The Flying Saucers are Real by Donald Keyhoe (fun to read txt) 📖

If the speed of light is not an absolute limit for space ships, then travel to remote parts of the universe may someday be possible.

Otherwise, a trip outside our solar system could be a lifetime expedition. Most space travel would probably be limited to the planets of our sun—the moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and the others.

Although it may be many years before the first manned space ship leaves the earth, we are already at work on the problems the crews would face. I learned some of the details from a Navy flight surgeon with whom I had talked about take-off problems.

“They’re a lot further than that” he told me. “Down at Randolph Field, the Aero-Medical research lab has run into some mighty queer things. Ever hear of ‘dead distance’?”

“No, that’s a new one.”

“Well, it sounds crazy, but they’ve figured out that a space ship would be going faster than anyone could think.”

“But you think instantaneously,” I objected.

“Oh, no. It takes a fraction of a second, even for the fastest thinker. Let’s say the ship was making a hundred miles a second—and that’s slow compared with what they expect eventually. Everything would happen faster than your nerve impulses could register it. Your comprehension would always be lagging a split second behind the space ship’s operation.”

“I don’t see why that’s so serious,” I said.

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“Suppose radar or some other device warned you a meteorite was coming toward you head-on. Or maybe some instrument indicated an error in navigation. By the time your mind registered the thought, the situation would have changed.”

“Then all the controls would have to be automatic,” I said. I told him that I had heard about plans for avoiding meteorites. “Electronic controls would be faster than thought.”

“That’s probably the answer,” he agreed. “Of course, at a hundred miles a second it might not be too serious. But if they ever get up to speeds like a thousand miles a second, that mental lag could make an enormous difference, whether it was a meteorite heading toward you or a matter of navigation.”

One of the problems he mentioned was the lack of gravity. I had already learned about this. Once away from the earth’s pull, objects in the space ship would have no weight. The slightest push could send crewmen floating around the sealed compartment.

“Suppose you spilled a cup of coffee,” said the flight surgeon. “What would happen?”

I said I hadn’t thought it out.

“The Randolph Field lab can tell you,” he said. “The coffee would stay right there in the air. So would the cup, if you let go of it. But there’s a more serious angle—your breath.”

“You’d have artificial air,” I began.

“Yes, they’ve already worked that out. But what about the breath you exhale? It contains carbon dioxide, and if you let it stay right there in front of your face you’d be sucking it back into your lungs. After a while, it would asphyxiate you. So the air has to be kept in motion, and besides that the ventilating system has to remove the carbon dioxide.”

“What about eating?” I asked. “Swallowing is partly gravity, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “Same as drinking, though the throat muscles help force the food down. I don’t know the answer to that. In fact, everything about the human body presents a problem. Take the blood circulation. The

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amount of energy required to pump blood through the veins would be almost negligible. What would that do to your heart?”

“I couldn’t even guess,” I said.

“Well, that’s all the Aero-Medical lab can do—guess at it. They’ve been trying to work out some way of duplicating the effect of zero gravity, but there’s just no answer. If you could build a machine to neutralize gravity, you could get all the answers, except to the ‘dead distance’ question.

“For instance, there’s the matter of whether the human body would even function without gravity. All down through the stages of evolution, man’s organs have been used to that downward pull. Take away gravity, and your whole body might stop working. Some of the Aero-Medical men I’ve talked with don’t believe that, but they admit that long trips outside of gravity might have odd effects.

“Then there’s the question of orientation. Here on earth, orienting yourself depends on the feeling you get from the pull of gravity, plus your vision. just being blindfolded is enough to disorient some people. Taking away the pull of gravity might be a lot worse. And of course out in space your only reference points would be distant stars and planets. We’ve been used to locating stars from points on the earth, where we know their position. But how about locating them from out in space, with a ship moving at great speed? Inside the space ship, it would be something like being in a submarine. Probably only the pilot compartment would have glass ports, and those would be covered except in landing—maybe even then. Outside vision might be by television, so you couldn’t break a glass port and let out your pressure.

“But to go back to the submarine idea. It would be like a sub, with this big difference: In the submarine you can generally tell which way is down, except maybe in a crash dive when you may lose your equilibrium for a moment. But in the space ship, you could be standing with your feet on one spot, and another crewman might be—relative to you—standing upside down. You might be floating horizontally, the other man vertically. {p. 105} The more you think about it, the crazier it gets. But they’ve got to solve all those problems before we can tackle space.”

To make sure I had the details right, I checked on the Air Force research. I found that the Randolph Field laboratory is working on all these problems, and many more.

Although plans arc not far enough advanced to make it certain, probably animals will be sent up in research rockets to determine the effect of no gravity before any human beings make such flights. The results could be televised back to the earth.

All through my check-up on space exploration plans, one thing struck me: I met no resistance. There was no official reticence about the program; on the contrary, nothing about it seemed secret.

Even though it was peacetime, this was a little curious, because of the potential war value of an earth satellite vehicle. Even if the Nazi scheme for destruction proved just a dream, an orbiting space base could be used for other purposes. In its two-hour swing around the earth, practically all of the globe could be observed-directly, by powerful telescopes, or indirectly, by a combination of radar and television. Long-range missiles could be guided to targets, after being launched from some point on the earth. As the missiles climbed high into the stratosphere, the satellite’s radar could pick them up and keep them on course by remote control.

There were other possibilities for both attack and defense. Ordinarily, projects with wartime value are kept under wraps, or at least not widely publicized. Of course, the explanation might be very simple: The completion of the satellite vehicle was so remote that there seemed no need for secrecy. But in that case, why had the program been announced at all?

If the purpose had been propaganda, it looked like a weak gesture. The Soviets would not be greatly worried by a dream weapon forty or fifty years off. Besides that, the Pentagon, as a rule, doesn’t go for such propaganda.

There was only one conventional answer that made any sense. If we had heard that the Soviets were about

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to announce such a program, as a propaganda trick, it would be smart to beat them to it. But I had no proof of, any such Russian intention.

The date on Secretary Forrestal’s co-ordination announcement was December 30, 1948. One day later, the order creating Project “Saucer” had been signed. That didn’t prove anything; winding up the year, Forrestal could have signed a hundred orders. I was getting too suspicious.

At any rate, I had now analyzed the Gorman case and checked on our space plans. Tomorrow I would see Redell and find out what he knew.

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