PREFACE
(Which may be read through or not)
HEN the ingenious Jules Verne wrote his Journey to the Moon, he did not suspect how soon this problem would engage the attention of serious physicists. What he consciously treated as a fantastic Utopia is to-day close to realization, and perhaps the first rocket is hissing on its way into space before this book leaves the press.
The Shot Into Infinity is no Utopia. The technical basis of the novel rests on the results of the most modern research and physical facts, and it is nothing but the development of the practical applications of discoveries which are no longer questioned to-day.
Very often persons who undeniably possess a certain degree of judgment have asked me, with a superior and almost pitying smile, whether I seriously believe that someday people might be able to leave the earth. Once and for all let this question be answered in this place by a counter question: Why not? In the final analysis the possibility of all the marvels of the technology of transportation depends on brute force. When the motor was invented which afforded half a horsepower for each kilogram of its own weight there sprang into existence the airplane which hitherto had been decried as a mad fantasy and speedily a way was found to overcome the little extra problems of the designs of the wings, the propeller, and so forth. The motor which is to carry persons (or for that matter itself only) into space must actually develop more than 100 H. P. for each kilogram of its own weight, in order to be able to combat successfully the powerful attraction of the earth. But unless all appearances are deceptive, this motor has already been invented or at least is en route to discovery.
In particular two scientists of world fame have been working at this problem for years—Prof. Hermann Oberth, a German, of Mediasch [Transylvania], and Prof. Robert H. Goddard, an American, of Worcester, Massachusetts— and both have solved it, though for the present only theoretically, by means of the rocket motor. Once this mode of propulsion (which is not dependent on any atmospheric resistance and develops its full efficiency only in a vacuum) has maintained itself in practice, then the “space ship” itself becomes an alluring but absolutely solvable problem for skilled constructors. For what the uninitiated regard as unconquerable factors, the fearful cold in space, the lack of air to breathe, the absolute absence of weight, are not at all real hindrances, and we may confidently assert that the engineers of 1930-40 will be able to make vigorous assaults on these problems with air generators and heat insulators.
To both of these gentlemen I herewith express my sincere admiration and my hearty thanks for their co-operation.
Of all the investigators who devoted themselves to the problem of the navigation of space, at present the American Professor Goddard seems to be the most successful; for if the last reports from Worcester are accurate, in the near future the first Goddard experimental rocket (without passengers) will ascend to the moon, and mankind is at the eve of a veritable new epoch in world history.
OTTO WILLI GAIL.