Chesley Bonestell
Chesley Knight Bonestell, Jr. was an American painter and illustrator. His paintings inspired the American space program, they have been influential in science fiction art and illustration. A pioneering creator of astronomical art, along with the French astronomer-artist Lucien Rudaux, Bonestell has been dubbed the "Father of Modern Space art". Bonestell was born in California, his first astronomical painting was done in 1905. After seeing Saturn through the 12-inch telescope at San Jose's Lick Observatory, he rushed home to paint what he had seen; the painting was destroyed in the fire. Between 1915 and 1918 he exhibited lithographs in the 4th and 7th annual exhibitions of the California Society of Etchers in San Francisco. Bonestell studied architecture at Columbia University in New York City. Dropping out in his third year, he worked as a renderer and designer for several of the leading architectural firms of the time. While with William van Alen, he and Warren Straton designed the art deco façade of the Chrysler Building as well as its distinctive eagles.
During this same period, he designed the Plymouth Rock Memorial, the U. S. Supreme Court Building, the New York Central Building, Manhattan office and apartment buildings and several state capitols. Returning to the West Coast, he prepared illustrations of the chief engineer's plans for the Golden Gate Bridge for the benefit of funders; when the Great Depression dried up architectural work in the United States, Bonestell went to England, where he rendered architectural subjects for the Illustrated London News. In the late 1930s he moved to Hollywood, where he worked as a special effects artist, creating matte paintings for films, including The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. Bonestell realized that he could combine what he had learned about camera angles, miniature modeling, painting techniques with his lifelong interest in astronomy; the result was a series of paintings of Saturn as seen from several of its moons, published in Life in 1944. Nothing like these had been seen before: they looked as though photographers had been sent into space.
His painting of Saturn seen from the frosty moon Titan is the most famous astronomical landscape ever. It was constructed with a combination of clay models, photographic tricks and various painting techniques. Bonestell followed up the sensation these paintings created by publishing more paintings in many leading national magazines; these and others were collected in the best-selling book The Conquest of Space, produced in collaboration with author Willy Ley. Bonestell's last work in Hollywood was contributing special effects art and technical advice to the seminal science fiction films produced by George Pal, including Destination Moon, When Worlds Collide, The War of the Worlds and Conquest of Space, as well as Cat-Women of the Moon. Beginning with the October 1947 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, Bonestell painted more than 60 cover illustrations for science fiction magazines The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, in the 1950s through 1970s, he illustrated many book covers. When Wernher von Braun organized a space flight symposium for Collier's, he invited Bonestell to illustrate his concepts for the future of spaceflight.
For the first time, spaceflight was shown to be a matter of the near future. Von Braun and Bonestell showed that it could be accomplished with the technology existing in the mid-1950s, that the question was that of money and will. Coming as they did at the beginning of the Cold War and just before the sobering shock of the launch of Sputnik, the 1952–54 Collier's series, "Man Will Conquer Space Soon!", was instrumental in kick-starting America's space program. In 1986, Bonestell died in Carmel, with an unfinished painting on his easel. During his lifetime, Bonestell was honored internationally for the contributions he made to the birth of modern astronautics, from a bronze medal awarded by the British Interplanetary Society to a place in the International Space Hall of Fame to an asteroid named for him; the Conquest of Space won the 1951 International Fantasy Award for nonfiction, one of the first two fantasy or science fiction awards anywhere, at the British SF Convention. The Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted Bonestell in 2005, the first year it considered non-literary contributors.
