THE GIANT LEAP

Reviewed 1/04/2003

The Giant Leap, by Adrian Berry

THE GIANT LEAP: Mankind Heads for the Stars
Adrian Berry
New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1999

Rating:

1.5

Poor

ISBN 0-312-87786-2 342pp. SC/WCI $14.95

I bought this book on the strength of its introduction. Only eight pages into chapter one, I began to regret that decision. Still, I kept on, through a diatribe about politicians (chapters 2 & 3) that is too long and totally irrelevant to the book — especially since Berry claims that governments will wither away within the next fifty years.

The next five chapters are not too bad. But then we come to the technical material, beginning with Chapter 9: A Fuel Like Magic. This is all about antimatter, and Berry gets important details wrong. The sad part is, he doesn't just get the technical details wrong; he flubs up things like the description of the fictional starship Enterprise.1

Page 126: "Most people who think of starships imagine a vessel like the Enterprise in Star Trek, a ship whose basic design is not unlike that of a jumbo jet. There is a huge pancake-shaped disk to house the crew compartments and flight deck, and below this, and sensibly separated from it, are two enormous rocket nozzles pointing to the rear."

Two enormous rocket nozzles, eh? I'm certain that Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott, chief engineer aboard the UFP starship Enterprise (and better known as "Scotty"), would have been grateful to Mr. Berry for pointing them out. Scotty thought he knew every nook and cranny of the vessel in his charge, and here he'd missed the nozzles all those years! But seriously, I wonder if Berry ever watched Star Trek. There's nothing about the ship's engine nacelles that even suggests a rocket nozzle; and the whole point of its design was that it used technology as far ahead of our current rockets as they are ahead of, well, a fleet of war canoes being rowed into New York City's harbor.2

On the very next page, he compares Goddard's 1926 liquid-fuel prototype with the design for an antimatter-fueled starship. The common element? Both have the engine in front. But here's Berry's description:

Page 127: "His 1926 rocket may have been unbelievably crude compared with a modern space rocket, but in one respect it was far more advanced. The engine pulled the payload rather than pushed it. Goddard's design has been long abandoned. Perhaps because the extra weight involved in a 'pushing' rocket did not greatly matter to people building a comparatively small Earth-to-orbit vehicle, engineers have long since put the engines in the rear — or at the bottom — of a craft lifting off vertically. (An aircraft jet engine, which is a form of rocket, could not possibly be anywhere but on the plane's tail or wings since otherwise, when taking off, the passengers might be bounced violently along the runway!)"

In a solid-body rocket, it does not matter if the engine is ahead or behind; the "puller" rocket has no stability advantage. Nor does it weigh less than the pusher rocket of the same thrust, delta-v and payload. Indeed, it would probably weigh more, since some means to resist or deflect the hot exhaust from the puller engines must be added. (Had the author bothered to check, he would have discovered that even Goddard himself never again used the puller design.)

Berry goes on to talk about aluminum-lithium resin (not alloy) and says that the starship's "shadow shield" need be only one-hundredth as wide as the engine. What he should have said is that it can be one-hundredth as wide as the crew compartment, since the crew compartment is one hundred times as far from the engine.

He warns, correctly, against the hazards of dust grains and other debris in interstellar space — but then says a passive shield will not work because "it would be destroyed itself by impacts." His solution is to project plasma from the engine forward to vaporize any incoming particles. Presumably he never stopped to wonder how much plasma would have to be "projected forward" to do the job, and how much the engine would have to be beefed up to compensate for the net loss in thrust.

Finally, he comes up with several hugely complicated schemes to handle deceleration, when all that would be necessary is to swing the ship around so the engine is pointing the other way, then light it up again.

In the next chapter — Chapter 11 — he discusses "rocketless rocketry". Talking about propelling a ship with concentrated beams of sunlight, he comes up with this howler:

Page 143: "It has been calculated that a mirror of this size, if polished as smoothly as possible, would generate a beam of light that would become no wider than 200 kilometres out to a distance of one light year. This would provide more than enough power to accelerate a starship, with a suitably large magnetic field, to relativistic speeds."

Obviously the photons, being charged particles, impart thrust by interacting strongly with the starship's magnetic field. <cough> This is not the final howler I read, but it is the one that lost me. I only recorded the ones I read, ending with the misinterpretation of Coleridge's poem. I cannot recommend this book, which is a shame because Berry put a lot of work into it. But he makes too many goofs. Pass it up.

