Look Up

In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan set sail from Seville with a fleet of five ships and a crew of 270 men. Their voyage was being bankrolled by the King of Spain and the intention was to find an alternative passage to the Spice Islands – now the Moluccas, in modern-day Indonesia – by heading west around the globe instead of taking the established easterly route. Few educated people at this time thought the world was flat, but some of Magellan’s contemporaries still suspected the voyage wasn’t even possible. The problem, though, was the size of the Earth, not its shape.

Polynesian people had explored the Pacific, settling on the islands they discovered – from Hawaii to Easter Island – starting perhaps as far back as 3,000 BCE. However, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the most Europeans knew about what we now call the Pacific Ocean was that there was some sort of ‘south sea’ on the other side of the Americas. They had absolutely no idea of the scale of the ocean Magellan was planning to cross, nor how to find a sea passage into it. Yet despite the dangers, the arduous conditions they would experience on board, and the fear of sea monsters and storms, sailors joined Magellan’s crew. They were motivated by the riches they could gain if they were successful – the spice trade was incredibly lucrative at the time. But there were still less dangerous ways to make money. Magellan and crew were daring to dream an impossible dream. It had only been 20 years since Vasco da Gama had become the first European to travel around the Cape of Good Hope and make it to India.

Of the five ships that set sail, only one made it back to Spain. Many – Magellan included – died during the attempt. While Magellan succeeded in finding and crossing through a strait at the foot of South America – which would go on to be named after him – he had to face a mutiny from his crew beforehand, and only regained control after beheading and marooning some of the mutineers. Those that survived the scurvy and starvation that ensued on their 98-day crossing of an expanse of water far bigger than anyone had imagined became the first Europeans to sail the Pacific Ocean.

Magellan himself died in the Philippines after picking a fight with a local king, but those 18 expedition members who survived the three-year voyage to return to Seville became the first humans to ever circumnavigate the globe. They had undertaken a voyage nobody else had. Something which to so many had seemed impossible, was now possible.

This period in European history is known as the Age of Exploration. It radically reshaped the world as we then knew it, and wreaked devastation on countless indigenous peoples. The Portuguese prince often called Henry the Navigator is credited with making a big contribution to exploration as he commissioned many expeditions at a time when lots of sailors were afraid of setting out into the Atlantic Ocean, tasking them with recording as much information as they could about the coastlines they visited. However, Henry was also responsible for starting the Atlantic slave trade. So when we celebrate humanity’s drive to explore, at the same time it is also important to reflect on the horrendous mistakes we made.

The desire to discover new lands for their nations pushed shipbuilders, cartographers and astronomers to come up with better technology. A new type of ship, the caravel – capable of faster speeds and with manoeuvrable sails allowing it to tack into the wind – helped to make the voyages of Magellan and many others possible. Explorers also had to learn how to live on board ship for long periods of time, though how to prevent scurvy – the eventually deadly consequence of depriving the body of vitamin C – wasn’t understood until the eighteenth century. Our desire to explore has continued to help push the limits of our understanding of the sciences of medicine and physiology.

At the same time as we were sending ships to further-away places, great minds were looking up and challenging the established ideas about the universe, often going against the thinking of religion. On his deathbed in 1543, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published his book On the Revolutions of Celestial Spheres. For more than a thousand years, we had believed the Earth was at the centre of the solar system; the Sun, the known planets and the stars all travelled around the Earth. But Copernicus’s work challenged the idea upheld by the church. He stated that the Sun, not the Earth, was in fact at the centre of the solar system. His book was met with controversy, but it led the way to the Scientific Revolution and a new way of understanding our world. Among the great inventions of this period was the telescope, which opened up the wonders above us like never before.

Then, in 1768, the Royal Society and the British Admiralty sent James Cook to sail to Tahiti, where he and his crew aboard the Endeavour would observe the transit of Venus. This is when Venus appears to cross the Sun, as viewed from Earth. The transit of Venus occurs in pairs, eight years apart, every 120 years or so. Scientists at the Royal Society hoped that observing this phenomenon from the Pacific Ocean would expand their knowledge of the solar system. At the time, we understood that there were six planets, including Earth. Astronomers knew the relative spacing of these planets but what was a great mystery was the size of the solar system. It was hoped that by measuring Venus crossing our Sun from different locations on Earth, and noting the start and stop times, it would be possible to calculate how far away the planet is from Earth and therefore deduce an estimate of the size of the known solar system.