His paintings are prized by collectors and institutions such as the National Air and Space Museum and the National Collection of Fine Arts. One of his classic paintings, an ethereally beautiful image of Saturn seen from its giant moon Titan, has been called "the painting that launched a thousand careers." Wernher von Braun wrote that he had "learned to respect, nay fear, this wonderful artist's obsession with perfection. My file cabinet is filled with sketches of rocket ships I had prepared to help in his artwork—only to have them returned to me with…blistering criticism." A crater on Mars and the asteroid 3129 Bonestell are named after him. In 2016 the first album of Sun Ra vocal tracks was released, The Space Age Is Here To Stay, featuring sleeve art authorized by the Bonestell estate. Ley, The Conquest of Space Across the Space Frontier Braun, Wernher von. Cornelius Ryan, ed. Conquest of the Moon. Illustrated by Chesley Bonestell, Fred Freeman, Rolf Klep. New York: The Viking Press. Illustrations by Chesley Bonestell: Constructing the moonships in t
Moon
The Moon is an astronomical body that orbits planet Earth and is Earth's only permanent natural satellite. It is the fifth-largest natural satellite in the Solar System, the largest among planetary satellites relative to the size of the planet that it orbits; the Moon is after Jupiter's satellite Io the second-densest satellite in the Solar System among those whose densities are known. The Moon is thought to have formed not long after Earth; the most accepted explanation is that the Moon formed from the debris left over after a giant impact between Earth and a Mars-sized body called Theia. The Moon is in synchronous rotation with Earth, thus always shows the same side to Earth, the near side; the near side is marked by dark volcanic maria that fill the spaces between the bright ancient crustal highlands and the prominent impact craters. After the Sun, the Moon is the second-brightest visible celestial object in Earth's sky, its surface is dark, although compared to the night sky it appears bright, with a reflectance just higher than that of worn asphalt.
Its gravitational influence produces the ocean tides, body tides, the slight lengthening of the day. The Moon's average orbital distance is 1.28 light-seconds. This is about thirty times the diameter of Earth; the Moon's apparent size in the sky is the same as that of the Sun, since the star is about 400 times the lunar distance and diameter. Therefore, the Moon covers the Sun nearly during a total solar eclipse; this matching of apparent visual size will not continue in the far future because the Moon's distance from Earth is increasing. The Moon was first reached in September 1959 by an unmanned spacecraft; the United States' NASA Apollo program achieved the only manned lunar missions to date, beginning with the first manned orbital mission by Apollo 8 in 1968, six manned landings between 1969 and 1972, with the first being Apollo 11. These missions returned lunar rocks which have been used to develop a geological understanding of the Moon's origin, internal structure, the Moon's history. Since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, the Moon has been visited only by unmanned spacecraft.
Both the Moon's natural prominence in the earthly sky and its regular cycle of phases as seen from Earth have provided cultural references and influences for human societies and cultures since time immemorial. Such cultural influences can be found in language, lunar calendar systems and mythology; the usual English proper name for Earth's natural satellite is "the Moon", which in nonscientific texts is not capitalized. The noun moon is derived from Old English mōna, which stems from Proto-Germanic *mēnô, which comes from Proto-Indo-European *mḗh₁n̥s "moon", "month", which comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *meh₁- "to measure", the month being the ancient unit of time measured by the Moon; the name "Luna" is used. In literature science fiction, "Luna" is used to distinguish it from other moons, while in poetry, the name has been used to denote personification of Earth's moon; the modern English adjective pertaining to the Moon is lunar, derived from the Latin word for the Moon, luna. The adjective selenic is so used to refer to the Moon that this meaning is not recorded in most major dictionaries.
It is derived from the Ancient Greek word for the Moon, σελήνη, from, however derived the prefix "seleno-", as in selenography, the study of the physical features of the Moon, as well as the element name selenium. Both the Greek goddess Selene and the Roman goddess Diana were alternatively called Cynthia; the names Luna and Selene are reflected in terminology for lunar orbits in words such as apolune and selenocentric. The name Diana comes from the Proto-Indo-European *diw-yo, "heavenly", which comes from the PIE root *dyeu- "to shine," which in many derivatives means "sky and god" and is the origin of Latin dies, "day"; the Moon formed 4.51 billion years ago, some 60 million years after the origin of the Solar System. Several forming mechanisms have been proposed, including the fission of the Moon from Earth's crust through centrifugal force, the gravitational capture of a pre-formed Moon, the co-formation of Earth and the Moon together in the primordial accretion disk; these hypotheses cannot account for the high angular momentum of the Earth–Moon system.
