The Second Comming Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? W.B. Yeats
Oswald Spengler Watches the Sunset By Stephen Edgar
The air is drenched with day, but one by one The flowers close on cue, Obedient to the declining sun. Forest and grasses, bush and leaf and stem, They cannot move (and nor, you dream, can you); It is the wind that plays with them. Only the little midges dancing still Against the evening move at will. This tiny swarm still dancing on and on Like something in a net Expanding and contracting, that late swan Towing its wake, a solitary crow Crossing the twilight in its silhouette, The fox proceeding sly and slow: They are small worlds of purpose which infuse The world around with will to choose. An animalcule in a drop of dew— And so diminutive That if the human eye should look clear through That globe there would be nothing there to see— Although it only has a blink to live, Yet in the face of this is free; The oak, in whose vast foliage this dot Hangs from a single leaf, is not. NOTES: Drawn from the opening pararaphs of the first chapter of VOLUME II of The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, translated by Charles Francis Atkinson.
Vikings of the intellect. Experiment, working hypothesis, perpetual motion. Meaning of the machine, the inorganic forces of Nature compelled to work. Industry, wealth, and power. Coal and population. Mechanization of the world. Symptoms of the decline, diminution of leader-natures. Mutiny of the hands. The lost monopoly of technics. The coloured world. The End.
THE culture of the armed hand had a long wind and got a grip
on the whole genus man. The Cultures of speech and enterprise — we are at once
in the plural, and several can be distinguished — in which personality and mass
begin to be in spiritual opposition, in which the spirit becomes avid of power
and lays violent hands on life, these Cultures embraced even at their full only
a part of mankind, and they are today, after
a few millennia, all extinguished and replaced. What we call “nature-peoples”
and “primitives” are merely the remains of their living material, the ruins of
forms that once were permeated with soul, cinders out of which the glow of
becoming and departing has gone.
On this soil, from 3000 B.C. onwards, there now grew up,
here and there, the high Cultures,[1]
Cultures in the narrowest and grandest sense, each filling but a very small
portion of the earth’s space and each enduring for hardly a thousand years. The
tempo is that of the final catastrophes. Every decade has significance, every
year, almost, its special “look.” It is world-history in the most genuine and
most exacting sense. This group of passionate life-courses invented for its
symbol and its “world” the city, in contrast
to the village of the previous stage — the stone city in which is housed a
quite artificial living, that has become divorced from mother earth and is completely anti-natural — the city of rootless
thought, that draws the streams of life from the land and uses them up into
itself.[2]
There arises “society”[3] with its
hierarchy of classes, noble, priest, and burgher, as an artificial gradation of life against the background
of “mere” peasantry — for the natural divisions are those of strong and weak, clever and stupid — and as the seat of
a cultural evolution that is wholly intellectualized. There “luxury” and
“wealth” reign. These are concepts which those who do not share them enviously
misunderstand. For what is luxury but Culture in its most exacting form?
Consider the Athens of Pericles, the Baghdad of Haroun-al-Raschid, the Rococo.
This urban Culture is luxury through and through, in all grades and callings,
artificial from top to bottom, an affair of arts, whether arts of diplomacy or
living, of adornment or writing or thought. Without an economic wealth that is
concentrated in a few hands, there can be no “wealth” of art, of thought, of
elegance, not to speak of the luxury of possessing a world-outlook, of thinking
theoretically instead of practically. Economic impoverishment at once brings spiritual and artistic
impoverishment in its train.
And, in this sense, the technical processes that mature in
these Cultures are also spiritual luxuries, late, sweet, and fragile fruits of
an increasing artificiality and intellectuality. They begin with the building
of the tomb pyramids of Egypt and the Sumerian temple-towers of Babylonia,
which come into being in the third millennium B.C., deep in the South, but
signify no more than the victory over big masses. Then come the enterprises of Chinese, Indian, Classical, Arabian, and Mexican
Cultures. And now, in the second millennium of our era, in the full North,
there is our own Faustian Culture, which represents the victory of pure
technical thought over big problems.
For these Cultures grow up, though independently of one another, yet in a series of
which the sense is from South to North. The Faustian, west-European Culture is probably not the last, but certainly it is the most powerful, the most
passionate, and — owing to the inward conflict between its comprehensive
intellectuality and its profound spiritual disharmony — the most tragic of them
all. It is possible that some belated straggler may follow it — for instance, a
Culture may arise somewhere in the plains between the Vistula and the Amur
—during the next millennium. But it is here, in our own, that the struggle
between Nature and the Man whose historic destiny has made him pit himself
against her is to all intents and purposes ended.
The Northern countryside, by the severity of the conditions
of life in it — the cold, the continuous privation — has forged hard races,
with intellects sharpened to the keenest, and the cold fires of an unrestrained
passion for fighting, risking, thrusting forward — that which elsewhere[4]
I have called the passion of the Third Dimension.
There are, once more, beasts of prey whose inner forces struggle fruitlessly to
break the superiority of thought, of organized artificial living, over the
blood, to turn these into their servants, to elevate the destiny of the free
personality to being the very meaningof the
world. A will-to-power which laughs at all bounds of time and space, which
indeed regards the boundless and endless as its specific target, subjects whole
continents to itself, eventually embraces the world in the network of its forms
of communication and intercourse, and transforms
it by the force of its practical energy and the gigantic power of its technical
processes.
