Chasing the Moon

As he read the news and talked with acquaintances, Ley was alarmed as things he had long opposed were gradually accepted as part of everyday life: a cult of loyalty and blind patriotism, militarism, anti-globalism, superstition, and pseudoscience. While Germany touted its reputation for excellence in the sciences, Ley observed how politics had begun to encroach on the scientific method, and positions formerly held by Jewish scientists were filled by less qualified opportunists. His friend Fritz Lang had already fled Germany, and Ley decided he had no other choice but to do the same. He would pretend to leave for a brief vacation in England but knew it likely he would not return home for years.

Members of both the British Interplanetary Society and the American Rocket Society—the new, more serious-sounding name of the American Interplanetary Society—came to Ley’s aid by securing him a visa and writing letters of support. Although he arrived in New York with little money, Ley was a recognized expert regarding recent rocket development in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. He was embarking on a new life, believing he would now assume a similar role in the United States.

Ley’s initial business venture in the United States generated publicity for collectable rocket-mail postal covers, but unfortunately it returned little income. He next attempted to find employment as a rocketry engineer but was surprised to encounter pervasive skepticism that a rocket could operate in the vacuum of space. Far more welcoming was the small community of science-fiction magazine editors and publishers, and out of necessity Ley began to support himself through his writing.

By the time Ley had arrived in the United States, Robert Goddard had become increasingly reclusive, having moved all his research to a secluded desert testing facility in Roswell, New Mexico. Noted aviation philanthropist Harry Guggenheim had stepped in to provide funding for his rocket research, thanks to the intercession of famed airman Charles Lindbergh as well as one of Goddard’s former students at Clark University, an aviation pioneer named Edwin Aldrin. (Aldrin was to become famous a little more than three decades later as the father of astronaut Buzz Aldrin, one of the first two men to land on the Moon.) Goddard’s continued secrecy aroused the suspicions of Ley, who considered the professor’s reputation in America overrated and unequal to the stature of Oberth. As he began to publish freelance articles about the current state of rocket development for American periodicals, Ley seldom gave Goddard’s work equal attention.

NO LONGER IGNORED in his homeland, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was celebrated as a national hero upon his death at age seventy-eight in 1935. One of his last projects was serving as the scientific adviser on a Russian feature film about the first trip to the Moon, Cosmic Voyage (Kosmicheskiy Reys). Little seen outside the Soviet Union, the adventure film was conceived as socialist-realist entertainment intended to interest young moviegoers in space science. It featured a spaceship named after Stalin, a launch system that used a massive ramp that towered over downtown Moscow, and cinema’s first depiction of a flag-raising on the Moon’s surface.

Had Cosmic Voyage been released in British cinemas, there is little doubt Archie Clarke would have been among the first to buy an admission ticket. Instead, his attention was focused on another film released at nearly the same time as Cosmic Voyage. Not long after turning eighteen, Clarke attended a screening of the new British film Things to Come. It was a rarity for its time: a serious science-fiction film with a screenplay by a major author, H. G. Wells. Things to Come presents a chronicle of the next hundred years, beginning with a devastating second world war that commences on Christmas Day 1940, followed by an extended second dark age and a subsequent technological renaissance in the mid-twenty-first century. In the film’s concluding sequence, preparations are under way for the first trip to the Moon. After decades of warfare and barbarity, humanity turns toward outer space to express its innate aspirational yearning. The camera focuses on actor Raymond Massey in the final scene, as he looks heavenward and asks, “All the universe, or nothing. Which shall it be?”

Clarke often spoke of Things to Come as his favorite movie of all time. But when the film appeared in English theaters during 1936, audiences would have seen it bookended by newsreels showing labor strikes, militarism in Germany and Japan, and the Italian Army at war in Ethiopia. A glimpse of a technologically advanced future that Clarke yearned for was envisioned on the movie screen, but Wells’s screenplay implied that rockets to the Moon would only happen after a devastating world conflagration and a second dark age.

The world was in crisis, but Arthur Clarke sustained his optimistic belief in a better future with a growing library of American science-fiction magazines. His network of science-fiction and rocketry enthusiasts continued to expand, and even Ley became one of his correspondents, not only offering firsthand information about recent rocketry development in Germany but also serving as Clarke’s American source for the latest magazines. No longer would he need to haunt the back tables at Woolworth’s.

The summer that Things to Come was playing in cinemas, Arthur Clarke moved to London to begin his professional life as a junior auditor for the board of education. He had aced the civil-service exam with a perfect math score. “I prided myself on having the fastest slide rule in Whitehall, so I was usually able to do all my work in an hour or so and devote the rest of the day to more important business.” The more important business was assuming an active role with the British Interplanetary Society, where he had risen to secretary/treasurer.