Page 18: "There will be no roads [on the uninhabited planets where expeditions from Earth set down], and so there will be no use for cars, trucks, or petrol. There would have been no room in the starship for such cumbersome luxuries, and even if there had been, there would have been no means of repairing them when they broke down."

Berry never heard of off-road vehicles? Tractors? Earth-moving equipment?

Page 25: "The first prophet of interstellar travel to go seriously into practical details in a full-length book was a distinguished member of the British Interplanetary Society, James Strong, in his 1965 book Flight to the Stars: An Enquiry into the Feasibility of Interstellar Flight. . . . The flowering of electronics (which Strong did not mention, since computers barely existed in his time)..."

No computers except ENIAC, and those manufactured by Burroughs and CDC and IBM and Sperry-Univac and . . .

Pages 27-28: "There is a general assumption among people who write about space that manned travel to the stars will take place as soon as such journeys become technically possible. First, it is said, after all the Sun's planet's have been explored by unmanned probes (a process which is nearly complete), manned exploration of the planets will take place. This will be followed in turn by permanent settlements on these worlds and in some cases by colonisation. Everything will be managed in an orderly fashion by governments, either in the form of a World Space Council or by national space organizations like NASA or the European Space Agency. In the long term, so the argument goes, because the growth of wealth will roughly keep pace with the level of technological development, governments will be able to afford to finance these vast projects without neglecting their domestic constituents.
It is a charming scenario, but unfortunately, like many such idealistic visions of the future, it will not happen like this. The principal reason is that politicians tend to be uninterested in funding any project that takes more than four years to come to fruition — the time until the next election. And the design, building, and testing of a starship will take about 50 years to complete."

Oh, boy! First, unmanned exploration of Sol's planets is far from complete. Second, how do "permanent settlements" differ from "colonisation"? Third, not everyone assumes governments will manage space flight (and definitely not "in an orderly fashion".) And NASA is right out. Fourth, how do you refute the argument that society's aggregate wealth will expand enough to make the marginal expense of star flights affordable? Fifth, how do you know how long it takes to build a starship?

Page 30: "Notwithstanding the lower esteem in which politicians are held, and the diminished interest which people take in their daily business, they have shown a tendency in recent decades to entrench themselves. They have responded to ever-increasing wealth with massive increases in taxation and, in the European Union, oppressive regulations imposed by non-elected officials."

He's a Libertarian!

Page 31: "But something very fundamental in the state of society is going to change in the next half-century or so. I would not have written this book if I did not believe this to be the case. Interstellar flights are going to happen because governments, in their present overweening form, are going to vanish from the Earth."

Told ya!

Page 80: "How fast is it possible to travel? From our earliest history as intelligent beings we have been developing our ability to travel faster; not gradually but by sudden bounds. One can draw up a chart of these achievements. In general order of magnitude, there are 16 possible speeds, of which 14 have either been already attained or will one day be attainable. Interestingly, each speed is approximately — very approximately — three times faster than the previous one."

Some of those listed are rather arbitrary. In any case, a factor of 3 is not an order-of-magnitude increase; that is a factor of 10. Also, in listing speed 16 as "Faster than light", Berry contradicts himself by going beyond the bounds of the possible — as we presently understand them.

Page 117: "Even in everyday life, we see the principle of mass energy conversion at work. Petrol drives a car along a road by turning the mass of its fluid into energy."
M E A   C U L P A
14 January 2006

Back in 2004, my comment on the statement above was, "Uh, no: This is the energy stored in chemical bonds." I was thinking that mass-energy conversion occurs only in nuclear reactions. That was wrong. Today (14 January 2006) on page 115 of Richard Wolfson's Nuclear Choices, I found this:

But E=mc2 is a universal statement. It applies to all events that release energy. Weigh a candle and all the oxygen around it. Burn the candle and weigh the smoke and carbon dioxide that come out, along with what is left of the candle. If you could weigh with enough precision, you would find that after burning the total weight is less. Again, matter has been converted into energy.

So I was wrong to condemn Berry's statement about petrol the way I did. But his unqualified statement is still misleading, since it implies total conversion of the petrol. It's just sloppy writing.

Page 131: "The tungsten shield, moreover, does not have to be at all wide. By placing it 100 times closer to the engine than to the crew compartments, its width need only be a hundredth of the 'shadow' — the source — of the gamma radiation, and the weight of the shield will hence be trivial."

