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Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and the
Accident on the Brick Moon

In the northern quarter of Moscow, there is a titanium sculpture, over thirty stories tall, rising from the center of a park. The base of the sculpture is wide, but the two sides swiftly converge to a point at the top, one side steeply slanted, the other curving smoothly upward. If you were standing in the park, following these lines with your eyes, it would feel like you were tracing the path of a rocket launch. And there, where the lines come together, is indeed a spacecraft. The sculpture was built in 1964, but this spaceship looks and feels like something from a much earlier era. To contemporary eyes, it might be something from the Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon comics of the ’20s and ’30s. The sculpture is the Monument to the Conquerors of Space, commissioned in 1958 to celebrate the successful launch and orbit of Sputnik 1, the first human-made satellite. This site also commemorates the person widely considered the father of the Soviet space program, and possibly the world’s first rocket scientist, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

Tsiolkovsky was the first to formulate an equation that describes the changing relationship between a rocket’s fuel mass, the speed of its exhaust, and its ability to accelerate away from the surface of a planet. The rockets that he described and drew, in publications like Exploration of Outer Space by Means of Rocket Devices (1903), and the novel Beyond the Planet Earth (1896–1920), looked a lot like the ship at the apex of the Monument. Cigar-shaped, with one end truncated for a rocket engine and the other tapering to a pointed crew capsule, his ships were streamlined with fins to pass through Earth’s atmosphere with as little effort as possible, on their way to the resources, riches, and vast open space that lay beyond.

Tsiolkovsky was the first space scientist, but besides—or as an extension of—his interest and faith in science, his work drew on a core of unique mystical materialism. In fact, his attitude toward science and space is not captured very well by the notion of “conquest” that names the Soviet monument. Tsiolkovsky’s earliest recorded beliefs, and those of his teachers, were that the universe was alive and undying, and that the only way to pay tribute to it was to expand intelligence into this infinite universe—no matter the cost.

Tsiolkovsky’s life was punctuated, two-thirds of the way through, by the two Russian revolutions of 1917. Before the first one, which displaced the imperialist czars in March of that year, Russia had been an Orthodox Christian country. Shortly after the second revolution, in October, which installed the Communist Bolsheviks in power, Russia was—in policy if not practice—an atheist nation. Under the czars, he was perhaps too much of a rational mystic for the church; indeed, his career as a teacher had been endangered several times by his unorthodox attitude toward Christianity. After the Bolshevik Revolution, he encountered similar difficulties explaining to the Soviet authorities that his research and writing on astronautics and universal destiny was intended to be a practical plan that would align with the new constitution the nation had just adopted. This plan, and this faith in its destiny, was influenced by neither religion nor Marxist philosophy; rather, it was mostly based on his personal experiences, and on the teachings of an obscure librarian-philosopher who Tsiolkovsky had met in Moscow when he was sixteen years old, named Nikolai Fedorov.

Particles and Planets

Fedorov, writing in the mid and late nineteenth century, liked to work from first principles, and to extend them to the most extreme scales possible. For Fedorov, the worst of the evils that beset humankind was clear—death itself. In his collected writings, published posthumously by his followers as The Philosophy of the Common Task,¹ Fedorov meticulously builds a case that proceeds upward and downward from this observation. The book assembled from his work reads like equal parts theology and literary analysis, materialist philosophy and natural science, historiography and rhetoric. Humans, he says, work best when their cause is united, and the progress of science shows this to be true. The sciences converge in physics, and the best place to observe physics in action is in the sky; therefore all politics, he says, is reducible to astronomy. What is the task that will both constitute and animate this notional, scientifically minded, theoretically global political unity? Nothing less than the elimination of death. All other problems will necessarily be solved either on the road to, or as a result of arrival at, this singular goal. Hunger and illness lead to death, so they must go; the same principle applies to crime and want, so they are out as well. War between nations not only results in death, but also impedes the unity necessary for the cause. And it will be scientific consensus that eliminates all these obstacles.