The prevailing hypothesis is that the Earth–Moon system formed after an impact of a Mars-sized body with the proto-Earth. The impact blasted material into Earth's orbit and the material accreted and formed the Moon; the Moon's far side has a crust, 30 mi thicker than that of the near side. This is thought to be; this hypothesis, although not perfect best explains the evidence. Eighteen months prior to an October 1984 conference on lunar origins, Bill Hartmann, Roger Phillips, Jeff Taylor challenged fellow lunar scientists: "You have eighteen months. Go back to your Apollo data, go back to your computer, do whatever you have to, but make up your mind. Don't come to our conference unless you have something to say about the Moon's birth." At the 1984 conference at Kona, the giant impact hypothesis emerged as the most consensual theory. Before the conference, there were parti
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of speculative fiction dealing with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, extraterrestrials in fiction. Science fiction explores the potential consequences of scientific other various innovations, has been called a "literature of ideas." "Science fiction" is difficult to define as it includes a wide range of concepts and themes. James Blish wrote: "Wells used the term to cover what we would today call'hard' science fiction, in which a conscientious attempt to be faithful to known facts was the substrate on which the story was to be built, if the story was to contain a miracle, it ought at least not to contain a whole arsenal of them."Isaac Asimov said: "Science fiction can be defined as that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology." According to Robert A. Heinlein, "A handy short definition of all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world and present, on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method."Lester del Rey wrote, "Even the devoted aficionado or fan—has a hard time trying to explain what science fiction is," and that the reason for there not being a "full satisfactory definition" is that "there are no delineated limits to science fiction."
Author and editor Damon Knight summed up the difficulty, saying "science fiction is what we point to when we say it." Mark C. Glassy described the definition of science fiction as U. S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart did with the definition of pornography: "I know it when I see it." Science fiction had its beginnings in a time when the line between myth and fact was arguably more blurred than the present day. Written in the 2nd century CE by the satirist Lucian, A True Story contains many themes and tropes that are characteristic of contemporary science fiction, including travel to other worlds, extraterrestrial lifeforms, interplanetary warfare, artificial life; some consider it the first science-fiction novel. Some of the stories from The Arabian Nights, along with the 10th-century The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter and Ibn al-Nafis's 13th-century Theologus Autodidactus contain elements of science fiction. Products of the Age of Reason and the development of modern science itself, Johannes Kepler's Somnium, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, Cyrano de Bergerac's Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon and The States and Empires of the Sun, Margaret Cavendish's "The Blazing World", Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Ludvig Holberg's Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum and Voltaire's Micromégas are regarded as some of the first true science-fantasy works.
Indeed, Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan considered Somnium the first science-fiction story. Following the 18th-century development of the novel as a literary form, Mary Shelley's books Frankenstein and The Last Man helped define the form of the science-fiction novel. Brian Aldiss has argued. Edgar Allan Poe wrote several stories considered science fiction, including "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" which featured a trip to the Moon. Jules Verne was noted for his attention to detail and scientific accuracy Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea which predicted the contemporary nuclear submarine. In 1887, the novel El anacronópete by Spanish author Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau introduced the first time machine. Many critics consider H. G. Wells one of science fiction's most important authors, or "the Shakespeare of science fiction." His notable science-fiction works include The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds. His science fiction imagined alien invasion, biological engineering and time travel.
In his non-fiction futurologist works he predicted the advent of airplanes, military tanks, nuclear weapons, satellite television, space travel, something resembling the World Wide Web. In 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs published A Princess of Mars, the first of his three-decade-long planetary romance series of Barsoom novels, set on Mars and featuring John Carter as the hero. In 1926, Hugo Gernsback published the first American science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in which he wrote: By'scientifiction' I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision... Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading—they are always instructive, they supply knowledge... in a palatable form... New adventures pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all impossible of realization tomorrow... Many great science stories destined to be of historical interest are still to be written...
Posterity will point to them as having blazed a new trail, not only in literature and fiction, but progress as well. In 1928, E. E. "Doc" Smith's first published work, The Skylark of Space, written in collaboration with Lee Hawkins Garby, appeared in Amazing Stories. It is called the first great space opera; the same year, Philip Francis Nowlan's original Buck Rogers story, Armageddon 2419 appeared in Amazing Stories. This was followed by the first serious science-fiction comic. In 1937, John W. Campbell became editor of Astounding Science Fiction, an event, sometimes conside
Explorers on the Moon
Explorers on the Moon is the seventeenth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. The story was serialised weekly in Belgium's Tintin magazine from October 1952 to December 1953 before being published in a collected volume by Casterman in 1954. Completing a story arc begun in the preceding volume, Destination Moon, the narrative tells of the young reporter Tintin, his dog Snowy, friends Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, Thomson and Thompson who are aboard humanity's first manned rocket mission to the Moon. Developed in part through the suggestions of Hergé's friends Bernard Heuvelmans and Jacques Van Melkebeke, Explorers on the Moon was produced following Hergé's extensive research into the possibility of human space travel – a feat that had yet to be achieved – with the cartoonist seeking for the work to be as realistic as possible. Hergé continued The Adventures of Tintin with The Calculus Affair, while the series itself became a defining part of the Franco-Belgian comics tradition.