A more understandable goof. Berry means a hundredth of the width of the crew compartment. At this diameter, being 100 times closer to the engine, it will cast a shadow enclosing the crew compartment, blocking (to a first approximation) any radiation headed in that direction.

Pages 132-3: "What can be done in general about the perils of gas and dust? The ship could of course travel more slowly, which would reduce the danger. The captain of the Titanic was confronted by a similar dilemma. He accelerated to full speed in order to arrive in New York a day early and win the Blue Riband. But here we cannot slow down as that captain ought to have done. For to do so would increase the voyage time not by a day, but by many decades, which would defeat its own object. Instead, some sort of anti-collision shield must be erected in front of the ship. A 'passive' shield, some sort of protective screen, would be useless, however strong it was, since it would be destroyed itself by impacts.
An 'active' shield must be designed, a device that ejects matter ahead of the ship and destroys or scatters obstacles in its path. The most promising way to do this is to exploit the vehicle's excess heat. {***} This excess heat must be ejected in front of the ship in the form of fluid, in streams of hot droplets that will ionize all atoms that they encounter, stripping away their electrons from their protons. This will work because at temperatures higher than about 10,000 degrees, all matter is turned into plasma, a fourth state of matter, matter without atoms, beyond the three states of matter we are familiar with, solid, liquid and gas. Plasma will present no obstacles."

True, a passive shield big enough to be effective would be massive. But Berry's method has problems of its own — chief among them being that it thrusts opposite the engines. He seems not to have considered the level of "plasma projection" required to reliably destroy dangerous incoming particles, and how much of a difference this would make in vehicle mass.

Page 134: "Now for the final all-important problem. After more than two years of coasting (ship time), The Alpha Centauri system will be only light-months away, and it will be time for the ship to slow down from its tremendous cruising velocity. Failure to do so in time would be calamitous. There is likely to be so much debris — moons, dust clouds and asteroids — in the destination star system that the ship would be certain to collide with something, a collision that even the fluid shield could not prevent. If it collided with this massive material at 92 percent of the speed of light, the ship would never be heard of again.
In their proposed method of reducing speed to avoid such a catastrophe, it is possible — just possible — that Pellegrino and Powell may be breaking their Rule Number One, to keep the ship's mass as low as possible. They suggest that the ship should have a second engine in its rear that stays inert during the coasting period of the voyage. When the time comes to decelerate, the ship would turn itself around and the second engine would fire, acting like a retro-rocket."

On its face, this is just nonsensical. Shut down the engine, turn the ship around so the engine faces the direction of travel (using thrusters on the crew compartment, and keeping the tether taught), and then fire up the main engine again. Of course, there is a chance that it may not fire up again, some vital component having failed or been destroyed by radiation. This may be the real reason the cited source proposes a second engine: a form of redundancy. Nothing in this world (or any other) prevents Berry from saying that.

Page 148: "The Ancient Mariner was in great navigational difficulties. Having shot the albatross which brought good fortune, he was cursed by evil luck. The sea began to blaze with unaccustomed colours so that he found it impossible to tell where he was or where he was going."

No. The problem was that the ship was becalmed, the crew were running out of water, and they were mightily peeved at the Ancient Mariner.3

And I had done an hellish thing,
And it would work 'em woe :
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Ah wretch ! said they, the bird to slay,
That made the breeze to blow !

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

This guy can't get either the physics or the poetry right! Being thoroughly disgusted at this point, I did not read beyond page 148 (the beginning of Chapter 12). This book, unfortunately, validates the motto of the high school I attended in York, PA: "Much good work is lost for the lack of a little more."

1 Reading this review in May of 2006, I realize I didn't make some of my objections to Berry's ideas very clear. I recall a similar situation on CompuServe's Space Forum years ago. Someone asked me if the heavy batteries on a spacecraft could be replaced by solar cells. I pointed out the obvious: that batteries are required to power the spacecraft when it's in Earth's shadow. They replied that they wanted to use the solar arrays during launch, to replace the heavy battery in the booster. I never reject unorthodox ideas out of hand; but this is a dumb idea six ways from Sunday (ask any aerospace engineer you trust) and I never explained why. At least with this review I get a second chance.
2 This comparison is due to the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke.
3 This seven-part poem is probably Samuel Taylor Coleridge's best-known work — at least to my generation, because it was taught in schools. If you'd like to read this fever-dream of sin and retribution, it's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, found at Bartleby (among other places.)
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