What are the implications of death’s eventual elimination? One thread of secondary effects reaches down in scale, to that of atomic particles. Fedorov concluded that the end of death would necessarily entail the manipulation of reality at this level. This would proceed in stages, starting from existing medical practice—for the treatment of wounds was already possible, and so was short-term resuscitation from seeming death by causes like drowning. The fine-grained ability to repair more and more types of wound and degradation in tissue would develop apace with the successive extension of the time after which a body could be brought back to life from the edge of total loss. If bodily immortality were possible through the control of the body’s particles, he follows, then what could be done with the particles that are no longer part of a body, but once were? Eventually, Fedorov thought, these two trend lines would meet and mutually reinforce one another. Death would become less and less final, as bodies at progressively worse stages of decomposition would be resurrected. And eventually would come the capacity to reawaken humans even after their corpses had crumbled into dust, as the sciences of particle manipulation and restorative medicine met. Even after that, there were further aspirations in Fedorov’s medical/technical/moral imagination. The “common task,” Fedorov urged, should be nothing less than the resurrection of every human who had ever lived.

Where would all of these hundred-odd billion people go? Another chain of consequences following from Fedorov’s assumptions extended up and out in scale, into the cosmos. Fedorov, as a follower of nineteenth-century astronomy, held the then-current view that the Sun was slowly dimming. For Fedorov, this was one of several indicators that humans must eventually become multiplanetary. One way or another, present conditions on Earth could not be relied on to last forever. Before leaving it behind though, the “common task” would first succeed in regulating and controlling every aspect of the planet. Rings of cables would be laid in the ground and extended upward into the sky, and electromagnetism would be used to control every aspect of the weather and climate, ensuring an adequate food supply. Humans would also fine-tune Earth’s rotation and its distance from its dimming Sun, from which they would draw energy directly, thus freeing the miners who had previously worked to extract coal from the Earth. But Fedorov’s preoccupation with large-scale, long-term planning would not stop there; even an entire planet, completely regulated toward the production of energy, resources, and comfort for its human inhabitants, wouldn’t be enough for a growing population of immortals.

Fedorov had studied the writing of the eighteenth-century economic philosopher Thomas Malthus, who noted that population growth and resource growth followed two different paths. Resources expanded arithmetically: when graphed, their growth marks a straight line, tilted upward like the front face of the Monument to the Conquerors of Space. Human population, on the other hand, swoops in a smooth, ever-steepening curve, like the Monument’s rear side. It was Fedorov who first proposed space travel as a solution to the problem posed by the convergence of these two curves.

In The Philosophy of the Common Task, Fedorov writes that he is acting on behalf of “the unlearned” to address “the learned.” The case he makes for this Common Task encompasses almost every possible framework. His arguments are that all of the moral, technical, and even aesthetic imperatives lead to the same conclusion: that this task ought to be undertaken. In one sense, Fedorov’s enemy here is not so much death, but the randomness of the world that leads to it. In his collected work, he often juxtaposes the image of a “blind force” and a “conscious being.”² Why should the one have so much power over the other? How can human effort unify under the task of reversing this power relationship? Space travel and space settlement, in this scenario, is an exercise that must be carried out to fulfill humanity’s responsibility as conscious beings. In Fedorov’s literal worldview, other planets exist in a state of natural randomness, one that must be controlled and utilized by human agency.

Tsiolkovsky encountered Fedorov around 1874. Tsiolkovsky’s father had sent him from the village in which he grew up to Moscow to attend school. Tsiolkovsky, who was deaf for most of his life, found higher education difficult, and after only about a year, he stopped going to classes, instead setting up his own system of self-education. Tsiolkovsky spent the allowance his father sent on supplies for experiments in physics and chemistry, and made almost daily visits to the Chertovski Library, where Fedorov was a librarian. Tsiolkovsky soon joined a group of students Fedorov mentored and taught, and over the next two years, the librarian and the library provided something like Tsiolkovsky’s university education.