Critics have praised the illustrative detail of the book, but have expressed mixed views of the story. The volume was adapted for both the 1957 Belvision animated series, Hergé's Adventures of Tintin, for the 1991 animated series The Adventures of Tintin by Ellipse and Nelvana; the synopsis continues a plot begun in Destination Moon. Professor Calculus, Snowy, Captain Haddock, Calculus' assistant Frank Wolff are aboard an atomic rocket-powered spacecraft leaving the Earth bound for the Moon. Soon after takeoff they discover that the detectives Thomson and Thompson have accidentally stowed away onboard, putting a strain on the oxygen supply; the detectives accidentally turn off the nuclear motor, disrupting the artificial gravity and sending everyone floating until Tintin corrects the problem. They suffer a relapse of the Formula 14 drug (seen in Land of Black Gold, resulting in their hair growing in multiple colours, until Calculus subsequently administers a cure. Haddock, who has smuggled whisky aboard the rocket, gets drunk and takes an impromptu spacewalk, during which he becoming a satellite of the asteroid Adonis but Tintin is able to rescue him.
The rocket lands with Tintin being the first human to step on the Moon. Next day and Wolff set up optical instruments to begin observational work on the Moon while Tintin and Haddock build the Moon tank. Two days Haddock and Tintin take the Moon tank to explore some stalactite caves in the direction of the Ptolemaeus Crater. Aboard the ship, Tintin is overwhelmed by a third stowaway, Colonel Jorgen, a spy, smuggled aboard by Wolff, blackmailed by a foreign power for which Jorgen works. With Wolff's help, Jorgen seeks to hijack the ship and return it to Earth, but is foiled by Tintin through emergency sabotage that cuts power to the engine. Due to the strain on the oxygen supplies, the crew decides to abandon the Moon tank and the optical instruments and to cut short the lunar stay; the repair work is completed ahead of schedule, the rocket is cleared for lift-off. Halfway to Earth, Jorgen escapes his bonds thanks to the detectives' bungling and tries to kill Tintin and the others; when it is revealed that there will not be enough oxygen aboard for the crew to survive the journey, Wolff sacrifices himself by opening the airlock and floating out into space to his death.
Upon approaching Earth, the crew fall unconscious, but Tintin wakes long enough to set the rocket to auto-pilot and it arrives back in Syldavia safely. The crew are resuscitated just in time. A celebratory toast to victory turns into a disagreement between Professor Calculus and Captain Haddock over returning to the Moon, with the latter character arguing that "Man's proper place...is on dear old earth." Hergé first devised the idea of sending Tintin on a mission to the Moon while he was working on Prisoners of the Sun. His decision to move into the field of science fiction might have been influenced by his friendly rivalry with his colleague Edgar P. Jacobs, who had had success with his own science fiction comic, The Secret of the Swordfish, he decided that it would be a two-volume story arc, as had proved successful with his earlier arcs, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure, The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun. He had intended on beginning this story after the culmination of Prisoners of the Sun, but both his wife Germaine Remi and his close friend Marcel Dehaye convinced him to proceed with Land of Black Gold, a story that he had left unfinished, instead.