At the beginning of every high Culture the two primary
orders, nobility and priesthood — the beginnings of “society” — take shape
clear of the peasant-life of the open land.[5] They are
the embodiment of ideas, and, moreover, mutually exclusive ideas. The noble,
warrior, adventurer lives in the world of facts,
the priest, scholar, philosopher in his world of truths. The one is (or
suffers) a destiny, the other thinks in causality. The one would make intellect the servant
of a strong living, the other would subject his living to the service of the
intellect. And nowhere has this opposition taken more irreconcilable forms than
in the Faustian Culture, in which the proud blood of the beast of prey revolts
for the last time against the tyranny of pure thought. From the conflict
between the ideas of Empire and Papacy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
to the conflict between the forces of a thoroughbred tradition — kingship,
nobility, army — and the theories of a plebeian rationalism, liberalism, and
socialism —from the French to the
German revolution — history is one sequence of efforts to get the decision.
[1]Decline of the West, English edition, Vol. I, pp. 103
et seq.
[2]Decline of the West, English edition, Vol. II, ch.
iv, “The Soul of the City.”
[3]Decline of the West, English edition, Vol. II, pp.
327 et seq., 343 et seq.
[4]Decline of the West, English edition, Vol. I, pp. 165
et seq., pp. 308 et seq.
[5]Decline of the West, English edition, Vol. II, pp.
334 et seq.
In: Man & Technics - A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life. Translated from
the German by Charles Francis Atkinson.2001. pp. 38-40.
John David Ebert on Oswald Spengler's Man and Technics 1/3
Constance
Adams was born in 1964 in Boston and raised in Dallas. She earned her bachelor
of arts degree from Harvard University-Raddiffe College in 1987 and her
master's in architecture from Yale University in 1990. She worked for a variety
of well-known architectural offices around the world between the late 1980s and
the mid 1990s, including those of Cesar Pelli and Associates in New Haven,
Connecticut, Josef Paul Kleihues in Berlin, and Kenzo Tange in Tokyo. Since
1997, she has been employed by Lockheed Martin Space Operations in Houston to
work with NASA architects to design and develop the habitation module for
BlO-Plex, a test facility for the Mars surface habitat, and TransHab
structures, inflatable habitations for future space missions. She teaches studios
in space,architecture and design at Yale, Rhode Island School of Design, and
the Technical University in Munich.
Armstrong, Harris
Harris Armstrong was born in 1899. He studied architecture
at Washington University and Ohio State University, and designed smaller
functionalist homes and offices in the 1930s. His career blossomed in the
postwar era, when he became one of St. Louis's leading architects, designing
structures such as the 1952 Cancer Research Building at Washington University
as well as projects farther afield, such as the American consulate in Basra,
Iraq, in 1957. Because of his prominence in St. Louis, he received several
commissions from the McDonnell Aircraft Company in the 1950s, including the
design of their new technical center, with its attractively landscaped park
setting and basement bomb shelters that could protect seven thousand employees
in case of nuclear attack. Armstrong retired from architectural practice in
1993 and died two years later.
Barmin, Vladimir Pavlovich
Born 1909
in Moscow, Vladimir Barmin graduated in 1930 from Bauman Technical University
and was employed thereafter by the Kompressor Plant and an offshoot design
bureau that created the famous Katyusha rockets used by the Red Army in World
War II. After the war, he traveled to Germany to study captured rocket
equipment and facilities, and he subsequently designed and built all major
Soviet launch facilities, most notably the Baikonur Cosmodrome, begun in 1950.
Barmin expanded upon Sergei Korolev's and Vasily Mishin's initial ideas about
horizontal assembly and transport of rockets to their launch sites and
incorporated that principle into the design of his launch facilities. He also
assisted in the design of machinery used for interplanetary soil sampling
missions. He died in 1993.
Bonestell, Chesley
Born in San
Francisco in 1888, the artist Chesley Bonestell is best known for his space
paintings and illustrations. His training as an architect at Columbia University
and his subsequent experience in Willis Polk's architectural office in San
Francisco from 1911 to 1919, and several firms in New York afterwards, gave him
the opportunity to work on major structures of the 1920s and 1930s, such as
the Chrysler Building in New York and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
At the age of 50, he changed careers and began working in Hollywood as a
special-effects artist. His movie credits include science-fiction classics such
as War of the Worlds; When Worlds Collide, and
Destination Moon. In the 1940s, he also
started illustrating articles by Willy Ley, Wernher von Braun, and others in
such magazines as Life, Scientific American,
and Collier's. These articles and technically
accurate illustrations helped fire the public imagination and brought space
travel from the realm of science fiction to serious feasibility. Bonestell died
in Carmel, California, in 1986.
Bossart, Karel J.
Commonly known as the "father of Atlas," Karel J.
"Charlie" Bossart was born in Belgium in 1904. He earned a degree in
mining engineering from the University of Brussels in 1925, then came to the
United States and enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There
he studied aeronautics and specialized in aeronautical structures. He went to
work for Convair (which later became General Dynamics) and led the group that
designed the Atlas missile. Among his revolutionary ideas for this rocket were
the concepts of a pressurized fuel tank, which functioned like a large, metal
balloon as part of the rocket's structure, and the ability to steer the rocket
by turning or gimbaling the entire rocket engine. These achievements earned him
the U.S. Exceptional Civilian Service Award in 1958 and led NASA to choose the
Atlas rocket as the vehicle that would
carry America's first Mercury astronauts into orbit.
Bossart retired from General Dynamics in 1967 and died in 1975.
Clarke, Arthur C.
Arthur C.