It’s notable that within Fedorov’s writings, the practical mechanisms of the different technical achievements necessary to the task are not resolved to any degree of detail. In some ways, the history of Fedorov’s lasting influence is the history of others working out the technical aspects of the “Common Task.” Regarding a means of travel in space, the closest Fedorov seems to have come is to speculate that the planet Earth itself might become mobile and steerable. In a literal anticipation of the “Spaceship Earth” concept discussed by Henry George, Barbara Ward, and most famously, Buckminster Fuller, Fedorov expands his binary concept of conscious effort and blind force:

Therefore humanity must not be idle passengers, but the crew of its terrestrial craft propelled by forces the nature of which we do not even know—is it photo-, thermo- or electro-powered? We will remain unable to discover what force propels it until we are able to control it. In the second case, that is to say, if the knowledge of the final destiny of our Earth is unnatural, alien and useless to it, then there is nothing else to do than to become passively fossilized in contemplating the slow destruction of our home and graveyard.³

In his subsequent philosophical and scientific speculation, Tsiolkovsky writes about the connection between particle vibration, the nature of immortality, and the potential for human expansion to infinite planets in an infinite universe. It’s not hard to see how Fedorov’s work influenced his thinking here. Accounts vary on the question of whether or not the older librarian and the young future rocket scientist ever discussed space travel. Tsiolkovsky remembers the details differently in different interviews. He often cites his encounters with the writings of Jules Verne as the zero point for his interest in space. But whether the two talked specifically about outer space or not, Tsiolkovsky’s work would be a part of Fedorov’s task. Federov’s conviction that eternal life, universal resurrection, and travel outer space were all an inextricable part of the Common Task would come to be known broadly as “cosmism.” It was Tsiolkovsky who discovered and explained, in his equations, “what force” would move humans off of Earth, helping to put these pieces together. And it was Tsiolkovsky who would put that rocket ship on the Monument, at the convergence of Fedorov’s Malthusian curves of planetary resources and population growth.

The Glass Moon and the Brick Moon

Alongside his career as a schoolteacher, Tsiolkovsky continued to conduct experiments and theoretical work on rocket science for his entire life, though he published the results of this work infrequently. Often he received support from the community of physicists in Russia and abroad, but just as often he felt he was ignored. At the same time, he was writing science fiction. He had not forgotten the effect that reading Jules Verne had on him as a younger person, and he knew that science fiction could be even more potent and influential in culture at large than peer-reviewed research. He began his full-length novel, Beyond the Planet Earth, in 1896, and finally published it in 1920,⁴ after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. As if to offer tribute to this occasion, the novel describes a series of events that take place one hundred years later, in 2017. In the book, a group of wealthy scientists secretly design and build a spindle-shaped rocket—not unlike the one at the apex of the Monument.

Half of the scientists, along with a select crew, launch the ship with little fanfare, intending to embark on a brief exploratory mission. Their journey becomes a series of opportunities for the team to demonstrate technical virtuosity, solving or anticipating every problem that arises. To deal with the crushing forces from acceleration at launch, they immerse themselves in tanks of water, breathing through tubes while the ship flies on autopilot. In order to regulate the temperature inside, they paint the hull black where they want heat energy to be absorbed, and shiny chrome where they want it reflected. Step by step they extend their trip, until the main problem is the capacity of their food and air supplies. Luckily they have brought along material to construct a huge floating greenhouse, using sheet glass and a metal frame. They fill it with seeds from their stores, fertilize it with their waste, and circulate exhaled carbon dioxide through it so the plants can replenish the ship’s oxygen.

Tsiolkovsky’s story is didactic, full of the same performative competence that defined the work of his idol Verne and that of other writers from the same period, like Arthur Conan Doyle. He constantly specifies the quantities of things, and his characters take the time to explain what they are doing and why. At one point, he uses more space to explain how humidity is removed from the air of a habitat than he does to describe the inhabitants’ daily life. He uses the narrative to think through and get out ahead of any of the reader’s possible objections to the feasibility of the scheme. For Tsiolkovsky, this is a road map for one part of the cosmist Common Task: a demonstration that conscious collective human effort could overcome the circumstances set up by the blind forces in space. If it were not enough to write a fin de siècle novel about a trip to space that demonstrates its own technical realism, Tsiolkovsky goes even further, making it into a story about the possibility that humans could live safely and happily away from planets altogether, indefinitely.