Seeking advice on the story, Hergé consulted his friend Bernard Heuvelmans, who had authored the non-fiction book L'Homme parmi les étoiles. In autumn 1947, Heuvelmans and Jacques Van Melkebeke developed a script for the story, which they gave to Hergé; this version based Calculus' lunar expedition in a fictional location, Radio City, in the United States. It featured a return of Professor Decimus Phostle, a character who had appeared in The Shooting Star, but this time as an antagonist. In early 1948, Hergé produced two black-and-white pages of this version of the story before abandoning it. Hergé retained some elements of this original script in his finished version, n
Arthur C. Clarke
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke was a British science fiction writer, science writer and futurist, undersea explorer, television series host. He is famous for being co-writer of the screenplay for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey considered to be one of the most influential films of all time. Clarke was a science writer, both an avid populariser of space travel and a futurist of uncanny ability. On these subjects he wrote over a dozen books and many essays, which appeared in various popular magazines. In 1961 he was awarded the Kalinga Prize, an award, given by UNESCO for popularising science; these along with his science fiction writings earned him the moniker "Prophet of the Space Age". His other science fiction writings earned him a number of Hugo and Nebula awards, which along with a large readership made him one of the towering figures of science fiction. For many years Clarke, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov were known as the "Big Three" of science fiction. Clarke was a lifelong proponent of space travel.
In 1934, while still a teenager, he joined the British Interplanetary Society. In 1945, he proposed a satellite communication system using geostationary orbits, he was the chairman of the British Interplanetary Society from 1946–47 and again in 1951–53. Clarke emigrated from England to Sri Lanka in 1956 to pursue his interest in scuba diving; that year he discovered the underwater ruins of the ancient Koneswaram temple in Trincomalee. Clarke augmented his fame on in the 1980s, from being the host of several television shows such as Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, he lived in Sri Lanka until his death. Clarke was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1989 "for services to British cultural interests in Sri Lanka", he was knighted in 1998 and was awarded Sri Lanka's highest civil honour, Sri Lankabhimanya, in 2005. Clarke was born in Minehead, Somerset and grew up in nearby Bishops Lydeard; as a boy, he lived on a farm, where he enjoyed stargazing, fossil collecting, reading American science fiction pulp magazines.
He received his secondary education at Huish Grammar school in Taunton. Early influences included dinosaur cigarette cards, which led to an enthusiasm for fossils starting about 1925. Clarke attributed his interest in science fiction to reading three items: the November 1928 issue of Amazing Stories in 1929. In his teens, he joined the Junior Astronomical Association and contributed to Urania, the society's journal, edited in Glasgow by Marion Eadie. At Clarke's request, she added an Astronautics Section, which featured a series of articles by him on spacecraft and space travel. Clarke contributed pieces to the Debates and Discussions Corner, a counterblast to an Urania article offering the case against space travel, his recollections of the Walt Disney film Fantasia, he joined the Board of Education as a pensions auditor. He and some fellow science fiction writers shared a flat in Gray's Inn Road, where he got the nickname "Ego" because of his absorption in subjects that interested him, would name his office filled with memorabilia as his "ego chamber".
During the Second World War from 1941 to 1946 he served in the Royal Air Force as a radar specialist and was involved in the early-warning radar defence system, which contributed to the RAF's success during the Battle of Britain. Clarke spent most of his wartime service working on ground-controlled approach radar, as documented in the semi-autobiographical Glide Path, his only non-science-fiction novel. Although GCA did not see much practical use during the war, it proved vital to the Berlin Airlift of 1948–1949 after several years of development. Clarke served in the ranks, was a corporal instructor on radar at No. 2 Radio School, RAF Yatesbury in Wiltshire. He was commissioned as a pilot officer on 27 May 1943, he was promoted flying officer on 27 November 1943. He was appointed chief training instructor at RAF Honiley in Warwickshire and was demobilised with the rank of flight lieutenant. After the war he attained a first-class degree in mathematics and physics from King's College London. After this he worked as assistant editor at Physics Abstracts.
Clarke served as president of the British Interplanetary Society from 1946 to 1947 and again from 1951 to 1953. Although he was not the originator of the concept of geostationary satellites, one of his most important contributions in this field may be his idea that they would be ideal telecommunications relays, he advanced this idea in a paper circulated among the core technical members of the British Interplanetary Society in 1945. The concept was published in Wireless World in October of that year. Clarke wrote a number of non-fiction books describing the technical details and societal implications of rocketry and space flight; the most notable of these may be Interplanetary Flight: An Introduction to Astronautics, The Exploration of Space and The Promise of Space. In recognition of these contributions, the geostationary orbit 36,000 kilometres above the equator is recognised by the International Astronomical Union as the Clarke Orbit. Following the 1968 release of 2001, Clarke became much in demand as a commentator on science and technology at the time of the Apollo space program.
