FLIGHT TO THE MOON

Evening Star, Issue 19773, 25 January 1928, Page 5

FLIGHT TO THE MOON

FAMOUS INVENTOR'S CONFIDENCE !; SAYS THAT IT IS POSSIBLE USB OF CIGAR-SHAPED ROCKET. ... . Press Association —By Telegraph— I Copyright LONDON, January 24. Interest has been aroused by a book on the exploration of the upper atmosphere by rockets, by Mr Robert Esnault Pelterie, the famous inventor of the aeroplane joystick and many other essentia! aviation devices. He declares that after considering every scientific possibility he is emphatic .that the 240,000-milo flight to the moon will eventually bo made by man. -Che vehicle will bo a cigar-shaped rocket propelled by gasses or atomic particles driven out of the rocket’s tail at extreme velocity. 'Jhe flight would occupy forty-nine hours. The rocket would be pointed directly towards the zenith, and leave the earth’s surface at a comparatively slow speed, becoming faster and faster through the higher regions. At an altitude of seventy miles the density falls to practically nothing, and the speed would reach a maximum of six miles a second after travelling 2,000 miles. It would then travel on its momentum, decreasing in speed to a mile and a-quarter a second at the central point, where the attractions of the earth and moon balance. Arriving within 150 miles of the moon the rocket would be headed about and the power turned on again. Propulsive gasses would simply be used tor about four minutes to slow up the descent, and the pilot would probably lay a straight flat course with the moon at one end of the telescope and the earth at the other. He adds: “I have been studying the question from the viewpoint of pure mechanics for fifteen years, and 1 am convinced that it will become possible. People will smile, yet within my lifetime I have seen mankind perform miracles. When it is possible to fly to the moon it will be almost as easy to go on to Mars and Venus, lu the face of modern progress who dares to say it is impossible ? It is not more fantastic than 300 miles an hour in an aeroplane would have seemed half a century ago.”