Clarke is generally regarded as one of the foremost science-fiction authors and
space visionaries of the twentieth century. He was born in Minehead, Somerset,
England, on December 16,1917, and joined the British Interplanetary Society in
1936, where he wrote the BIS Bulletin and
began writing science fiction. In 1954, Clarke wrote a letter to Dr. Harry
Wexler, the chief of the Scientific Services Division of the U. S. Weather
Bureau, in which he proposed the idea of using space satellites as a meteorological
tool. Ten years later, in 1964, he began work with Stanley Kubrick on the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which realistically
portrayed moon bases, space shuttles, and a rotating space station. Clarke
currently lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he continues to write science
fiction.
Connell, Maurice H.
Maurice
Connell was born in 1894 in Greenwich, Connecticut, and earned a degree in
mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in 1914. After service
in the Signal Corps and the Air Corps in World War I, he returned to
Connecticut to establish his own engineering practice. In 1925, he relocated
his firm, Connell, Pierce, Garland and Fridman, to Miami, Florida, where they
designed the mechanical aspects of a number of buildings. These include such
local landmarks as the Dade County Courthouse, the Miami Post Office, and the
Miami Biltmore Hotel, the launch gantries and service structures at Cape
Canaveral, as well as similar projects at the Redstone missile arsenal in
Huntsville, Alabama. Connell died in December 1967 in Hendersonville, North
Carolina.
Dornberger, Walter Robert
A pioneer in the developing field of rocket technology,
Walter Dornberger was born in Giessen, Germany, on September 6,1895. He enlisted
in the German army in 1914, and was commissioned a year later. In 1925, the
army sent him to the School of Technology in Charlot- tenberg, where he
specialized in ballistics and earned his master's degree in 1930. After
graduation, he was assigned to help with the development of new rocket-powered
weapons, which were not banned
by the Treaty of Versailles. Dornberger rose through the ranks and in 1932 was
placed in charge of the Research Station West at Kummersdorf. Working as part
of his team was the young scientist Wernher von Braun. The research group moved
to Peenemünde in 1937 and began to develop the A-4 rocket (known to the Allies
as the V-2). After the war ended, Lieutenant General Dornberger was held as a
British prisoner of war for two years, but was released and came to the United
States in 1947. He served as an advisor to the air force in the area of guided
missiles, and helped with the development of the X-20 Dyna-Soar project before
it was canceled. In 1965 he retired, and he died in Baden-Württemburg, Germany,
on June 27, 1980.
Ehricke, Krafft Arnold
Krafft
Ehricke was born on March 24, 1917. In 1942, he received his degree in
aeronautical engineering from Berlin's Technical University. Because of the
war, his talents were immediately put to use as part of the Peenemünde rocket
development team, where he specialized in propulsion systems for the A-4
rocket. After the war, he came to the United States and continued his work on
ballistic missiles and space vehicles working for the U.S. Army Ordinance
Department. After leaving the army, he went to work with Convair General
Dynamics and helped develop the Atlas rocket. In 1959, he became a vice president
of the company and headed up the team that built the Centaur upperstage. This
vehicle was the first hydrogen- fueled upper stage and was used almost
exclusively to boost NASA's space probes to the planets. In 1974, he became the
chief scientist at North American Rockwell's Space Systems Division, where he
was free to pursue his ideas of using space resources peacefully for the benefit
of all people. Ehricke died in 1984, and a year later the Krafft A. Ehricke
Institute for Space Development was founded in his honor.
Esnault-Pelterie, Robert
Robert Esnault-Pelterie, sometimes known as REP, was born
in Paris on November 8, 1881. He graduated with a degree in science (which
encompassed botany, chemistry, and physics) from the Sorbonne College of
Science and Letters of the University of Paris in 1902. In that same year, he
received his first of many patents. As news of the Wright brothers'
accomplishments reached France, Esnault-Pelterie knew that he wanted to build
and fly airplanes. He did not like the crude control methods employed by the
Wrights, however, so he improved the design, inventing the control stick and
the aileron in the process. He completed his first successful monoplane in
1906, an all-metal design powered by a seven-cylinder, air- cooled radial
engine, which he also designed. This engine was so successful that variations
of it powered planes for the next thirty years. Soon, though,
Esnault-Pelterie's interest turned to spaceflight. His studies were interrupted
by World War I, but after the war he sued France, England, the United States,
and Germany for patent infringement for their use of the control stick in their
airplanes. He won his case, and every company that used a control stick in
their airplanes had to pay him royalties. In 1920, he resumed his theoretical
rocket research and began lecturing on rocket design. A year later, in association
with banker André Hirsch, he instituted the REP-Hirsch International
Astronautics Prize for the most influential original scientific work in
astronautics. The first award was presented to Hermann Oberth. From 1926 to
1930, Esnault-Pelterie was engaged in writing L'Astronautique,
an encyclopedia of everything that was known about rocketry and space travel.
He continued his experiments and in 1931 lost four left- hand fingers when a
rocket engine he had been working on exploded. He switched his research to the
somewhat safer propellants - liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen - and
demonstrated an engine powered by these propellants in
1937.With the onset of
World War II, however, he collected and destroyed all of his unpublished
research to keep it from the Nazis. He retired to Switzerland and presented
his last rocketry lecture in 1947. Esnault-Pelterie died on December 6, 1957,
two months after the Soviet launch of Sputnik 2.
Faget, Maxime Allen
Max Faget
was bom in 1921 in British Honduras and studied engineering and aeronautic
design at Louisiana State University. After graduation, he entered the U.S.
Navy and served on submarines during World War II. When the war ended, he
returned to his interest in aeronautics and went to work for Dr. Robert Gilruth
designing high-speed and high-altitude aircraft for the Department of Defense.