On 20 July 1969 Clarke appeared as a commentator for CBS for the Apollo 11 moon landing. Clarke lived in Sri Lanka from 1956 until his death in 2008, first in Unawatuna on the south coast, in Colombo, he and his friend Mike Wilson travelled around Sri
Conquest of Space
Conquest of Space is a 1955 American Technicolor science fiction film from Paramount Pictures, produced by George Pal, directed by Byron Haskin, that stars Walter Brooke, Eric Fleming, Mickey Shaughnessy. The storyline concerns the first interplanetary flight to the planet Mars, manned by a crew of five, launched from Earth orbit near "The Wheel", mankind's first space station. On their long journey to the Red Planet, they encounter various dangers, both from within and without, that nearly destroy the mission. Mankind has achieved space flight capability and built "The Wheel" space station in orbit 1,075 miles above Earth, it is commanded by Colonel Samuel T. Merritt, his son, Captain Barney Merritt, having been aboard for a year, wants to return to Earth. A giant spaceship has been built in a nearby orbit, an Earth inspector arrives aboard the station with new orders: Merritt is being promoted to general and will command the new spaceship, now being sent to Mars instead of the Moon; as General Merritt considers his crew of three enlisted men and one officer, his close friend, Sgt. Mahoney volunteers.
The general turns him down for being 20 years too old. Hearing that Mars is the new destination, Barney Merritt volunteers to be the second officer. Right after the crew watches a TV broadcast from their family and friends, the mission blasts off for the Red Planet; the general's undiagnosed and growing space fatigue is beginning to affect his judgement: Reading his Bible he has doubts about the righteousness of the mission. After launch, Sgt. Mahoney is discovered to be a stowaway, their piloting radar antenna fails, two crewmen go outside to make repairs. They manage to get it working just as their monitors show a glowing asteroid, 20 times larger than their spaceship, coming at them from astern; the general fires the engines managing to avoid a collision, but the planetoid's fast-orbiting debris punctures Sgt. Fodor's spacesuit. After a religious service in space, Fodor's body is cast adrift into the void. Eight months the general is becoming mentally unbalanced, focusing on Sgt. Fodor's loss as "God's judgement".
On the Mars landing approach, he attempts to crash their spaceship, now convinced the mission violates the laws of God. Barney wrests control away from his father; as the crew takes their first steps on the Red Planet, they look up and see water pouring down from the now vertical return rocket. Barney discovers the leak is sabotage caused by his father, who threatens his son with a.45 automatic. The two struggle and the pistol discharges, killing the general. Sgt. Mahoney, who observed only the last stages of the struggle, wants Barney confined under arrest with the threat of court martial, but cooler heads prevail. Mars proves to be inhospitable, they struggle to survive with their decreased water supply. Earth's correct orbital position for a return trip is one year away. While glumly celebrating their first Christmas on Mars, a sudden snowstorm blows in, allowing them to replenish their water supply; as their launch window arrives, they hear low rumbling sounds see rocks falling, feel the ground shake violently.
The ground level shifts during this violent marsquake. Their spaceship can not make an emergency blast off. To right the spaceship, the crew uses the rocket engines' powerful thrust to shift the ground under the landing legs; the attempt works and they blast off, the spaceship rising just as the Martian surface collapses. Once in space and Mahoney reconcile. Impressed with Barney's heroism and leadership while on Mars, Mahoney concludes that pursuing Barney's court martial for his father's death would only impugn the general's reputation, tarnishing what had been a spotless military career. Better is the fiction that "the man who conquered space" died in the line of duty, sacrificing himself to save his crew; the science and technology portrayed in Conquest of Space were intended to be as realistic as possible in depicting the first voyage to Mars. The film's theatrical release poster tagline reads: "See how it will happen in your lifetime!" The title Conquest of Space is from The Conquest of Space, a 1949 nonfiction book written by Willy Ley and illustrated by Chesley Bonestell.
