Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 56 — page 60: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION prove possibie for fares to be reduced to the point where they are well below those for surface transport today. SPACE One great adventure that awaits future generations is a flight through space to the moon. It has been suggested by some experts that such a flight should be possible within twenty-five years, but the figure is likely to be nearer a century. The problem of de- signing a spaceship capable of making the journey has been solved on the drawing board, but it is often forgotten that we should be exploring un- known territory, and that experience is likely to reveal difficulties of which the very nature is at present beyond our ken. Columbus, when he set out on his great voyage, had, after all, the consider- _ able knowledge of sea naviga- tion accumulated during several hundred years. We know nothing of space naviga- tion, and of what lies beyond 39 about iwenty miles of the earth’s surface we are almost entirely ignorant. It is certain that conditions differ in many ways from those of which we have any first-hand experience, quite apart from the thinness of the air and other inferen- tial data. . . The appeal of flight to another world will remain, and the moon is as yet the only destination we can seriously consider in the fore- secable future. Even although it is true that when escape from the earth’s gravitational pull has been made the energy required to maintain a speed of many thousand miles an hour will be small, a journey to Mars, which has been described so ofien in imagination, would occupy 200 days, and the time to Jupiter would be nearly six years. These things are not “impossible,” but any real- istic view of the difficulties of a journey to the planets must put the time in centuries, rather than decades, from our lifetime. comiclooks.conrn