His projects included the Scout and Little Joe research rockets, the Polaris
missile, and the X-15 rocket plane. With the launch of Sputnik, national
attention turned to space, and Faget followed Gilruth to the newly formed
National Aeronautics and Space Administration. There, he championed the idea of
a blunt capsule for manned missions, rather than the popular notion of a
streamlined, winged spacecraft. His arguments eventually convinced NASA, and he
went on to design the Mercury spacecraft, and helped with the Gemini, Apollo,
and shuttle programs. After retiring from NASA, he founded his own company,
Space Industries, Inc. Faget lives in Houston.
Fender, Donna L.
Born in
1965 in Decatur, Alabama, Donna Fender earned a bachelor of science degree in
aerospace and aeronautical engineering from the University of Alabama in 1988.
Since then, she has worked for NASA in a variety of positions related to test
systems and space simulation. She presented a paper entitled "Manned
Testing in a Simulated Space Environment" at the 1993 European Space
Agency conference in the Netherlands on space simulation. She is currently the
project manager for TransHab, coordinating the work of architects and engineers
creating inflatable space habitats. Fender specializes in building and
integrating systems for testing, particularly in space-simulation chambers.
Frassanito, John
John Frassanito
was born in 1941 and raised in New York. He studied industrial design at the
Art Center in Los Angeles (now Art Center College of Design in Pasadena), and
graduated in 1968. He then joined Raymond Loewy'sfirm, Raymond Loewy/William
Snaith, Inc., as part of the team that worked on the design of Skylab, NASA's
first space station. Frassanito left Loewy's office shortly thereafter to take
a job with the Computer Terminal Corporation, where he designed, among other
early computers, the Datapoint 2000 (patented July 25,1972). It was considered
by Invention and Technology magazine (Fall
1994) to be the "direct lineal ancestor to the PC." Frassanito
started his own design firm in 1975, where he continued to design Datapoint
computers as well as products for Sani-Fresh, Scott Paper, and EMI Corporation.
In 1983, he set up his practice in Houston so that he could collaborate again
with NASA, which was beginning to plan the space station that resulted in the
International Space Station. In the 1980s, Frassanito worked with NASA
architects and engineers as part of one of the teams that developed concepts
for the space station. His firm has continued to work for NASA on a contract
basis in developing computer-generated animations of their planned missions.
Glushko, Valentin Petrovich
Born in 1908 in Odessa, Russia, Valentin Glushko graduated
in 1929 from Leningrad University. A few years later, while working at the Gas
Dynamics Laboratory, he developed early Soviet rocket propulsion systems. It
was in that job that he first met Sergei Korolev, who would serve as chief
designer of the Soviet space program in the 1950s and 1960s.
In fact,
Glushko designed a rocket engine that was used in 1937 to propel one of
Korolev's glider designs. As was Korolev, Glushko was arrested in a Stalinist
purge and spent the war in a prison camp, where he continued to work on rocket
design. Immediately after World War II, he studied captured German rocket
launchers and was put in charge of the design bureau that eventually became NPO
Energomash, the facility responsible for most of the Soviet Union's first-
stage engines of their heavy launchers. Although Glushko disagreed with Korolev
over the design of the latter's N-1 Moon Rocket (designed by Korolev favorite
Vasily Pavlovich Mishin), his fortunes changed after Korolev's death in 1966.
Glushko reorganized the design bureaus of the Soviet space program and has been
credited with developing the massive Energia boosters, as well as Buran, the
Soviet Union's answer to America's Space Shuttle. He died in Moscow in 1989.
Goddard, Robert Hutchings
Robert Goddard was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on
October 5, 1882. Although math was a difficult subject for him in high school,
Goddard dreamed of building rockets and knew that math was critical. Through
hard work and determination, he graduated at the top of his class. He entered
Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1904 and earned his bachelor's degree in
physics. He then went on to earn his master's degree and doctorate at Clark
University. After graduation, he began teaching physics. In 1912, Goddard was
awarded a one-year research fellowship to Princeton, where he developed his
basic theoretical rocket computations. His hard work and long hours, however,
soon caught up with him. Near the end of his fellowship he had a breakdown and
contracted tuberculosis. He was given two weeks to live, but managed to
survive. He returned to Clark University as a part-time teacher, in order to
dedicate more time to his research and experiments. In 1917, he began his long
relationship with the Smithsonian Institution and received a $5,000 sponsorship. A year later, he led the U.S. Army rocket research
group. Goddard published his calculations and theoretical rocket models in
1919 in a paper entitled, "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes."
This study, however, earned Goddard nothing but skepticism and ridicule. He
became more reclusive and secluded, but continued his research.
He began developing liquid-fueled rockets, and on March
16, 1926, the world's first liquid-fueled rocket flew for 2.5 seconds and
achieved an altitude of 184 feet. Goddard continued to improve his design, and
in 1929 launched a rocket that contained a scientific payload, consisting of a
thermometer, a barometer, and a camera to take a picture of the instruments at
the top of the rocket's flight path. In 1930, Goddard received a $50,000
Guggenheim grant and moved to Roswell, New Mexico, where he built a new rocket
research facility. He continued to improve his designs and achieved better
stability by using gyroscopes, and in 1935 he launched a rocket to an altitude
of over a mile on a perfectly stabilized flight. Following these successes, he
published a second paper in
1936titled,
"Liquid-Propellant Rocket Development," which included experimental
data from all his rocket flights. With the onset of World War II, Goddard
joined the Naval Engineering Experimental Station in Annapolis, Maryland. He
continued working there until his death in 1945.