In the story, when the people of Earth learn about the successes of the explorers, others plan and execute further launches. The first greenhouse built by the main characters is meant to be an ideal environment for their plants: it gets twenty-four hours of sunlight, the temperature is kept tropical hot, and the atmosphere is thin and supercharged with carbon dioxide. The explorers can only visit it while wearing their space suits. The groups of newcomers, though, design and build large orbital glass houses for living in, adjusting the preferred temperature and humidity to make a compromise paradise for both plants and humans. When his characters perform in this way, Tsiolkovsky is using them to demonstrate what sociologist Saskia Sassen calls a “capability,” as they employ technical apparatus to create and fine-tune the parameters of a world. Each of these structures is home to hundreds of people who, lightly dressed, fly freely in the zero gravity using paddle-shaped wings attached to their hands. Before long, these new space dwellers speculate about building even more habitats, using ore recovered from asteroids. This would end the need for heavy and expensive rocket launches from Earth to bring construction material. Huge populations emigrate to these new glass moons, some of the first space stations in fiction.

But Tsiolkovsky wasn’t the only author writing about living in space. In 1869, in the United States, the Unitarian minister and cultural critic Edward Everett Hale published another story about a space station. Hale’s story, “The Brick Moon,” appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, followed by a sequel the next year, “Life on the Brick Moon.”⁵ Hale’s titular Brick Moon is planned and built by a group of speculators who had been friends when they were young men. When still in school, they had schemed to win prize money that had been offered by the British government for solving “the problem of longitude.” By the nineteenth century, sailors had for centuries been accustomed to the use of constellations for navigation. The calculation of a ship’s position in latitude was a well-refined process of astronomical observation, with the assistance of an astrolabe to measure the angle of a star’s distance from the horizon. The determination of precise longitude, though, was complicated by Earth’s rotation. To predict which stars should be visible according to longitude, sailors needed to know the precise time, or reckon from a stable object—both hard to find at sea. Imprecise longitude, in a colonial era of expansion and trade, resulted in hazards to navigation and was the cause of costly delays and accidents. The British Empire demanded better precision, and they were willing to pay the equivalent, in today’s money, of up to $3.5 million to anyone who could deliver it.

The American protagonists of Hale’s story propose to build and launch an artificial satellite into a geostationary orbit over Greenwich. This satellite would be high enough and large enough to be visible from Atlantic trade routes, providing a stable reference point whose angle of elevation would indicate the observer’s longitude. Having made their fortunes in business and transportation, the men revive their scheme when they’re reunited, just before the American Civil War. Britain’s Board of Longitude had been disbanded in 1828, after timekeeping devices had advanced to their satisfaction, but wrecks were still common. Without a cash prize, the team needed investors to back their scheme. Among themselves, they had worked out detailed cost estimates for a plan to make their artificial moon out of brick. It would be a solid sphere 200 feet in diameter, with spherical cavities inside to save on material and weight. The Brick Moon would be launched with waterpower: two giant flywheels would squeeze the moon between them, then shoot it off at the appropriate angle.

To raise money, they staged a public presentation that attracted a mixed audience of shipping magnates, bank fund managers, and interested hangers-on. The three protagonists delivered a three-pronged pitch in a series of speeches. These were far more sophisticated, rhetorically, than the speeches delivered by Tsiolkovsky’s scientists. The first appealed to the application of intentional order in a random universe, in a way that Fedorov might have appreciated, for the launch of the Brick Moon was an essential part of something like his Common Task:

I said that we believed we had a method which, if the means were supplied for the experiment, would give the humblest fisherman the very certainty of sunrise and of sunset in his calculations of his place upon the world. And I said that whenever a man knew his place in this world, it was always likely all would go well. Then I sat down.

The second entrepreneur appealed to virtue, “for he believed, on his soul, that the success of this enterprise promised more for mankind than any enterprise which was ever likely to call for the devotion of his life. ‘And to the good of mankind,’ he said, very simply, ‘my life is devoted.’ Then he sat down.” The third appealed to the audience’s vanity and sense of their own cleverness:

He did it as if he had been talking to a bright boy of ten years old. He made those people think that he respected them as his equals. But, in fact, he chose every word, as if not one of them knew anything. He explained, as if it were rather more simple to explain than to take for granted. But he explained as if, were they talking, they might be explaining to him. He led them from point to point—oh! so much more clearly than I have been leading you—till, as their mouths dropped a little open in their eager interest, and their lids forgot to wink in their gaze upon his face, and so their eyebrows seemed a little lifted in curiosity—till, I say, each man felt as if he were himself the inventor, who had bridged difficulty after difficulty; as if, indeed, the whole were too simple to be called difficult or complicated. The only wonder was that the Board of Longitude, or the Emperor Napoleon, or the Smithsonian, or somebody, had not sent this little planet on its voyage of blessing long before.⁶

