This column resulted from a foray through a packet of notes and clippings becoming thicker and heavier every month and every year. I check it occasionally to reassure myself there remain topics on which to base future columns. They have been stored away like nuts in a squirrel's nest against the day they surely will prevent starvation.
I came across an editorial written - presumably by my predecessor, Mr. Edward Quick - about speculation that moon and Mars expeditions had become quite probable in the foreseeable future.
This was written at least five years before I came to Weyburn. Some of my readers (I try to believe) were not even born then, or were quite young. It was 1953, about four years before the Soviet Union (now also relegated to history), forced the U.S. into action on space travel, by launching Sputnik, the first man-made object to orbit the earth.
Taking into account the scientific inventiveness of the time, the editorial acknowledged the world was entirely different than it had been even 10 years earlier. Remember, please, that in 1943 the world was still deeply immersed in World War 2, sometimes feared to last forever.
"But even ten years ago," wrote the Review editor, "people were talking glibly about a trip to the moon, or to Mars Scientists tell us that such a trip is entirely feasible; that rocket ships could be built which would be able to take off, presumably in the proper direction, and that once in space the rocket ship would be compelled to keep going, just like shooting stars do, or other heavenly bodies that astronomers tell us move through space with nothing to stop them unless they hit Mother Earth or some other planet or body
"Perhaps some day some enthusiastic space-travelers will undertake such a trip. Daring men, willing to take their lives in their hands, are as ardent now as they were at any time in the past. They are as hardy as those who sailed, for instance, with Christopher Columbus, when he set his course forever westward across the unknown Atlantic.
"Just how they would get back, however, is another matter. Unlike Columbus it would not be a matter of just turning around and sailing eastward. They would need powerful machinery and apparatus to give them the impetus to start back as they require on this planet to leave it. Perhaps that is the big drawback in making the venture - they would not be able to transport it and set it up - even if they could overcome the lack of air on the moon, or the different atmosphere of Mars."
Please do not consider this as criticism of the view of an editor a mere 55 years ago. If memory serves, even after Sputnik had been launched, and the entire world was left breathless with the Russian achievement, spokesmen from the respected Greenwich space observatory in England were quoted in American news magazines as warning that space travel was still far off, if feasible at all. There was a big difference, it was pointed out, between sending a grapefruit sized object into orbit, and sending human beings, with all their needs, to a distant body in outer space and back.
In fact, it was less than two decades, once the Yanks got serious about the undertaking, before an American astronaut set foot on the moon - and returned to live happily and famous ever after.
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