Using special telescopes, Cook and his onboard astronomer Charles Green observed the transit. But the intense sunlight filtering through Venus’s atmosphere made the edge of the disc of the planet fuzzy, meaning it was difficult to get precise timings. The times recorded by Cook and Green differed by 42 seconds, and there were many variations in the other measurements recorded elsewhere in the world. It would take until the nineteenth century and the next pair of transits for astronomers to get the precise measurements needed – this time aided by photography.

Cook then continued with the second part of his mission and headed south, in search of ‘Terra Australis Incognita’. Dutch, and possibly Portuguese, explorers had visited parts of Australia’s coast already, but it wasn’t known for sure whether this was the southern continent that many scientists believed must exist to ‘balance’ the landmass of the northern hemisphere.

After he first arrived in New Zealand and mapped it, Cook concluded that it was two islands and not what he was looking for. He finally sighted what he would name New South Wales on 19 April 1770 and ‘claimed’ it for Britain. The result of his discovery was that it was now possible to draw a reasonably accurate map of the world. Our picture of our home planet had changed completely since 1492, when Christopher Columbus had arrived in the Caribbean and believed it to be Asia.

Before the Age of Exploration began in the fifteenth century, the oceans had been the great frontier. But by embarking on these bold journeys and pushing the limits of where humans could go, we gained a better understanding of the Earth’s geography. These impossible voyages also opened the door to future expeditions that would focus on scientific discovery rather than conquest and riches. In many ways, the voyage of the Endeavour was comparable to our space missions of today – Cook and his crew set sail both to conduct scientific research and to expand what we knew about our surroundings.

As we increased our knowledge of our planet and our understanding of science, our attention began to turn to the skies. People have always been fascinated by the idea of flying and the ability of birds to leave terra firma and rise high above us. The first real studies into the possibilities of flight were made by Leonardo da Vinci in the 1480s. Centuries ahead of his time, he produced over 100 drawings to illustrate his theories, and he famously drew a design for something that looks a lot like the modern helicopter. However, the ability to successfully rise above the ground and travel in the air had so far evaded us.

Then, on 19 September 1783, a crowd of dignitaries including King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette gathered in Paris, France, to watch the flight of the Montgolfier balloon. I like to imagine that the atmosphere was comparable to the crowds watching the first crewed rocket launches on Florida’s Space Coast almost two centuries later. The Montgolfier brothers behind the first hot air balloon were the Elon Musks of their day. They had made their money in paper manufacturing – a high-tech industry at the time – and were now pioneering a new type of technology.

The passengers for this flight were a duck, a sheep and a cockerel. No one had yet been up in the Montgolfiers’ invention as they didn’t know at the time if people could survive at altitude. The animals had been selected carefully; the thinking was that the sheep mimicked the physiology of a human, the duck was seen as unlikely to be harmed (as they already fly) and the cockerel was a control – cockerels are birds, but they do not fly. The animals survived their eight-minute journey, and humans would shortly follow them into the skies.

Two months later, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent le Vieux d’Arlandes sailed high above the rooftops of Paris – to the astonishment of its citizens – in the first crewed, untethered flight. Europe became gripped by balloonmania and its early pioneers were celebrities of the time.

Scientists, engineers and designers – and the people or organisations who bankroll their work – bring us great technological breakthroughs, enabling things to be done that have never been done before. But in order to achieve anything, you first have to come up with the idea. As Albert Einstein famously said, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’ And for nearly as long as we have understood the Moon to be our satellite, and another world, rather than a deity or object in danger of being eaten by a wolf or dragon, we have imagined what it might be like to go there.

By the late nineteenth century, our understanding of science and technology had boomed as the Age of Enlightenment brought about a new understanding of the world around us. In turn, this knowledge helped inspire the imagination of artists and writers. Works of science fiction began to depict voyages to space. Jules Verne’s eerily prophetic From the Earth to the Moon of 1865 and its sequel Around the Moon, told the tale of three Americans launched from Florida bound on a voyage to the Moon, who later splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. Little more than 100 years later, three astronauts would do just that – launch from Florida bound on a mission to the Moon. Science fiction became science prediction.