Griffin, Brand Norman
Born in
1947, Brand Griffin was raised in the Pacific Northwest and educated at
Washington State University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in architecture
in 1 970. He earned a master of fine arts from the California Institute of the
Arts in 1971, and a master's in architecture from Rice University in 1972.
Although Griffin taught at Tulane, Rice, and the University of Washington, he
is probably best known for his long-term work with Boeing, particularly for
designs for the International Space Station in the 1980s. He has received
numerous awards, including the Prix de Rome fellowship in architecture at the
American Academy in Rome, and his design work for spacecraft has been featured
in publications such as Aviation Week and Space Technology
and in exhibitions in Huntsville, Alabama, Seattle, and New York. He
currently heads his own firm, Griffin Design, in Huntsville.
Hedrick, Wyatt Cephas
Wyatt Hedrick was born in Chatham, Virginia, in 1888, and
was educated at Roanoke College and Washington and Lee University, where he
earned a bachelor's degree in architecture in 1910. He
established a variety of firms during a more than fifty-year career, beginning
with the W. C. Hedrick Construction Co. of 1914 and culminating in Wyatt C.
Hedrick Architect and Associates, based in Fort Worth, from 1925 until his
death in 1964. He received major industrial commissions in Texas and abroad,
and his other important projects included bases for the army, navy, and air
force, among them the U.S. Air Force base in Keflavik, Iceland, of 1952-57, and
the Shamrock Hilton in Houston of 1946 (now demolished). For NASA he designed
the Central Laboratory and Office Complex at the Marshall Space Flight Center
in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1961.
Hilten, Heinz
Born in
Berlin in 1909, Heinz Hilten studied architecture at the Technical University
there, earning a master's degree under the well-known architect Heinrich
Tessenow in 1934. From 1939 to 1942 he worked as an architect at Peenemünde, mostly
on the construction of the housing projects for the facilities workers and
scientists there. After serving in the German army from 1942 to 1944, he
returned to work with Wernher von Braun's group at Peenemünde until the war's
end, and from 1945 to 1954 he was employed in the municipal architect's office
in Augsburg. It was then that Hannes Luehrsen (see below) brought him to
Huntsville, Alabama, to work on the master planning of the Redstone missile
arsenal, which occupied him until 1960. Between 1960 and his retirement in
1978, he was employed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville,
Alabama. At Marshall, he prepared the master plans submitted annually to
Congress for budgetary and expansion approval, and he participated in the
design of various laboratories there, including those for structures,
mechanics, guidance, and aerodynamics. Since retiring he has continued to live
in Huntsville.
Jones, Rod
William R."Rod" Jones II was born in 1958 in
Charlottesville, Virginia. He earned his bachelor of architecture degree from
the Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1984. Even before finishing his degree,
he worked as a draftsman for the Los Angeles architects Pulliam Mathews and
Associates in 1979-80, and as a junior designer with the Chicago firm of
Fujikawa, Conterato, Lohan, and Associates (later Lohan Associates), from 1981
to 1982. In the latter firm he contributed to the design of the demonstration
kitchen and extensive high-tech audio-visual functions for McDonald's
headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois.
Since 1984, he has worked with NASA's Johnson Space Center
in Houston. There, he participated in the design of the International Space
Station as well as managed the development of Space Station Crew Equipment,
including restraints, interior partitions, crew quarters, galley, food service
areas, and personal hygiene facilities. At present he is responsible for the
oversight of all U.S. flights to assemble, outfit, and resupply the International
Space Station.
Kennedy, Kriss
Kriss Kennedy
was born in Potsdam, New York, in 1960. He earned his bachelor's degree in
professional studies in architecture from the University of Buffalo in 1984
and his master of architecture degree from the Sasakawa Center for Space
Architecture at the University of Houston in 1988. He has worked for a variety
of architectural firms, sometimes simultaneously. From 1987 to 1995, he was a
consulting designer for Allan James, Inc., in Houston, and in 1990, he
established his own architectural firm, called Techne Architects. In addition,
since 1987 he has also been employed at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston
in a variety of design positions, including those related to the inflatable
module TransHab for the International Space Station, Surface Base Planning, and
Lunar-Mars habitats. His latest work for NASA involves the development of
inflatable structures for space habitation.
Korolev, Sergei Pavlovich
Sergei Korolev was born in the Ukraine in 1907. In 1928, he
entered Bauman Technical University, where he specialized in aeronautical
engineering. While there, he cofounded GIRD, an unofficial organization that
carried out some of the first liquid-fueled rocket experiments in the Soviet
Union. Unfortunately, his increasing technological skills brought him unwanted
attention, and in 1938 he was arrested in a Stalinist purge and accused of
"subversion in a new field of technology." He was sent to the Kolyma
gold mines in Siberia, where the average life expectancy of a prisoner was six
months. Soon, however, he was transferred to a special prison for scientists
and engineers, where he resumed his rocket research. After World War II,
Korolev was sent to Germany to study captured A-4 rockets. He was put to work
designing ballistic missiles, but he also persisted with his own plans to send
people into space by designing missiles large enough and powerful enough to
launch manned capsules. He eventually became the chief designer of the Soviet
space program. Under his leadership, the Soviet Union set a stunning number of
space records: the first artificial satellite, the first person in space, the
first spacewalk, the first spacecraft to reach the Moon, the first (and only)
probes to land on Venus, the first Mars flyby, and the first spy satellite. He
also led the U.S.S.R.'s attempts to land a man on the Moon. Korolev, however,
did not live to see the conclusion of the race. He died prematurely in January
1966.
