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Aviation History
1963
1963 - 1434.PDF
252 Stepping-stone between the Mercury and Apollo programmes will be the Gemini project, in which two-man spacecraft will make extended Earth-orbital and rendezvous flights. Here a fullscale model of the Gemini craft gives a size comparison with the one-man Mercury capsule US MOTIVES IN SPACE... taking of truly heroic proportions. It provides a graphic test of our national technical capabilities and our national fortitude and in tegrity. I, for one, would be most distressed to see the United States shrink from this challenge. Beyond these aspects which I have just listed which are generally on the objective of an aspirational nature, there are some quite compelling objective factors in manned exploration as well. These factors lie in the effective conduct of scientific exploration considered as an objective in its own right. It is perfectly obvious that there are machines which can perform certain functions much better than can a man using only his bare hands and unaided senses. All of us employ machines of one kind or another every day in many different ways. There are indeed many types of space and scientific investigations which can be much more effectively pur sued by a mechanically instrumented spacecraft. Men and Instruments Let me give you an example of that. In June 1961 a little group of us built and had launched successfully a small satellite which we called Injun 1. This was done with the help of the Office of Naval Research at my university. Since that time, about 18 months ago, this little 47-pound satellite has accumulated over ten million observations concerning the space environment, radiation environ ment of the Earth. I think it is clear that you cannot conceive of any manned vehicle, certainly not of 47 pounds gross, which could have travelled around the Earth for 18 months and made anything resembling the set of observations which we have available from a purely mechanical device. It is quite a fascinating study to think of the various relationships between men and scientific instruments and machines. In the final analysis, I think everybody agrees that there is always a man in the system, regardless of how unobvious he may be in the first instance. Instruments that are used in science range, for example, from a microscope, let us say, in which you set and work the buttons right on the ground and examine the specimen, to the remote control of a spacecraft which might be illustrated by the recent Mariner 2 FLIGHT International, 15 August 1963 probe which passed by Venus which successfully responded to commands given by men some 40 million miles away. This is certainly an example of the remote operation of a piece of scientific equipment. The most extreme example we could possibly cite at the present time as to how man, although not visible so to speak in this system, played an essential role in the operation. When one watches radio telescopes at work from the standpoint of supervision of such places, it is rather astonishing to see not a human being in sight. These big dishes or telescopes are training around and presumably making some kind of scientific observation, but the thing I want to mention particularly is there is not a man in sight, superficially. You and I jolly well know there is man some where in the system. He may have been planning an experiment in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, while subsequently he carried on another at Palomar, but he is a part of the system. I hope that I successfully illustrate here that there are all sorts of degrees by which a man may be a part of the system of scientific instrumentation. In order to have effective work done, one must devise a system of what I would call a viable relationship between the machine and the man. The man is really thinking this thing up and knows how to go about it and he has a viable relationship with the machinery. It does what he thinks ought to be done under a given set of circum stances. From a certain point of view one can think then of a machine as being effectively only an extension of a man's senses; that is, you cannot see something with your naked eye and then you employ a microscope to see smaller objects more clearly. I think it is fair to say that all scientific instruments are essentially of this character, an extension of man's senses and his capabilities. Most of us have the feeling that at a certain level of complexity, this viable relationship begins to break down. No one is quite sure at what point in any given circumstance that is going to be so, but let me give you at least two examples of where I think I can convince you that that would be so. I might say that you can play this game as sort of a parlour game, an intellectual exercise. You name something you would like to have done and I will think of a machine to do it, a machine that I can operate, let us say in the case of the Moon 240 million miles away. This game is new and it is a lot of fun. It depends on the wits of the people involved. The "Telepuppet" Concept It is very difficult to name any specific function required in the way of exploration of the Moon that someone else is not bright enough to think of a machine for doing which he can operate from the ground. For example, Professor Urey would like to get a speci men up there and he can have a machine with a little hammer and a bucket up there and he can sit in San Diego and wave his finger and the hammer will go up and down a few seconds later on the Moon. He can scratch his head and the machine will scratch its head and all these things can be done by the scheme which has received the pretty name "Telepuppet"; that is, something by which means of telecommunications does the things you would like to have it do. As a parlour game, this can all be thought through, and you might say, "Will there ever be any sense of having a man do these things ?" I think, and many other people much brighter than I think, that there is. Let me give you two examples where I would much rather have a man on the job than any machine that I can think of. One of these is the exploration of the Mississippi Valley by Mar quette and Joliet many years ago. I would like to challenge any one of you in the spirit of the game to think of a machine which could have gone down the Mississippi River and made as complete observations of the nature of the United States as did Marquette and Joliet with almost no equip ment and very primitive means. That is the answer to that one. Let me give you another example, perhaps closer to home, and more homely. If you bundled me up in Chicago, let us say, and blindfolded me and delivered me to this room and then took off the blindfold, I daresay I could tell you in about 30 seconds what is going on here. If you can pick up a machine to do that, I would like to see how it works. Along the lines of these more-or-less homely examples, I think it must be granted that eventually, at some point of complexity and diversity of observation and investigation, the possibility of a viable machine as part of a scientific system breaks down and you really must put a real live mean on the job at some point.
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