These opening lines of H. G. Wells‘ 1897 science fiction classicThe War of the Worlds maintain their haunting power to this day.
For all of our history, there has been the fear, or hope, that theremight be life beyond the Earth. In the last hundred years, that premonition has focused on a bright red point of light in the night sky.
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Three years before The War of the Worlds was published, a Bostonian named Percival Lowell founded a major observatory where the most elaborate claims in support of life on Mars were developed. Lowell dabbled in astronomy as a youngman, went to Harvard, secured a semi-official diplomatic ap-pointment to Korea, and otherwise engaged in the usual pursuits of the wealthy. Before he died in 1916, he had made major contributions to our knowledge of the nature and evolution of the planets, to the deduction of the expanding universe and, in a decisive way, to the discovery of the planet Pluto, which is named after him. The first two letters of the name Pluto are the initials of Percival Lowell. Its symbol is e, a planetary monogram. (111p)
Like organisms, machines also have their evolutions. The rocket began, like the gunpowder that first powered it, in China where it was used for ceremonial and aesthetic purposes.
Imported to Europe around the fourteenth century, it was applied to warfare, discussed in the late nineteenth century as a means of transportation to the planets by the Russian schoolteacher Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and first developed seriously for high altitude flight by the American scientist Robert Goddard.
TheGerman V-2 military rocket of World War II employed virtually All of Goddard‘s innovations and culminated in 1948 in the two-stage launching of the V-2/WAC Corporal combination to thethen-unprecedented altitude of 400 kilometers. In the 1950‘s, en-gineering advances organized by Sergei Korolov in the SovietUnion and Wernher von Braun in the United States, funded asdelivery systems for weapons of mass destruction, led to the firstartificial satellites. The pace of progress has continued to be brisk (116p)
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