The Race for Space: Rockets Galore (1961)

From the October 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was 9 a.m. on August 6th, that the Russians fired Major Titov into orbit. The spaceman himself seems to have enjoyed the trip in Vostock II. He even managed to eat three meals and sleep for eight of the 24 hours he was out in space.

Who can deny that the whole thing was an impressive achievement? Indeed, it stands out as yet another example of man’s technical ability and his power to acquire knowledge and apply it to solve the problems he faces. In the space race these must be formidable, yet such has been the fantastic advance in the last few years that Professor Sir Bernard Lovell of Jodrell Bank hardly turned a hair when told of the latest Russian achievement. “I am not a bit surprised,” he said. According to a spokesman at his observatory, the Professor holds the view that a manned flight to the moon is only about five years off and nobody laughs at him for thinking it. Yet it was not so long ago that the British Interplanetary Society talked with daring optimism of perhaps a 50 year wait.

But it is against a background of events here on earth that we must view the Soviet feat. While the Bank holiday crowds in Britain digested the news, and messages of congratulations were heaped on the beaming young astronaut, the Western diplomats and politicians were doubtless reflecting gloomily on this latest indication of Russian rocket mastery. It was just one more worry to add to their already splitting headache over Berlin.

Some British scientists have expressed, the opinion that Vostock II was one of a series of “in between” flights to bridge the gap between Major Gargarin’s single orbit and a manned lunar flight. It should not be regarded, they say, as just a prestige trip. Be that as it may, it has certainly been exploited to the full by Mr. Khrushchev and the propaganda organs of the Soviet ruling class, as a boost to Russian confidence. There is little doubt also that American prestige suffered a corresponding blow, although it remains to be seen to what extent, particularly among the newly rising capitalist states.

The Guardian of August 8th offers a crumb of comfort to the American rulers and tells them not to be downhearted.

“They have some new and powerful rocked corning into service in the next year or two; they may soon be the pacemakers again. If Vostock II was a military weapon, a twelve months start might be technically decisive. In the history of scientific exploration twelve months is the blinking of an eye.”

The last sentence is true enough, but how foolish it is to ignore the war-like potentialities of scientific study in a capitalist world. This neat little piece of “compartmentising” just does not face up to the unpleasant reality that there really is no such thing as research for “peaceful purposes” in private property society.

While Vostock II itself was not a war weapon, it does nevertheless point to the undoubted technical lead currently held by the Soviets, and the military significance of this will not be overlooked by the U.S. and her N.A.T.O. allies. We can all remember the fear expressed in some sections of the British press, when the Russians successfully fired their “Moon Probe” rocket, that it would be possible to set up a military base on the moon, from which a power would be able to bombard its earthly enemies in a future war.

Now, with Major Titov’s flight, similar fears have been given voice in the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Richard Russell, has warned that “… a satellite of this size could be utilized as a very dangerous weapon.” On the same day, Ambassador Adlai Stevenson confessed his admiration for the Soviet feat but “prayed that the arms race will not spread to outer space.”

But even ignoring this possibility, the sheer power of the present rockets and their accuracy as inter-continental missiles, give us all a glimpse of the terrifying prospect which we face if the cold war gets hotted up at any time. Mr. Krushchev has told us of Russian military might. When talking on August 7th about the Berlin crisis, he said :

“We are developing various rocket weapons, inter-continental ballistic rockets, of various range, strategic and tactical purpose, with atomic and hydrogen warheads. We also pay the necessary attention to other forms of military hardware.”

It was shortly after this that we heard of the Soviet 100-megaton bomb and his claim that there was a rocket to deliver it.

More specific was the Soviet Governent’s announcement of August 30th that they would resume nuclear testing and that “Titov-type” rockets could be used to carry their new super-powerful bombs to any part of the globe. An acceleration of the arms race can now be confidently expected and the space race is part of it.

And what of America? Although, at. present, she lags behind Russia in rocket development, she will make frantic efforts to catch up and snatch the lead. Already, anyway, there are three very advanced American rockets available—Polaris, Sky-bolt, and Minuteman—all highly mobile, but having warheads of no more than about 1 megaton yield. Now that Russia has broken the three year old moratorium on tests, the U.S. Government has the ideal political excuse to try out a greater range of bombs and develop the rockets to carry them. It is admitted in the Guardian of September 1st that pressure of opinion in favour of this has been building up in American military circles for some time, and designs already exist to increase the yield of Polaris and Sky-bolt to 2 megatons each.

So it is clear that the usual dirty and cynical game has been played by both sides over the past two or three years, and that all their talk of banning nuclear arms has been so much hypocritical eyewash. We shall not here take part in the futile debate on the relative advantages of the Russian and American types of rocket. Is it more desirable to have one that is massively powerful and can deliver 100 megatons, or one that is far less powerful and destructive, but has greater mobility? We neither know nor care. As far as we are concerned both types are highly undesirable.

Despite all these melancholy developments, do not let us lose sight of the tremendous possibilities of rocket propulsion. It is here to stay, and in the years since the end of the second World War, we have seen great strides in its development. There seems little doubt that fairly soon, it will be used in the exciting adventure of landing men on the moon and maybe even on the planets further afield. It could have great potentialities as a means of enhancing our knowledge of the universe. One thing is certain, it will unfortunately suffer perversion and defilement like so many other things in a capitalist world. But do not blame the rocket for this. Get rid of Capitalism.

