Beyond Gravity

One weekend in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, visitors to London's Science Museum might have come across a dozen young men peering through a contrivance of rotating mirrors at a spinning disk a few meters away. Hanging just above them was the 1903 Wright Flyer—but the experimenters had set their sights on something far more ambitious than flight in the atmosphere. They believed that one day it would be possible to travel to other worlds and were trying to design the navigational equipment needed for such voyages.

I am now the only survivor of that little group of British Interplanetary Society members. Though none of us could have guessed that the first moon landing was only three decades in the future, we were already concerned with the problems that might arise during the voyage. One of these—well known even to Jules Verne when he wrote From the Earth to the Moon in 1865—was that for most of the time the occupants of a spaceship would be weightless.

Because this condition cannot be reproduced on Earth for more than a few seconds, no one knew how the human body would react to it. Some horrifying scenarios had been predicted: One held that the heart would race uncontrollably in zero gravity, so that any foolhardy astronauts could expect a swift but merciful death.

However, there appeared to be a simple solution: Make the living quarters of the spaceship a slowly revolving drum, so that centrifugal force gave the occupants the sensation of weight, allowing them to walk on a cylindrical "floor." My late friend Stanley Kubrick showed this, on rather a lavish scale, in 2001: A Space Odyssey's orbiting Hilton hotel.

So we premature 1930s space cadets had designed a spinning spaceship, but how to observe the moon and stars if we were revolving several times a minute? Fortunately, astronomers had long ago solved this problem for the Earth, which revolves once a day, with an instrument known as a coelostat. This employs mirrors moving in such a way that the reflected sky appears stationary.

To demonstrate the British Interplanetary Society's considerably higher speed version, we used a spinning disk on which we had painted the letters "BIS." These were quite unreadable until one peered into the coelostat, where they appeared motionless. I am indeed happy to say that the society is still very active and is now the world's oldest organization devoted to space exploration.

As it turned out, our fears of weightlessness were much exaggerated, although there may be long-term effects about which little is yet known. Humans have now lived in space for longer than a year, and indeed some astronauts became so addicted to freedom from gravity that they were reluctant to return to Earth.

Weightlessness does have certain problems, however, and NASA's famous—or infamous—flying laboratory, the aptly named "Vomit Comet", has been used to study some of them. The plane's carefully controlled flight pattern can produce weightlessness for nearly half a minute. One of the great unsung moments in the conquest of space was when the Vomit Comet was used to test space-toilet design. The heroic volunteers had a mere 30-second window of opportunity…