Ley, Willy
Fascinated by science, Willy Ley was one of the driving
forces behind the popularization of spaceflight. Ley was born in Berlin in
1906, and studied astronomy, zoology, physics, and paleontology at the
University of Berlin and the University of Konigsburg. He wrote his first book
on the topic of space travel in 1926 and worked with the film director Fritz
Lang on a few of his movies, including Frau im Mond.
Inspired by the writings of Hermann Oberth, in 1927 he helped . form the
Society for Space Travel and later recruited the young Wernher von Braun into
the society. His enthusiasm for spreading knowledge, specifically the latest
developments in rocketry, however, led to trouble when the Nazi party came to
power. He left Germany, moved to Great Britain, and then came to the United
States. After the war, he continued to write books about rocketry and space
travel, collaborating on some of them with von Braun, and he strongly advocated
the idea of sending people to the Moon. His books helped fuel the public
support that eventually led to the Apollo program. He died in June 1969, just
one month before the first Moon landing.
Lippisch, Alexander Martin
Alexander Lippisch was born in Munich on November 2, 1894.
He received his engineering doctorate from Heidelberg University. In 1918,
after his service in World War I, he went to work for the Zeppelin Company.
Soon, though, his interests turned to high-speed aircraft. He developed some of
the earliest studies, experiments, and theoretical models of high-speed
aircraft performance, and was intrigued by the idea of a tailless aircraft.
His first successful tailless design was a glider he designed in 1921. Seven
years later, he created a rocket- boosted glider and achieved the first
rocket-powered flight in history. He pursued his research on delta wing,
tailless, high-speed aircraft and in 1939 was hired by the Messerschmitt
Company. There, he designed the Me 163, the world's first rocket-powered
interceptor. In 1946, he immigrated to the United States and worked with the
U.S. Air Force. He died on February 11,1976.
Loewy, Raymond Fernand
Raymond Loewy became one of the most influential industrial
designers in America. He was born in Paris on November 8, 1893, and attended
the University of Paris from 1910to 1912. He served with the French Army Corps
of Engineers as liaison officer to the American Expeditionary Force between
1914 and 1918. After the war, he immigrated to the United States; he was
naturalized in 1938.He started his career
as a window- display artist and fashion illustrator, but soon opened his own
industrial design firm, Raymond Loewy Associates, in 1929. He developed the
acronym MAYA - Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable - to describe his design
philosophy. He helped design all kinds and aspects of American products,
including International Harvester tractors, a Sears, Roebuck, and Co.
refrigerator, Studebaker automobiles, and the Exxon and Shell Oil Company
logos. From 1967 to 1973, his influence extended beyond the atmosphere as he
helped design the interior of the Skylab space station. He died on July 14,
1986, in Monte Carlo.
Luckman, Charles
Charles Luckman was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1909.
He graduated magna cum laude in 1931 from the School of Architecture at the
University of Illinois. His career began at the Colgate-Palmo- live-Peet
Company, where he worked as a draftsman. His business sense and attention to
detail were quickly noticed, and in 1935, he was offered the position of sales
manager at the Pepsodent Company, whose profits he promptly quadrupled. This
feat earned him a place on the cover of Time magazine in 1937and the label,
"Boy Wonder of American Industry." In 1943, Pepsodent was acquired by
Lever Brothers, but Luckman again rose to the top, and in 1946 he was named
president of Lever Brothers. One of his first tasks there was to help create
the new corporate headquarters, which became one of the first glass skyscrapers
in Manhattan - the famous Lever House on Park Avenue designed by Skidmore,
Owings and Merrill. He enjoyed the process so much that he left the company and
started the Luckman Partnership architectural firm. It was with this firm that
he made his contributions to the space program. He was responsible for creating
the original master plans for Edwards Air Force Base, north of Los Angeles,
the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and the Johnson Space
Center in Houston. These accomplishments are even more impressive when the
timelines are taken into account. Because of the rush to land men on the Moon
by the end of the decade, Luckman was given only forty-eight days
to design the entire Johnson Space Center, including all the laboratories,
training facilities, and Mission Control. Luckman died in January 1999.
Luehrsen, Hannes
Hannes Luehrsen
was born in Bargteheide, Germany, in 1907 and studied at the Technical
Universities in Aachen and Berlin, earning his bachelor's degree in 1930 and
his master's degree in 1934, both from Aachen. He ran his own architectural
practice in Berlin from 1938 to 1941 and during World War II was one of the
architects who worked on the design of the V-2 facilities at Peenemünde, where
he designed the various emblems on the V-2s. In 1949, he was brought to
Huntsville, Alabama, by Wernher von Braun to work as the master planner for the
Redstone missile arsenal. In 1960, two years after NASA was established,
Luehrsen became chief of the master planning office for the NASA campus in
Huntsville; he held this position until 1969. He also consulted on other master
planning efforts, such as that for the restoration of Heidelberg, Germany,
sponsored by the Portland Cement Company, in 1969, and for Point Mallard Park
in Decatur, Alabama, in 1967. Luehrsen died in 1986.
Mount, Frances E.
