As author Peter Ackroyd points out, the most singular defining characteristic of humans has always been our ‘endless and inexhaustible curiosity”. Even as our first ancestors busied themselves with colonising Earth, they gathered around the evening fire and turned their gaze heavenwards, and through myths and stories tried to make sense of the infinite bodies that mysteriously lit up the night. Much later on, scientific giants such as Galileo and Newton also scanned the skies in order to make sense of life on Earth.
Now, in the 21st century, many of us seem to take the incredible story of the human journey into space for granted. How many of us ever take time to look up at the night sky?
Escape from Earth, the last volume in Dorling Kindersley’s extensive series Voyages through Time, will surely change this complacent attitude. Once again, Ackroyd’s story-telling abilities and Dorling Kindersley’s publishing panache have produced a fitting tribute to humans’ determined quest to look beyond the seemingly finite limitations of our own planet.
Ackroyd starts his tale with the observation that the technology that finally made space exploration a reality was a result of one of the most destructive wars in history, World War II, and its potentially deadly aftermath, the Cold War.
To explain how the Cold War led to the proliferation of the arms race and the start of the ‘race for space”, Ackroyd traces the first experiments in rocket science conducted by the Russians, the
Americans and their wartime enemies, the Germans.
The late 1940s saw the Americans gain the experience and expertise of German scientist Wernher von Braun, and before long both Americans and Russians had built space centres and rocket launch pads. The race for technological superiority and political supremacy was on.
In chapter two, Ackroyd explains the extraordinary progress that was made in rocket and satellite development in the brief period between 1957 and 1960, as the space race intensified.
Many older readers will remember that, at the time, the winner of the race was seen to be the first one to launch a manned rocket into space, to land a man on the moon and to return him safely to Earth. Chapters three, four and five of Escape from Earth detail the triumphs and disasters that finally took the Russians out of the running and paved the way for Project Gemini. Then Ackroyd recaptures the excitement that some of us will remember vividly, as Neil Armstrong made his legendary landing on the lunar surface.
This book succeeds largely because Ackroyd continues the story of space exploration after the lunar explorations of the Apollo missions. In the final chapters, we get a sense of the steady technological progress humans are making, as Ackroyd describes the gradual cooperation of Russian and American scientists and cosmonauts in their efforts to build permanent space stations above Earth, to probe the mysteries of interstellar space and, of course, to discover whether life may exist on other planets in some form.
Escape from Earth is an extra-ordinarily exciting read. For one thing, it is full of breathtaking images. One can marvel at the enormity of the Faith 7 rocket, for example. Even more astounding is the full-page picture of the sun, in all its molten, gaseous splendour. Equally beautiful is the image of blue Neptune, captured by the Voyager 2 space probe.
The book is also filled with clearly labelled information boxes for the more technologically minded reader. For the first time, I understood how a rocket is launched into space and travels safely back towards Earth. It was also fascinating to learn how the absence of gravity affects the body when cosmonauts are in space for extended periods of time. Did you know, for example, that the human spine grows noticeably longer in the absence of the compressing effect of gravity, causing considerable backache? Or that astronauts describe the silence of space as infinitely painful and fearful? Readers will also be reminded how satellites now facilitate so much of our 21st-century life on Earth. Useful too, is the comprehensive reference section that provides detailed listings of space missions, the heroes of space travel, moon landings, spacecraft and other space facts.
It is the boundlessness of space that Ackroyd captures most effectively in his writing. There are no borders to halt our exploration into deep space, and the probes that we have sent into perpetual orbit constantly beam back information about astonishing space phenomena. Indeed, astronomers have just detected what could be the solar system’s 10th planet, using California’s Mount Palomar Observatory. This new find has been given the name Sedna after the Inuit goddess of the ocean.
And most of all, there is something deeply moving about the gold-plated records carried by the Voyager probes, complete with the sounds of music, human voices, the wind and the songs of whales. As Ackroyd says: ‘These echoes of the Earth are drifting into the irrecoverable bounds of space … there will come a time when they will be lost to infinity. Then they will become the oldest surviving artefacts ever produced by human beings, monuments of a civilization that, by then, may itself have already faded away.”
Escape from Earth could be a powerful tool in the hands of science teachers. They should use it to motivate students to enjoy and contribute to the studies of science and mathematics – subject areas identified by education officials as needing rejuvenation by educators.
The rest of us can also be inspired by the book. Those living in cities can seek out astronomy centres where they can experience the thrill of looking through a sophisticated telescope. But we can all take the time to lie on the ground and surrender ourselves to the beauty of the universe.