Abstract
The desire to fly like birds and touch the Moon is as old as mankind and is documented in some classic works of pure fantasy. In the nineteenth century, after the Industrial Revolution, writers began to draw on science and technology to make their fantastical inventions plausible. A new and successful literary genre, science fiction, was born. Finally, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, real space science took its first steps, thanks to the work of a unique, self-taught man lost in the endless countryside of the Tsarist Empire, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. We owe to this deaf and reclusive scientist, a disciple of a philosopher in love with progress, the first studies on the applications of an “engine” powered by black powder, discovered by the Chinese and used by them for recreational purposes or to make rudimentary projectiles. From the idea of the rocket, which until then had been exploited only for military purposes in the West, Tsiolkovsky also developed the first projections of a true colonization of space. A starting point for young dreamers all over the world in a century plagued by devastating material and moral conflicts and enlightened by new ideals.
Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.
Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky
I’m always more interested in the present and the future than the past.
Bernard Baruch
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Notes
- 1.
To obtain the official time of Moscow or Baikonur, where the Soviet (now Russian Federation) launch base was located, simply add 3 or 6 h, respectively, to Greenwich time (also known as UTC, Coordinated Universal Time).
- 2.
Reported by F.J. Krieger, Behind the Sputniks, Public Affairs Press, Washington, DC, 1958, pp. 311–12.
- 3.
According to myth, Minos adopted this restrictive measure in revenge for Daedalus's role in the terrible affair of his wife Pasiphae, mother of the Minotaur, who had fallen in love with a white bull.
- 4.
The hippogriff takes Astolfo to Earthly Paradise where he is welcomed by Saint John the Evangelist who informs him of Orlando’s madness and accompanies him to the Moon with a flying chariot.
- 5.
Classic launcher used to amaze, as in the story of Baron Munchhausen, or to kill, as in the Kaiser Wilhelm Geschütz (Kaiser Wilhelm Gun) and the Hitler’s Schwerer Gustav (Heavy Gustav), two mega-cannons transported by rail, manufactured by the Krupp steelworks in Essen for each one of the World Wars.
- 6.
Verne, for example, deals correctly with inertia, but not with the absence of gravity to which the occupants of the spherical spaceship would have been exposed. Nor does he address the question of whether the impulse required to travel to the Moon would be tolerable for a human organism, merely imagining a simple fainting spell as a consequence.
- 7.
Territorial subdivision similar to a region or province.
- 8.
A shining example of this is Giovanni Battista Odierna, archpriest of the Tomasi fiefdom in Palma di Montechiaro, Sicily, who in the seventeenth century was the first in the world to compile a catalog of celestial nebulae. An ardent student of science, he lamented from the depths of his island that he had no “socium, vel amicum, aut propinquum, quo paululum sublevari possim. Mens mea praeceptor meus, et difficultates meas nulli communico” (not a partner or friend or someone close to me on whom I can lean a little. I have only my mind as teacher, and no one else to share my difficulties with). Different places and times, but stories common to “suburban geniuses”.
- 9.
Russian cosmism appeared before the October Revolution and developed between the two world wars as a rejection of contemplation in favor of transformation. The goal was to create a new philosophy and, more importantly, a new world, with the end of death, the resurrection of the dead, and the conquest of cosmic space.
- 10.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 is called the October Revolution because according to the Julian calendar, which was still in use in the Russian Empire, it conventionally began on October 25, a day that is instead of November 5 in the Gregorian calendar.
- 11.
The lighter ones, such as balloons and dirigibles, simply use Archimedes’ thrust, that is, the excess of upward pressure that keeps the mass of air in perfect equilibrium with gravity within the volume occupied by the flying object.
- 12.
In fact, the principle of action and reaction implies that the center of gravity of the system that splits (you and your shoe in the example), under the impulse of an internal force only (that of the arm muscles), remains stationary and the two parts separate, moving in opposite directions with speeds inversely proportional to their relative masses.
- 13.
In 1835, in a work devoted to the philosophy of the physical sciences (Cours de la Philosophie Positive), the sociologist Auguste Comte wrote:
On the subject of stars, all investigations which are not ultimately reducible to simple visual observations are [...] necessarily denied to us. While we can conceive of the possibility of determining their shapes, their sizes, and their motions, we shall never be able by any means to study their chemical composition or their mineralogical structure [...] Our knowledge concerning their gaseous envelopes is necessarily limited to their existence, size [...] and refractive power, we shall not at all be able to determine their chemical composition or even their density [...] I regard any notion concerning the true mean temperature of the various stars as forever denied to us.
Two reasons for this peremptory statement: the impossibility of making the necessary measurements both at a distance and in situ, by means of space travel. Two blatant errors in one stroke by a man of genius but without vision! A similar short-sightedness was shown by Lord William Thomson, first Baron Kelvin, when he declared at the beginning of the twentieth century that there was nothing left to discover in physics. All that remained to be done was to complete the knowledge that had been acquired. An entirely different point of view from that of Enrico Fermi, who held that “if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery”.
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Capaccioli, M. (2024). The Dawn. In: Red Moon. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54760-7_2
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