On a chilly winter morning a few months after his arrival in London, Clarke and a few friends caught a train out of St. Pancras station to attend a conference in Leeds. The event, held in the city’s Theosophical Hall, brought together a handful of young men interested in spaceflight and science fiction for what was later recognized as the world’s first scheduled science-fiction convention. The entire attendance was fewer than twenty people. They heard Clarke announce that the British Interplanetary Society planned to move its center of operations from Liverpool to a branch office in London, which shortly thereafter became the society’s official headquarters. The new London address was, in fact, a small flat that Clarke shared with the society’s publicity director, another aspiring science-fiction writer, William Temple.

© Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM 9A12591)

Eighteen-year-old Arthur C. Clarke photographed himself using an automatically timed camera shutter in his childhood home in southwest England. The shelves of one bookcase held his extensive collection of American science-fiction magazines.

But within a few months, the society suffered a major setback. Like their American counterparts, the British society occasionally conducted public demonstration launches of small experimental rockets. While these events proved an effective way to generate publicity, little attention had been given to safety, and during a demonstration in Manchester three spectators were hit by pieces of an aluminum rocket that exploded on the launchpad. Subsequently, all experimental rocket launches in England were subject to prosecution under a nineteenth-century explosives act. The society had to find a different way to capture media attention. Even though they had limited resources, they chose to shoot for the Moon.

It was a purely intellectual exercise but one that no one had attempted before. Working as a team, the core members of the society outlined the many scientific, engineering, and intellectual challenges that a group planning a piloted expedition to the Moon would need to address. They even tried to construct a few working instruments, including an inertial guidance system that would indicate the spaceship’s position in space. Assuming they had an unlimited budget, the society’s team proceeded to design a launch vehicle with a combined crew cabin and landing craft. The entire budget the society could actually allocate to their research project was roughly one hundred twenty dollars.

Undaunted, the society’s team exploited their available resources: youthful enthusiasm, free time, and a smattering of knowledge in a variety of professional disciplines. One member was an expert on turbine engineering; another was a chemist; a third an accountant. There was an interior designer, who envisioned the spacecraft’s living quarters. Not one was a full-fledged scientist, but several had some engineering experience. Clarke oversaw the necessary higher math and the astronomical calculations.

Once a week the society’s “technical committee” gathered in the evening to dissect details of the proposed two-week lunar mission, with a brief break for fish and chips from the local pub. For their launch system, they decided to use a series of six solid-fuel stages of diminishing size, which were designed to fire in sequence. The committee had ruled out using liquid propellants, having assumed that moving the fuel through a series of mechanical pumps would be nearly impossible in such a massive vehicle.

When the project was completed, the results were published in the January 1939 issue of their newsletter, the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. The entire print run for that issue filled two cardboard boxes, which Clarke retrieved from the printer and walked back to his flat. But their modest journal generated publicity that reverberated around the world. Initally Clarke and other society members were interviewed by London newspapers and on BBC radio. Next, the Journal received attention in the prestigious science magazine Nature, which summarily dismissed the moon ship as pure fantasy. The scientific community thought it necessary to silence these starry-eyed young troublemakers before someone took them seriously.

Undismayed, Clarke and his companions returned every instance of public criticism with pointed and sarcastic rebuttals—whenever the publications deigned to give them space to reply. The criticism from the scientific establishment inspired the creation of the first of Clarke’s Three Laws: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

News about the society’s rocket ship spread internationally. In the United States, Time magazine reported on the controversy, and English-language newspapers as far away as India included it in their world-news summary. The society’s journal noted with pride that one account “stole half the photo-news page of a national Sunday newspaper from Herr Hitler.” During the flurry of publicity surrounding their moon rocket, Clarke and Bill Temple met one foreign-language journalist who made an enduring impression. Early in the interview, Temple began to wonder whether the tall quiet-voiced German might be a Nazi spy, especially when he showed particular interest in their collection of clippings about rockets as weapons. Clarke and Temple agreed that in this instance it was probably wise to avoid impressing their visitor with their knowledge of astronautics. Instead, they pretended to be merely a couple of harmless science-fiction fanboys.

The best-informed members in both the American and British rocket societies continued to assume that all rocket-related research and development in Germany had come to an abrupt end following the rise of the Nazis. Living in the United States, Willy Ley had heard nothing from his homeland to make him believe otherwise. The Third Reich appeared more concerned with rearming its land army and rebuilding its air force than with funding scientific rocket research, which few believed had any practical application as a weapon of war. Ley logically assumed that transporting a small explosive payload via a rocket would be a waste of money, and he was certain that other military strategists would agree. Meanwhile, he hoped he might eventually find a full-time position with an American company interested in developing rockets for scientific purposes. He continued to advocate for space travel, writing articles on a variety of scientific subjects for popular magazines in the hope that an informed public in the United States would avoid being seduced by the pseudoscientific and mystical fads that had become popular in Germany recently.