But there would be further difficulties yet unbridged. For one, the funds raised from these investors were still short of what was needed, leading the entrepreneurs to struggle with the process of raising more money, until war intervened. The narrator describes the April 1861 attack on Fort Sumter by Confederate troops as the conceptual take-off point for their Moon, sending it on a trajectory like the one traced by the Russian Monument. “Little did he know it, but in that explosion the BRICK MOON also was lifted into the sky!” In a boon that might be called war profiteering, the money sitting in the would-be Moon builder’s account benefits from skyrocketing interest rates, and by the time the Civil War is over, they have enough funds to begin the project. The project is time-consuming. As their team of immigrant laborers is nearing completion of the Brick Moon, they’ve moved their families—and some of their livestock—inside the Moon’s interior voids. One night in early spring, melting snow has swollen the river alongside which the Moon is being built, and a shift in the bank sends the still-occupied Moon into the flywheels, launching it into orbit too early. But later there is good news: the workers, along with one of the three original entrepreneurs, have survived. And their household stores, along with plentiful water from melted snow, seem to be enough to let them all survive and thrive indefinitely. The Brick Moon, in Hale’s story, has accidentally become the first occupied space station.

Tsiolkovsky’s story about his glass moons is steeped in the world-transforming fervor of the period during and after the two Russian revolutions of 1917. Progress unfolds step by step, made possible by the faith of the people in rationality and science. There is a story that, after the February Revolution that overthrew the czars, people paraded in the streets of St. Petersburg with a coffin, painted with the label “The Old World.”⁷ Difficulties, in Beyond the Planet Earth, are not only overcome, but anticipated in advance; this new world exists thanks to application of Fedorov’s “conscious being” over “blind force.” Hale’s Brick Moon, on the other hand, proceeds from accident to accident. It was blind chance that let the Civil War elevate the entrepreneur’s fortunes, that put the families on board the Moon when it accidentally launched, and that subsequently allowed them to flourish.

Both authors take liberties with the hard science behind their space stations. Tsiolkovsky fudges the energy density of his rocket’s fuel. No known liquid substance, in 1917 or in 2019, could launch a ship with the size and mass of the ship in the story so efficiently. Hale’s launch, with flywheels instantaneously accelerating the Brick Moon to orbital velocity, would have killed everyone inside due to inertial forces. At least Tsiolkovsky had the foresight to give his astronauts liquid tanks in which to rest during the intense g-forces of takeoff. Tsiolkovsky underestimates the amount of plants that would be necessary to keep humans alive in a closed environment with a constant supply of both food and oxygen, but Hale’s agricultural speculation is even more unrealistic. Hale expects that the small mass of the Moon would have enough gravity to hold their atmosphere to it, without Tsiolkovsky’s greenhouse glass enclosure. He also anticipates that the environment of space would cause the bare stocks brought by the accidental Moon dwellers to somehow evolve into more complex crops. “Write to Darwin that he is all right,”⁸ one character communicates back to Earth.

The two remaining entrepreneurs on Earth are relieved when they spot the Brick Moon in the sky, and when the third entrepreneur on the Moon and his cohort of workers start signaling in Morse code that all is well, they are overjoyed. When the people on Earth try to consciously intervene to assist these victims of blind force, though, more accidents happen. Imagining that the inhabitants of the Moon must be wanting for instruction on government and culture on their new world, the Earthbound arrange to send up a package of books on law and history. The launch misses the Brick Moon, and the books end up orbiting around it, just out of the Moon dwellers’ reach. The partner on the Moon is undisturbed by this loss. “Go to thunder with your old law-books,” he signals back. “We have not had a primary meeting nor a justice court since we have been here, and D.V., we never will have.”⁹ Edward Everett Hale was an abolitionist, and a Union supporter during the Civil War, and he is using this story to think through some of the issues around revolution. The residents of the Brick Moon, like the failed Confederacy that started the war, had decided to secede.

