Evening star., 1936-05-31
The Man Who Dared
Confnved from pose five
Confinved from poss five

and flicker in pale auroral displays.
Far below, the watchers at Beres-
ford field saw the plume of fame di-
minish to a point among the faint
stars, then vanish entirely. Before
their dazzled eyes the field stretched
still and dark, unchanged but for a
crater of burned and smoking earth
around the launching tower.
My God. could any man stand
that?" The crowd commenced slowly
to break up. There was no possible
way of learning the fate of the pilot,
until his scheduled return four and a
half days later.
Hurting upward at an acceleration
twice that of gravity, driven by the
terrific recoil of continuously explod-
ing hydrogen and oxygen, the rocket
reached an altitude of over eighteen
hundred miles in twelve minutes. At
the instant the automatic controls cut
off the flow of fuel from the nearly ex-
hausted tanks, it had attained speed
of nearly thirty thousand miles an
hour - enormously exceeding that of
the fastest projectile ever driven from
the muzzle of gun. The duraluminum
PROV was still glowing cherry red from
the bombardment of the hydrogen and
helium molecules in the high atmos-
phere. but the heat was rapidly radiat-
ing away into the temperatureless void
of space. The rocket had long ago
cleared the edge of the earth's shadow,
and the sun was blazing in blue-white
brilliance to the east, the pearly ef-
fulgence of its corona and the great
flames of the solar prominences burn
ing with terrible beauty against the
utter blackness of the sky.
But the man sealed within the tiny
windowless chamber at the nose of the
projectile could see nothing The til
tanic rush upwards was simply period
of great oppression. when his body
had been forced down into the pad
ding of the seat with three times its
normal weight. On the instant that
the roaring pillar of fame of the ex-
haust died away, the weight that had
been COMPRISING his lungs and drag
ging on his whole body was released -
all acceleration ceased. The projectile
became an inert mass of metal, coast
ing through space away from the
earth, obedient to the same forces that
govern the movements of the planets,
the comets, the wandering meteors.
In that same instant the horrible
sensation of free fall'' swept over his
body - space sickness. The human
physique, evolved from form of life
through countless ages under the in
escapable pull of gravity, rebelled in
blind panic from the suspension of that
pull. Nausea from the disturbed Wis
Ceral organs, vertigo from the unbal-
anced semi-circular canals of the ear
and, worst of all, pure physical terror
from the nervous centers of the body
to which that sensation had always
meant immediate danger. combined to
make of the cockpit a torture chamber
Several hours elapsed before even
Grierson's disciplined mind fought it.
self free from this chaos and achieved
some degree of self-control and clarity.
There was much thinking to be done
life, and knowledge, depended on
it. To know whether the trajectory he
was following was the right one to the
limit of instrumental accuracy - that
spelled the difference between falling
helplessly in the grip of the lunar at
traction, or dropping out away from
it, on into limitless space; or the in
termediate path, the perfectly con-
ceived and executed swing in towards
the moon, with just the right velocity
and distance to carry the projectile
around the unknown half of the moon,
then to release it and allow it to begin
the long fall back to earth.