While on a trip to Los Angeles, Ley was delighted to reestablish contact with Frau im Mond’s creator. Fritz Lang’s sudden departure from Germany had come shortly after Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, banned his latest film, in which Lang had put the words of the Nazis in the mouth of an evil criminal mastermind. Lang was now working for MGM, where he had directed his first American film, Fury, starring Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sidney. It was a provocative thriller that addressed the scourge of lynchings in the United States, though told through the eyes of an innocently accused white man. In it, Lang depicted American vigilante mob justice with visual comparisons to what he had witnessed in Nazi Germany.

Sitting on a veranda under a starry California sky, Lang and Ley discussed the impending war in Europe and mused about travel to the Moon and the planets. However, if they had wanted to revisit their earlier cinematic collaboration, finding a copy of Frau im Mond would have been impossible. Hitler’s Gestapo had confiscated every exhibition print a few years earlier. The film had disappeared.

Not long after the Third Reich’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, Britain entered the war against Germany, forcing Clarke and Bill Temple to vacate their Bloomsbury flat and shut down the British Interplanetary Society’s headquarters. Should the British forces in Western Europe fail to prevent France from falling, Germany’s Luftwaffe bombers were expected to appear in the skies over the heart of London within days. Londoners with the opportunity to do so sought out alternative lodging with friends and relatives in the city’s less vulnerable outskirts or moved to the countryside. When Clarke and Temple locked their door, they left behind Clarke’s almost-complete run of American science-fiction magazines, a collection numbering in the hundreds that had taken him nearly a decade to assemble. He would never see them again.

The worst of the Blitz didn’t come to London until the fall of 1940, when the city was bombed continuously for nearly two months. Arthur Clarke saw none of it; now working for the Ministry of Food, he had been relocated to a seaside resort in North Wales. Sometime in the early spring of the next year, their Bloomsbury flat took a direct hit, destroying everything except the outside walls.

CLARKE SPENT THE early months of the war processing paperwork that documented the precise location of each ton of imported British tea. His position in the civil service gave him a temporary deferment from military conscription, but by the end of the year, service in one of the armed forces was unavoidable. He joined the RAF in the hope that he might be able to acquire a valuable education in the fundamentals of celestial navigation, but instead he was assigned to a technical unit devoted to a new utilization of radar to assist aircraft during poor-visibility landings. It was Clarke’s first opportunity to collaborate with another group of trained scientists, a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that had worked on the invention’s development.

Corporal Clarke was then assigned to an RAF training center in Wiltshire, not far from Stonehenge, where he taught night classes on the fundamentals of radar. However, the subject of the corporal’s classroom lectures frequently turned to astronautics, prompting his students to nickname him “Spaceship Clarke.” During a lecture a student might mischievously ask the instructor how a rocket functions in space, setting off a long discussion about multi-stage rockets and reaching the Moon, complete with diagrams and basic calculations. During his off hours he wrote technical articles for journals such as Electronic Engineering. His career as a published science-fiction author was yet to come, though just prior to joining the RAF he had completed the preliminary draft of his first novel, Against the Fall of Night.

As the Allied forces closed in on Germany in late 1944, Clarke and a group of the most active members of the British Interplanetary Society met in a London restaurant one evening. Val Cleaver, a society officer who worked in British aviation, told the diners details about his recent business trip to the United States. While visiting New York, Cleaver had met with Willy Ley and discussed recent reports of a large German rocket weapon that was said to have hit targets in Antwerp and London. Ley had heard reports that it was a frightening and more sophisticated successor to the V-1, a low-flying cruise missile that had appeared in the skies of southern England that summer, sometimes arriving in waves of more than one hundred missiles a day. Ley dismissed the jet-powered V-1 as a crude and inaccurate weapon of little military value, assuring his British guest that the reports of a bigger, high-altitude rocket bomb were nothing more than desperate Nazi propaganda. Cleaver, who had already seen classified U.K. military-intelligence reports detailing the existence of the big rocket, cautioned his friend, “If I were you, I wouldn’t be quite so sure.”

Laughter was heard around the dinner table after Cleaver recalled his words of caution. But no sooner had the amusement subsided than the gathering was interrupted by the sound of a huge crash outside the restaurant. “The building shook slightly,” Clarke recalled. “We heard that curious, unmistakable rumble of an explosion climbing backwards up the sky, from an object that had arrived faster than the sound of its own passage.” The abrupt intrusion had been the British Interplanetary Society’s introduction to the deadly V-2 rocket, the world’s first operational ballistic missile.

