories
that the narrative of a future
for humanity in space
began to propagate from mind to mind,
eventually creating an intergenerational
intellectual community
that would iterate
on the ideas for spacecraft
until such a time
as they could finally be built.
This process has now been going on
for over 300 years,
and the result is
a culture of spaceflight.
It’s a culture that involves
thousands of people
over hundreds of years.
Because for hundreds of years,
some of us have looked at the stars
and longed to go.
And because for hundreds of years,
some of us have dedicated our labors
to the development
of the concepts and systems
required to make those voyages possible.
I also wanted to tell you
about Godwin, Poe and Verne
because I think their stories
also tell us of the importance
of the stories that we tell each other
about the future more generally.
Because these stories don’t just
transmit information or ideas.
They can also nurture passions,
passions that can lead us
to dedicate our lives
to the realization of important projects.
Which means that these stories can and do
influence social and technological forces
centuries into the future.
I think we need to realize this
and remember it when we tell our stories.
We need to work hard to write stories
that don’t just show us the possible
dystopian paths we may take
for a fear that the more dystopian
stories we tell each other,
the more we plant seeds
for possible dystopian futures.
Instead we need to tell stories
that plant the seeds,
if not necessarily for utopias,
then at least for great new projects
of technological, societal
and institutional transformation.
And if we think of this idea
that the stories we tell each other
can transform the future
is fanciful or impossible,
then I think we need to remember
the example of this,
our voyage to the Moon,
an idea from the 17th century
that propagated culturally
for over 300 years
until it could finally be realized.
So, we need to write new stories,
stories that, 300 years in the future,
people will be able
to look back upon and remark
how they inspired us
to new heights and to new shores,
how they showed us new paths
and new possibilities,
and how they shaped
our world for the better.
Thank you.
(Applause)