Frances
Mount was born in 1936 and was raised in Pennsylvania. She traveled extensively
throughout the United States while completing her college work. From the
University of Houston, she earned a bachelor of science in mathematics in 1974;
a bachelor of science in psychology in 1975; and a doctorate in psychology,
specializing in human factors, in 1993. She worked as a consultant to NASA's
Johnson Space Center for a decade beginning in 1974, and since 1985 she has
been a staff member. At NASA, she has worked on a variety of habitability
issues related to spaceflights of long duration, particularly those pertaining
to the space station Freedom (the precursor
of the International Space Station), developing the programs for ergonomics,
workstation design, and human-computer interface issues. Her research also
addresses general space habitability factors, from window placement to color
use and noise level determination. She currently researches space human factors,
such as procedures, crew interfaces, and conflict resolution, which help maintain
effective and efficient crew performance during spaceflight missions. Nixon, David A. Born in 1947 in 11 key, Yorkshire, England,
David Nixon studied architecture at the Polytechnic of Central London. After graduation in 1971, he worked for a variety of high-tech architectural firms, including those of Lord Richard Rogers, Sir Hugh Casson, Sir Norman Foster, and Nicholas Grimshaw, as well as Chicago's Skidmore, Owingsand Merrill. In 1977, Nixon and architect Jan Kaplicky formed a group in London called Future Systems; they worked together on a variety of design projects for more than a decade. Nixon moved to California in 1980 to teach architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the University of California, Los Angeles. Between 1985 and 1989, he worked for NASA on the design of the astronauts' habitation in the International Space Station. With the experience gained from that contract, he created the firm Altus Associates and expanded his scope to include aerospace architecture and design projects, most notably for the Rotary Rocket Company.
Oberth, Hermann Julius
Born in
Transylvania on June 25, 1894, Hermann Oberth became interested in spaceflight
and rocketry at an early age when he began reading the works of Jules Verne. In
1912, he entered the University of Munich to study medicine, and he worked in
a medical unit during World War I. Deciding not to pursue a medical career,
Oberth returned to school to study physics. He presented his doctoral thesis,
entitled "Rockets into Interplanetary Space," in 1922, but it was
rejected for being too utopian. He did not rewrite his thesis, but instead published
it on his own, hoping to show that without a degree he was a better scientist
than those who had rejected his work. His interest in rocketry continued, and
in 1928 and 1929 he worked as a scientific consultant to Fritz Lang during the
production of the film Frau im Mond. Also in
1929, Oberth fired his first liquid-fueled rocket, assisted by students of the
Technical University of Berlin. One of these students was Wernher von Braun,
who later used many of Oberth's design improvements in his own V-2 rocket
engine. Oberth also assisted with the production of the V-2 during World War
II, and after the war he moved to Switzerland to be an independent consultant
and writer. Oberth then came to the United States and worked for von Braun in
Huntsville, Alabama, during the late 1950s. He retired to Germany in 1962,
where he continued his writing. Oberth died in Nurem- burg in 1989, at the age
of ninety-five. Tedesko, Anton Anton Tedesko was born in 1903 in
Gruenberg, Germany. He earned engineering degrees from the Polytechnic Universities in Vienna in 1926 and Berlin in 1930, as well as a doctorate from Vienna in 1951. Although he designed structures in Vienna as well as Poland and Czechoslovakia before World War II, he is best remembered for his work with Chicago engineers Roberts and Schaefer from 1932 and after, particularly thin- shell concrete roofs. Some of Tedesko's most famous buildings include the Sea-plane Hangars at North Island Naval Air Station in San Diego from 1940-41 and the roofs of the 1951-56 terminal at Lambert Field, St. Louis, designed in con-junction with architects Hellmuth, Yamasaki, and Leinweber. He and his firm consulted on other aerospace proj¬ects as well, most notably the facilities at Cape Canaveral from the early 1960s, including the Vertical Assembly Building. Tedesko died in Seattle in 1994.
Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin Eduardovich
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of Soviet rocketry, was
born on September 17, 1857, in the village of Izherskoye, about two hundred
kilometers from Moscow. At age nine, a case of scarlet fever caused him to lose
most of his hearing. Ridiculed by other children, he turned to reading for
entertainment. He taught himself physics and began inventing such vehicles as
a steam-powered carriage and a hydrogen-fueled balloon. At age sixteen, he went
to Moscow to continue his studies; he taught himself differential and integral
calculus, analytical geometry, and spherical trigonometry. Tsiolkovsky was
driven by the idea of travel into space and starved himself so that he could
spend most of his money on books and chemicals for his experiments. In 1876, he
returned home and three years later began his career as a schoolteacher. He
continued his experimentation and theoretical studies and was particularly
interested in airplanes, an all-metal dirigible, and interplanetary rockets. In
1890, he constructed the first wind tunnel in Russia to test his designs. He
even tried his hand at writing science fiction. His 1895 story, "Dreams of
Earth and Heaven," describes a space station orbiting two hundred miles
above the Earth, an altitude that is remarkably accurate. In 1897, he derived
the formula for a liquid- fueled rocket, which relates the rocket velocity to
its exhaust velocity and amount of fuel remaining. He described this formula in
his 1903 paper, "Investigating Space with Reaction Devices," which
also proved that rockets could theoretically achieve orbital speeds and escape
velocity. The paper contained as well practical instructions for building rocket
components and concluded that single-stage rockets were not the best design for
interplanetary flights. His ideas, however, were not well received. Most people
refused to give credit to the work of a self-taught scientist with no formal
college degree. Tsiolkovsky continued his research, and a revised version of
"Investigating Space" was published in 1911. This version also
included a new section on using nuclear power for rocket propulsion and
proposed the idea of using electric fields to increase the exhaust velocity. He
began gaining more credibility for his work and was inducted into the Russian
Socialist Academy of Sciences in 1919. He continued writing papers on reentry,
solar propulsion, multi-staged rockets, and jet airplanes. Tsiolkovsky died in
Kaluga, Russia, in 1935, having published four times as many articles during
his last seventeen years as he had in his previous sixty years of life.
Urbahn, Max O.