One of the greatest ever writers of adventure stories, Jules Verne was born in 1828 in the French coastal city of Nantes. He grew up on stories of shipwrecks and nautical travels, and watched sailors at the docks close to where he lived arrive back from remote and far-flung places. The books he wrote as an adult were about impossible voyages and daring expeditions, but they were grounded in meticulously researched scientific fact and inspired by our real-life adventures on Earth. Verne’s story about a voyage to the Moon would go on to inspire one of the first movies, Georges Méliès’s Le Voyage dans la Lune. The 13-minute film captivated audiences in 1902, showing a crew of explorers shot from a cannon into the eye of the Moon.

Then, the following year, on 17 December 1903, on a windswept beach in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, humans became capable of powered flight. Two bicycle builders, Orville and Wilbur Wright, successfully flew the aeroplane they had designed. The initial trip lasted just seconds, but it ignited the age of aviation. The skies became the new frontier.

Aviation’s pioneers continually pushed the limits of where flight could take us. This new technology developed quickly and captured the imagination of the public. In 1927, Charles Lindbergh became the first person to travel solo across the Atlantic by aeroplane, flying from New York to Paris. His journey took 33.5 hours. A great ocean, which for so long could only be crossed by an arduous sea voyage, had been traversed in less than two days.

This new frontier of flight, of course, came with high risks. Many of the famed pilots of the era – among them Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic – lost their lives in the pursuit of extending our airborne capabilities. But in spite of the risks and the dangers, people continued in their quest to tame the sky. The spirit of adventure and yearning to fly called loudly to a new generation of explorers.

The demands of the Second World War brought yet more development in flight as aircraft became larger as well as capable of flying further and faster. Then in 1947 Chuck Yeager did something which had once been thought impossible – in a specially designed craft, the Bell X-1, he flew at over 800mph, faster than the speed of sound. Until this point it was unknown what would happen if someone in a plane attempted to cross what had been dubbed ‘the sound barrier’.

As many remained captivated by the developments of aviation, other great minds looked very seriously at the feasibility of humans leaving Earth. Robert Goddard, Hermann Oberth, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Robert Esnault-Pelterie would become known as the ‘Fathers of Rocketry’. Inspired by great works of science fiction, at the turn of the twentieth century they worked independently to develop the mathematics and techniques that would form the basics for us to eventually leave Earth by rocket. Voyages to space were no longer the stuff of science fiction, but instead within our grasp.

The stage was set for the stars.

On 4 May 1989, Magellan once again set out to explore the unknown. This time it was the Magellan spacecraft, launched by NASA to reach the orbit of Venus and map the planet’s surface. It became one of NASA’s most successful deep-space missions, just over 200 hundred years after those aboard James Cook’s HMS Endeavour watched the planet cross the Sun from the deck of their ship. NASA has often named spacecraft for the great explorers who set out to learn more about our planet or their ships – the Space Shuttle Endeavour was named after James Cook’s ship, and the name would later be used for the first SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule to be flown with astronauts onboard, while the Space Shuttle Challenger owed its name to the British Navy research vessel HMS Challenger, which explored the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in the 1870s.

In many ways, space was our next natural step. Once we had sailed the great oceans, mapped the land and mastered the skies, it was inevitable that we would want to go further. So while our contemporary space scientists and engineers are working at the edge of what we currently know how to do, in some ways this is nothing new. We have always pushed at the boundaries of what we are capable of – figuring out how to achieve the impossible is how we move forward as a species. Our world of today, for better and worse, is owed to those who set sail in search of new horizons.

Today, the distance between the planets in our solar system is like the span of the oceans between the continents for those in the Age of Exploration. Just like our ancestors, we are setting sail into the unknown on voyages that will bring about new discoveries, knowledge and benefits that we cannot even imagine. History has taught us that, by building on the knowledge of previous generations, things which once seemed impossible eventually become possible.

Chapter One

The Space Race

‘Far better it is to dare mighty things.’

President Theodore Roosevelt

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