Chapter 36
Despite its communist government’s fears that utopian visions of travel to outer space would “stir up the masses,” the Soviet Association of Inventors in 1927 launched an expo dedicated to space flight. Held in Moscow, the show was called the World’s First Exhibition of Models of Interplanetary Apparatus, Mechanisms, Instruments, and Historical Materials. It was produced by the Cosmopolity, a group that believed with rapturous fervor mankind would very soon acquire the means to migrate to new and better worlds. Its members shunned meat, alcohol, and tobacco, deprived themselves of sleep, and fashioned their own language. They advocated wearing masks to foster social equality. They wanted to dive into the deep Loch Ness darkness of space. They lacked only a Diane Arbus to capture them on her Rolleiflex.
The Russian craze for the cosmos was ignited by a 1923 article in the newspaper Izvestia. Called “Is Utopia Really Possible?,” the piece lasered in on two innovators of rocket science—the Romanian-German Hermann Oberth and the American Robert Goddard, noting Goddard’s monograph, which received nationwide attention, speculating on throwing a rocket at the moon.
The article, in true Rube Goldberg fashion, kindled a renewed interest in Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Called the father of Russian rocketry, Tsiolkovsky wrote science fiction, authored papers on escape velocities and liquid-propellant rockets, and on his free afternoons, devised the Tsiolkovsky formula, which “established the relationships among rocket speed, the speed of the gas at exit, and the mass of the rocket and its propellant.”
Curiously, it wasn’t the homegrown Tsiolkovsky but the American Goddard who inflamed Russians’ imagination. Though he speculated often, even promiscuously, about voyaging to the moon, Goddard’s 1926 liquid-fuel rocket, the first of its kind, soared a less-than-spacefaring 200 feet. But his Carl Sagan-like optimism and his far-seeing gusto stoked the post-revolution Soviet soul that saw reaching for the stars as a natural progression from working for a better Earth.
Courtesy of Ron Miller
Not surprisingly, in the period between 1921 and 1932, an estimated 30 nonfiction books and 250 articles about space flight were published in the USSR. Russians’ enthusiasm was superheated enough to reach escape velocity in 1924, when the Moscow horse militia had to disperse rowdy throngs agitated over reports that a rocket to the moon would launch somewhere some time that year.
In the United States, despite the short burst of hoopla over Goddard’s work (thumped famously by the New York Times in 1920 as “A Severe Strain on Credulity”), a whopping two fact-based monographs were published in about the same time span. (In 1927, the year of the show, the word “rocket” did not appear once in issues of Popular Science magazine.) Sure that Goddard, as unquantifiably and incomprehensibly popular with Russians as David Hasselhoff is with Germans, was ready to make the 250,000-mile-long journey any day, Russian experts in astronomy and physics wrote him, frantically requesting confirmation on his incipient moon launch. Perhaps they had envisioned a future on their home planet as bright as a black hole, and twice as hard to escape.
Courtesy of Ron Miller
Goddard, likely sensitive to the embroidered perception of his accomplishments, did not attend the show, which ran between April and June of 1927. His absence hardly mattered to the crowd of 12,000 artists, scientists, schoolchildren, policemen, and others from every walk of Russian life who mobbed the exhibition like individual compasses for which space was true north.
They entered gliding past a landscape, “Lunar Panorama,” set behind a glass enclosure and bordered by a string of words written in the group’s peculiar language, “Cosmopolitans invent the roads to new worlds.” The alien scenery glowed with carroty soil and cobalt flora traversed by canals set like plumb lines. From the sky above, sparkling with stars, a rocket ship, the color of tinsel, dropped down to the alien surface like a sculpted iceberg sliding through space. Clad in an early vision of a spacesuit (it was made of plywood), a proto-astronaut stood pensively on the lip of a crater.
Visitors next coursed through an asteroid belt of exhibits featuring the then-fringe predictions of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, who, like the Cosmopolitans, also believed we would soon travel to the outer limits of space. Models of Jules Verne’s cannon-launched projectile from “From the Earth to the Moon” and H.G. Wells’ Cavorite-infused sphere from “The First Men in the Moon” seemed to suggest such wonders were inching from a fictional realm to an everyday one.
More practical star treks, however, were suggested by models of space-faring crafts inspired by the ideas of Goddard, Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, and other space pioneers that anticipated the Soviet Union launching the first human into space thirty-four years later. Russians didn’t drop their zest for space the way Sprint drops calls. While the Soviet authorities never allowed another repetition of the wishful-thinking exhibition again, in 1933 they sponsored the formation of a national institute to construct rockets, the launch pad, so to speak, for Sputnik, Laika, and Yuri Gagarin. Forgotten by many now, the Cosmopolity’s exhibition left the Russians feeling they were in a place that David Bowie’s “Major Tom” would recognize, one where “the stars look very different today.”