George Pal bought the rights to the book at the suggestion of Ley. Bonestell is noted for his photorealistic paintings showing views from outer space. However, the production design of Conquest of Space was modeled on the technical concepts of Wernher von Braun and space paintings of Chesley Bonestell that were printed in Collier's magazine and reprinted in the 1952 Viking Press book Across the Space Frontier edited by Cornelius Ryan; the production incorporated concepts from von Braun's 1952 book The Mars Project, as well as material from the April 30, 1954, issue of Collier's magazine that would in 1956 be incorporated into the Viking Press book The Exploration of Mars by Willy Ley, Wernher von Braun, Chesley Bonestell. All of these books feature text, straight popular science with no fictional characters or story line. In addition, according to director Byron Haskin, "We had Wernher von Braun on the set all the time...as a technical advisor." Had Producer George Pal followed any or all of these nonfiction books as written, he would have produced a speculative futuristic documentary, much like of the trio of 1955 Tomorrowland-set Disneyland television episodes: Man in Space, Man
Binary star
A binary star is a star system consisting of two stars orbiting around their common barycenter. Systems of two or more stars are called multiple star systems; these systems when more distant appear to the unaided eye as a single point of light, are revealed as multiple by other means. Research over the last two centuries suggests that half or more of visible stars are part of multiple star systems; the term double star is used synonymously with binary star. Optical doubles are so called because the two stars appear close together in the sky as seen from the Earth, their "doubleness" depends only on this optical effect. A double star can be revealed as optical by means of differences in their parallax measurements, proper motions, or radial velocities. Most known double stars have not been studied adequately to determine whether they are optical doubles or doubles physically bound through gravitation into a multiple star system. Binary star systems are important in astrophysics because calculations of their orbits allow the masses of their component stars to be directly determined, which in turn allows other stellar parameters, such as radius and density, to be indirectly estimated.
This determines an empirical mass-luminosity relationship from which the masses of single stars can be estimated. Binary stars are detected optically, in which case they are called visual binaries. Many visual binaries have long orbital periods of several centuries or millennia and therefore have orbits which are uncertain or poorly known, they may be detected by indirect techniques, such as spectroscopy or astrometry. If a binary star happens to orbit in a plane along our line of sight, its components will eclipse and transit each other. If components in binary star systems are close enough they can gravitationally distort their mutual outer stellar atmospheres. In some cases, these close binary systems can exchange mass, which may bring their evolution to stages that single stars cannot attain. Examples of binaries are Sirius, Cygnus X-1. Binary stars are common as the nuclei of many planetary nebulae, are the progenitors of both novae and type Ia supernovae; the term binary was first used in this context by Sir William Herschel in 1802, when he wrote: If, on the contrary, two stars should be situated near each other, at the same time so far insulated as not to be materially affected by the attractions of neighbouring stars, they will compose a separate system, remain united by the bond of their own mutual gravitation towards each other.
This should be called a real double star. By the modern definition, the term binary star is restricted to pairs of stars which revolve around a common center of mass. Binary stars which can be resolved with a telescope or interferometric methods are known as visual binaries. For most of the known visual binary stars one whole revolution has not been observed yet, they are observed to have travelled along a curved path or a partial arc; the more general term double star is used for pairs of stars which are seen to be close together in the sky. This distinction is made in languages other than English. Double stars may be binary systems or may be two stars that appear to be close together in the sky but have vastly different true distances from the Sun; the latter are termed optical optical pairs. Since the invention of the telescope, many pairs of double stars have been found. Early examples include Acrux. Mizar, in the Big Dipper, was observed to be double by Giovanni Battista Riccioli in 1650; the bright southern star Acrux, in the Southern Cross, was discovered to be double by Father Fontenay in 1685.
John Michell was the first to suggest that double stars might be physically attached to each other when he argued in 1767 that the probability that a double star was due to a chance alignment was small. William Herschel began observing double stars in 1779 and soon thereafter published catalogs of about 700 double stars. By 1803, he had observed changes in the relative positions in a number of double stars over the course of 25 years, concluded that they must be binary systems. Since this time, many more double stars have been measured; the Washington Double Star Catalog, a database of visual double stars compiled by the United States Naval Observatory, contains over 100,000 pairs of double stars, including optical doubles as well as binary stars. Orbits are known for only a few thousand of these double stars, most have not been ascertained to be either true binaries or optical double stars; this can be determined by observing the relative motion of the pairs. If the motion is part of an orbit, or if the stars have similar radial velocities and the difference in their proper motions is small compared to their common proper motion, the pair is physical.
One of the tasks that remains for visual observers of double stars is to obtain sufficient observations to prove or disprove gravitational connection. Binary stars are classified into four types accordi