Both of these stories were published shortly after revolutions—the successful ones in Russia, and the failed secession in the United States—and both have distinct connections to national and planetary imaginations. Tsiolkovsky imagines that the fact of living in space will correspond to a radical estrangement from ideas about living on Earth that had been previously taken for granted. In this imaginary, everything can be designed by conscious intention, so debates spring up, in space and on the ground, about the necessity—and morality—of everything from the specification of a day/night cycle to nudity. The capability of reconstructing an entirely new world is contagious, and, as one character in the book observes, even though a great number of people were now choosing to live in space, “Earth will have to be looked after just as before, even more strictly than before, or it will turn into a hell.”¹⁰ In another text published in 1928, eight years after Beyond the Planet Earth, Tsiolkovsky expands on the techniques he proposes to apply, in order to make sure Earth is “looked after.” These turn out to be techniques directly imported back from space.

In The Future of Earth and Mankind, a nonfiction pamphlet, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky writes briefly about “homes in the ether”—glass greenhouse habitats like the ones in Beyond the Planet Earth—before turning his attention back to the planet itself. He worries about the potential, after space travel is enabled, for an unmanaged Earth to become a “house of agony.” His proposal for that management is the step-by-step conscious transformation of the planet’s blind forces. Tsiolkovsky’s goal is to redesign the Earth’s surface in order to maximize its productive capacity as measured by two simple terms: its ability to feed and house as many humans as possible.

His starting point is the tropics, whose residents, he says, “are unable to make use of the paradise bestowed on them and lead pitiful, impoverished lives.” The native peoples, in his scheme, would be impressed into work to clear the land. This clearing would proceed in the form of a line of people, regularly spaced, who would march forward, removing all plant and animal life in their way. Behind them, another regular line would erect a metal mesh on a gridded frame, protecting the cleared zone from the return of insects or other unwanted organisms. A third line would proceed with sowing “the purest varieties of the plants most beneficial to man.”¹¹ Other waves of construction behind that would build more superstructure, with glass panels to even out the interior climate of this global grid as it proceeded from the equator to the poles. The application of this process would turn the world into a giant greenhouse, with one uniform interior climate, as comfortable for human and plant life as the orbital glass moons. The fine-grained control of this designed atmosphere would be achieved through the same techniques used in space: the reflection of heat where it wasn’t wanted, absorption where it was, and use of solar power for energy throughout. Until this total control could be achieved, though, work inside the structure would be done, again, by native people from the tropics, “who are more accustomed to the climate, and suffer from it less.”¹²

Tsiolkovsky doesn’t mention Nikolai Fedorov in The Future of Earth and Mankind, but the influence is clear. Not only is the ambition to optimize the Earth for the needs of a human population part of the Common Task, but so are the methods. The people of the tropics, in Tsiolkovsky’s scheme, would have to be displaced, and forced to work, but eventually all would become part of a “multimillion man voluntary army,” enacting a unified purpose, which, along with “all the technological means at our disposal,” would also unify all of the planet’s environmental conditions.

The endgame of Tsiolkovsky’s proposal would go so far as to cover the oceans with planted, gridded rafts. Every person would be given enough surface area to live in, and to care for, so that all of their needs would be met. If the design of the environment is inextricable from the design of the subject, then this is a plan to unify the space and its inhabitants. Both on and off of Earth, the only real difference between a glass moon and a glassed-over planet would be the presence or absence of gravity. In a final phase, the glass greenhouse roof extending from pole to pole would be sealed, so that every aspect of the atmosphere inside could be specified, and any air outside would be pumped in to grow plants, or sent off into space, making Earth itself into a literal space station that could then travel at will.

Tectonics

Architects have a term of art that describes how forces are resolved in space and material, to create and express the relationship between parts and parts, and between parts and wholes: tectonics. If we’re discussing tectonics, we’re talking about the space between the actuality of how pieces come together during construction to form a complex whole object like a building, and the idea about how that object is composed as an abstraction or a concept. Often, that idea can describe the systematic ways in which the pieces relate to one another to form the totality, but the expression of the idea doesn’t have to correspond to actual construction in a one-to-one fashion.

For example, the architecture of classical Greek temples mostly comes down to us in marble, but in ancient Greece, wooden temples would have outnumbered marble ones by orders of magnitude. Wood is easier and less expensive to build with, and wooden classical temples would have predated their stone counterparts. But they didn’t last. When the Greeks built temples in marble, even though the actual assembly and stacking of stones was an entirely different process than carpentry, they carved the forms to emulate and express the joinery of the earlier wooden temples. The idea—and its expression—transcended the material reality.