Eddie Critchfield

50 Years Ago: Man in Space (2011)

The 50 Years Ago column from the June 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Russia’s daring young man did all the right things, at the right time.

Sent looping around the Earth, he sang a patriotic song: (“The motherland hears, the motherland sees, the motherland knows…”). On the rostrum beside Mr. Khruschev, he was the star turn at this year’s Moscow May Day parade.

Gagarin’s exploit, Commander Shepard’s flight, and the arrival of the Russian Venus rocket shot, have put spaceships right back in the news. Such things are interesting, not to say exciting – but have they been worth anything?

We all know that Russia and the United States are feverishly applying the knowledge which their space probes give them to the production of more accurate missiles. Some of these were paraded before Gagarin in the Red Square on May Day.

Without a doubt, the quest for more accurate and more powerful weapons is the main incentive in the space programmes of the great powers.

Incidentally, they may also gain knowledge which has little or no military value. But there is no guarantee that even this will not one day be misused.

There is one thing the space shots have to teach everybody. Capitalist society is bound to distort human knowledge for inhuman ends. Scientific investigation can only come into its own when this world is sanely organised.

(“News in Review”, Socialist Standard, June 1961)

News In Review: The Space Race (1961)

The  News in Review from the June 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Man in Space

Russia's daring young man did all the right things, at the right time.

Sent looping round the Earth, he sang a patriotic song: ("The motherland hears, the motherland sees, the motherland knows . . . ") On the rostrum beside Mr. Khruschev, he was the star turn at this year's Moscow May Day parade.

Gagarin's exploit, Commander Shepard's flight, and the arrival of the Russian Venus rocket shot, have put spaceships right back in the news. Such things are interesting, not to say exciting—but have they been worth anything?

We all know that Russia and the United States are feverishly applying the knowledge which their space probes give them to the production of more accurate missiles. Some of these were paraded before Gagarin in the Red Square on May.

Without a doubt, the quest for more accurate and more powerful weapons is the main incentive in the space programmes of the great powers.

Incidentally, they may also gain knowledge which has little or no military value. But there is no guarantee that even this will not one day be misused.

There is one thing the space shots have to teach everybody. Capitalist society is bound to distort human knowledge for inhuman ends. Scientific investigation can only come into its own when this world is sanely organised.

Golden Boys

80,000 pounds is an awful lot of money.

We may think that the Milan Football Club, who paid that amount to Chelsea for Jimmy Greaves have a millionaire somewhere behind them.

They have. So have Juventus, Naples and other Italian clubs. This is why they can afford such enormous wage bills, and can offer irresistible financial bait to British footballers.

Greaves put it in record that he did not want to leave England, but Milan were offering him such a high signing-on fee that he really had no choice in the matter.

Helpless, the English fans moan as their golden boys take off for sunnier lands. They blame the clubs, the Football League, the Italians, for being a lot of poachers.

But the millions who weekly cheer their favourite club, support, almost to a man, the social system in which whoever pays the most money takes the best choice. They can hardly complain when that principle is extended to football.

Because, whatever the match programme may say, football is not a sport. When we hear it discussed in terms of transfer fees, gate money and the rest, we know that it is as much a business as any gas works or marmalade factory.

Cuban Failure

Whatever happened to that nice, level-headed young man Mr. Kennedy?

When he was campaigning for the United States Presidency he seemed so calm, so cool tempered. He sounded so peaceable. Lots of Republicans, in fact, thought that he might want to be too soft on the Russians.

The invasion of Cuba changed all that.

President Kennedy inherited the plans for the landing which the Eisenhower administration had laid. He chose to go ahead with them—and when the invasion failed, with typical acumen, he pointed out that his predecessor must take part of the blame.

This is the sort of ruthlessness and cynicism which we have come to expect from capitalism's leaders. And we have grown familiar with the assurances, as they are climbing to power, that they are anything but ruthless and cynical men.

Each time, the working class fall for it. Kennedy promised an era of sanity and calm judgement in foreign policy. In their millions, American workers voted for him.

Will they profit from the lessons of reality? Probably not. The signs are that Kennedy will be reviled not so much for agreeing to the Cuban expedition, as for the fact that the whole thing was a flop.

Ignorantly patriotic, the working class will forgive almost anything but that.

Stags Rampant

How did the strait-laced City Editors of Fleet Street come to be making jokes about Lady Chatterley?

Penguin Books recently announced a record profit, for which the trial—and the sales—of Lady C. can take much of the credit. At the same time, Penguin offered £450,000 worth of shares to the public, the more prosperous of whom applied for them to the tune of £67 million.

Now a lot of the people who tried to get Penguin shares are known, in Stock Exchange jargon, as stages. Hence the little jokes about gamekeepers, and Lady C. in the City columns.

The stags have been rampant lately, in shares other than the Penguin issue. They specialise in going for shares which can be easily applied for—sometimes by completing a newspaper coupon—and which are likely to rise quickly on the Stock Exchange. Some of them apply many times over for the same shares.

The snag is that the stags often pay up with bouncy cheques. The idea is to sell the shares at a profit before the cheques have had time to be cashed.

This is the sort of speculative boom which preceded the 1929 crash. Many sage economists have since told us that it aggravated matters in 1929—and that it could never happen again.

But whoever heard of investors refusing the chance of a profit? The stags have shown that capitalism is the same old animal as it ever was.