Should Ley have needed any further persuasion about Germany’s new rocket weapon, a copy of Life magazine published a few weeks later would have been sufficient. A double-page spread provided a detailed and fairly accurate cutaway diagram of the V-2 and a graphic illustration presenting its trajectory from launch to impact. Life also reproduced military photographs that pictured recovered rocket engines. It described the V-2 as a “spectacular weapon” but judged it “a military flop.” Despite its impressive engineering, the new weapon was an ineffective boondoggle. As Ley had predicted, the V-2’s destructive power was limited by its small payload capacity. In fact, fewer military and civilian casualties resulted from V-2 attacks than the total number of slave laborers killed due to the harsh conditions surrounding the weapons’ assembly. But decisively, when the German high command chose to fund the V-2 by diverting funding earmarked for fighter-jet aircraft, they ceded the airspace to Allied bombers, thus hastening their own defeat.

© NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center

A German V-2 rocket containing a small explosive warhead is readied for launch during the final months of World War II. More than three thousand V-2s were fired against Allied targets in England and Belgium, but as a strategic military weapon of destruction it was largely ineffective.

Ley published an article about the V-2 in an American magazine just as Allied forces entered Germany. In it he speculated that the large new rockets were the work of Hermann Oberth and thought it unlikely that either Oberth or his associates would survive to tell the story of the V-2’s birth. “Those who knew the full story are dead already,” he stated. “Those that are still alive will die before the war is over.” But far more important to Ley was its legacy: The V-2 had provided undeniable proof that it was possible to launch a large, fully operational guided missile.

Parts of a V-2 confiscated by the Allies were shipped to the United States, where Robert Goddard examined them at the Naval Experiment Station in Annapolis, Maryland. Goddard found the design of the V-2’s gyroscopically controlled stabilizing vanes, its fuel-injecting turbopumps, and its combustion chamber remarkably similar to features he had used on the rockets he developed and launched in Roswell, New Mexico. In the mid-1930s, when Goddard had been conducting his research far from the eyes of the press and curiosity seekers, both Hitler’s military intelligence organization—the Abwehr—and Soviet espionage officials had dispatched spies to gather information about Goddard’s progress. But despite Goddard’s suspicions that the V-2’s design had been stolen from his work, the technology for both rockets evolved along independent parallel tracks, with the Germans already ahead of Goddard by the early 1930s. A few days after Goddard scrutinized the confiscated V-2, Germany fell to the Allies and the war in Europe ended. Already ill with cancer, Goddard would die at age sixty-two four months later. His death came on the same week that the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, ending the war in the Pacific.

In the wake of the German surrender, the United States’s joint chiefs of staff immediately approved an unprecedented new program intended to achieve a strategic military advantage over future adversaries by obtaining proprietary access to the Third Reich’s advanced weapons technology. Not only were physical weapons and plans to be seized, but the United States’s wartime intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), sought to find the brainpower behind them as well.

The plan progressed so rapidly that the first group of German scientists and engineers arrived on American soil before President Truman became aware of the program’s existence. It began as Operation Overcast, an initiative focused on taking possession of Nazi scientific knowledge and technology for use in the war against Japan. However, after the Japanese surrender, the larger program was renamed Operation Paperclip and included many more former Third Reich engineers, technicians, and scientists. The code name arose from the Office of Strategic Services’ use of paperclips to mark the intelligence files of scientists and engineers selected for inclusion in the program.

Willy Ley assumed his unique knowledge of rocket science and his experience working with Hermann Oberth would help him obtain a financially secure job with either the United States government or an American corporation expanding into rocket development. But in the eyes of the American military, Ley was an outsider. He learned from contacts in the U.S. government that many of the German engineers who had designed the V-2 had survived the war and had been brought to the United States to work with the War Department. It was cruelly ironic. Ley had left Germany out of conscience, while those who had chosen to remain and build rockets for Hitler were accorded special attention and employed by the U.S. government. Many of Ley’s associates from the Verein für Raumschiffahrt who had worked on the V-2 would be among those leading the effort to make human space travel a reality. But Ley would not be among them.

From an American military officer, Ley learned that the Nazis’ director of the V-2 program had not been Hermann Oberth, as he had assumed. Its manager was Wernher von Braun, who as a bright eighteen-year-old aristocrat and part-time student had been personally introduced to Oberth and the Verein für Raumschiffahrt in 1930 by Ley. When recalling von Braun’s persuasion skills, Ley wrote his friend science-fiction author Robert Heinlein, “I only hope that the U.S. Army will not suddenly find him ‘charming’ in addition to being useful.”

In the waning days of the Third Reich, von Braun and his top associates had considered their options. Soviet forces were approaching from the east and the American Army from the west; their capture was inevitable. They knew their unique technical knowledge would give them leverage when negotiating terms of surrender. When von Braun polled his group, the consensus was to surrender to the Americans, and after hiding for a few days in a remote area of the Bavarian Alps, they made furtive contact with a U.S. infantry division. By the time the Soviet Army arrived at von Braun’s rocket development and testing area at Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea, nearly every one of the top scientists and engineers had already surrendered to the American forces.