Born in 1912 in Burscheid, Germany, and educated in
architecture at the University of Illinois and Yale University, Max Urbahn
began his design career in
1938in the office of John
Russell Pope. There he worked as part of the team that designed the National
Gallery of Art and the Jefferson Memorial. He worked in the New York office of
Holabird and Root, a prominent Chicago firm, during World War II. Urbahn
practiced architecture on his own in New York from 1946 to 1978. His firm,
originally Resiner and Urbahn, exists today under the name Urbahn Associates
and is headed by Martin Stein. The Urbahn office specialized in, and still
concentrates on, architecture for the public sector, some of its notable work
being hospitals, schools, and research institutes, particularly in the New York
City area. His office was part of the architectural team that designed Fermilab
in Batavia, Illinois. Urbahn's greatest accomplishment in building for space
travel was heading a consortium that designed the Vehicle Assembly Building and
launch-control complex at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida,
in the early 1960s. He served as president of the American Institute of
Architects in 1972. Urbahn made his home in Stonington, Connecticut; he died
there in 1995.
Verne, Jules Gabriel
Jules Verne was born on February 8, 1828, in Nantes,
France, into a family of lawyers. He earned his law degree in Paris in 1849.
Verne became increasingly enchanted with the city's literary circles, and he
began writing plays, the first of which was performed in 1850.
Verne also
began teaching himself geology, engineering, and astronomy in order to write
more realistic and believable stories. His first novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, was published in 1863.
Many more novels followed, including From the Earth
to the Moon, Direct in Ninety-seven Hours Twenty Minutes in 1866, and
its sequel, Around the Moon, in 1869. These
stories of interplanetary travel, which were remarkably accurate for their
time, later inspired many scientists and engineers to make space travel a
reality. Verne lived a long and colorful life, which included witnessing a
revolution, serving in the coast guard during the Franco-Prussian War, working
as a stockbroker, receiving a private audience with Pope Leo XII, and being
shot by his nephew, which left him permanently lame. He died in Amiens in 1905.
Von Braun, Wernher
Wernher von Braun was born into an aristocratic family in
Wirsitz, Germany, on March 23, 1912. Upon his confirmation into the Lutheran
church, his mother presented him with a telescope, which fueled his desire for
space travel. The family moved to Berlin in 1920, but young Wernher did not
perform well in school, particularly in math and physics. In 1925, he obtained
a copy of Hermann Oberth's thesis, "Rockets into Interplanetary
Space," and became extremely frustrated when he could not understand the
math involved. He began to study more diligently and eventually mastered the
subject. While studying at the Berlin Institute of Technology in 1930, von
Braun joined the Society for Space Travel, where he assisted Oberth with the
testing of liquid-fueled rocket engines. In 1932, he earned his bachelor of
science degree in mechanical engineering and started his graduate work at
Berlin University. In that same year, the Society for Space Travel ran into
financial problems and could not afford to continue its rocket tests. The
group was soon contacted by Captain Walter Dornberger, who was in charge of developing
solid-fueled rockets for the German army and offered them a chance to keep
working at the Kum- mersdorf Army Proving Grounds outside of Berlin. Von Braun
completed his schooling and earned his doctorate in physics in 1934. His
thesis,"About Combustion Tests," bore a title that was purposely
vague due to military security. In it, von Braun intricately described the
test firings of two different types of liquid-fueled engines developed at
Kummersdorf. While at Kummersdorf, von Braun and his team also developed the
rocket that became known as the V-1 buzz bomb. Soon, however, it became
apparent that more room was needed for their tests, and in 1937 the team moved
to a town on the Baltic Sea called Peenemünde. There von Braun and his
colleagues created the A-4 rocket, which later was renamed the V-2. The first
test flight of the A-4 occurred on October 3, 1942. During this flight, the
rocket broke the sound barrier and climbed over sixty miles high, literally
reaching the edge of space. Work continued, and on September 7, 1944, the
first operational V-2 was launched. As the war neared its end, all turned their
eyes towards von Braun. The United States and the Soviet Union both wanted the
mastermind behind the V-2, but the German military police force had orders to
kill the entire team to keep the information from falling into enemy hands. Von
Braun and his fellow scientists decided that they would much rather surrender
to the Americans, so they stole a train and headed for the American lines.
They were brought to White Sands, New Mexico, along with hundreds of tons of
captured V-2 hardware, and continued their rocket research, this time working
for the U.S. Army.
In 1952, von Braun moved to Huntsville, Alabama, and took
charge of the army's ballistic weapons program. Under his control, the army
developed the Redstone, Jupiter-C, Juno, and Pershing missiles. During the
1950s, von Braun also wrote numerous articles and books popularizing the idea
of space travel.
He became a United States citizen in 1955. In 1958, after
the Soviet launches of Sputnik 1 and 2, and the failed launch of the U.S. Vanguard
program, von Braun and his team at Huntsville launched America's first
satellite, Explorer 1, aboard a Jupiter-C
missile. In that same year, the rocket team was transferred to the newly formed
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Von Braun became the
director of NASA's George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville and
began work on the Saturn series of rockets, the first boosters designed
specifically as space vehicles. Saturn rockets eventually launched every
manned mission to the moon, as well as the Skylab space station and the
American half of the joint U.S.-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz mission. In 1970, von Braun
was transferred to NASA headquarters in Huntsville, where he served as the
deputy administrator for planning. He left NASA in 1972 and took a position as
vice president with the aerospace company Fairchild Industries, Inc. He
founded the National Space Institute in 1975 to promote the peaceful use of
space. Von Braun died in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1977.
In: 2001: Building for Space Travel. Edit by John Zukowsky, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Flight (Seattle, Wash.), pp.180-184. Out of the Present
.jpg)