Like buildings, worlds have tectonics. The planet Earth is conceived of as a solid sphere, but in actuality its surface comprises a series of hard moving plates, floating around on top of a more fluid mantle. These pieces relate to one another in various systematic ways: they can slide under or over one another, crumple on impact, or become stretched out, thin, and porous. These qualities, along with Earth’s spin, make the actual planet a lumpy oblate spheroid, whose continents have divided from one another. These divisions, in the form of oceans, seas, and mountain ranges, create a corresponding tectonics of human geography, correlated with different ethnic, political, economic, and social situations.

The Brick Moon’s actual construction method is additive: brick stacked on brick. But it is conceived subtractively, as a solid sphere first, which then has void spheres removed from it. Tsiolkovsky’s glass moons and glass Earth, on the other hand, are additive in both their conception and execution. Each successive pass of the moving “volunteer army” front adds another layer of control over the Earth’s surface, as they assemble the glass membrane by adding part to part, panel to frame, until the whole system gradually becomes complete and sealed.

Tsiolkovsky’s additive grid is not unlike the gridded steel frames that made modern architecture possible. Indeed, by the middle of the twentieth century, the endless reproducibility of the metal structural frame and glass window system, along with abundant and cheap energy from fossil fuels, had made a real-world counterpart of Tsiolkovsky’s globalized architecture possible, as in the so-called International Style of modernism. Shortly after the middle of that century, glass-and-steel skyscrapers would start to become ubiquitous in cities from Boston to Beijing.

In 1971, as oil prices were about to spike, and the modernist project was coming to a kind of end, the Italian critical design practice Superstudio published “Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas.”¹³ The speculative projects in their cautionary stories take the totalizing steel-and-glass grids of modernism to absurd and sinister lengths. Like Tsiolkovsky, they propose covering the landscape with moving fronts of transformation and urbanization (Seventh City, Continuous-Production Conveyor Belt City), giant grids that cover the ground with buildings and plants (First City, 2,000-Ton City), and in orbit (Fourth City, Spaceship City). One proposal (Third City, New York of Brains) even seems to reference the post-cosmist cyborg speculation of J.D. Bernal (see chapter 2).

The social and political tectonics of these proposals (utopian and otherwise) seek to unify, not divide. The additive method of the forms is reproduced in the political intentions. As grids—of actual modernist architecture, of Superstudio’s darkly critical cities, or of Tsiolkovsky’s planetary transformation—they do what grids do best: flatten difference into regularized uniformity. Tsiolkovsky’s project starts with brutal hyper-colonialism, displacing native people from their land, and immediately forcing them to work to transform that land for a new globalized—even universalized—human subject. But his hope, like the hopes of the modernists, is that these displaced populations will eventually be assimilated to the larger group identity and to the Common Task.

The Almería Peninsula in southern Spain is a contemporary analogue of Tsiolkovsky’s greenhouse urbanism, where hundreds of square miles of land, once used as vineyards, have been reconstructed into greenhouses that extend the growing season for tomatoes. Architect Keller Easterling has written about how the keys to this transformation can be found in the tectonics of the greenhouse system itself. Farmers, she explains, developed a standard method for connecting inexpensive translucent plastic sheeting to the vineyard frames. This simple detail allowed the system to proliferate across the entire peninsula. Instead of unifying the population, though, the spread of these greenhouses revealed rifts in subjectivity. The farmers, who are often Spanish nationals, employ immigrant workers from North Africa, across the Strait of Gibraltar. This situation has attracted the attention of right-wing neo-Nazi groups who have attacked the workers. To keep them safer, farmers house them in the covered fields, creating shelters out of the same building system that makes the greenhouses. Unlike Tsiolkovsky’s scheme, however, there is no unification of populations here, nor is there even negotiation between human comfort and plant comfort. As Easterling notes, “The citizen subjects of the plans are not the greenhouse workers, the human inhabitants of the agripole, but, rather, the tomatoes themselves.”¹⁴ The workers might live in the space, but it is made for the fruit.

The Brick Moon tells a different story about tectonics and political life. Hale foregrounds the fact that the Moon’s interior voids are conceptually subtracted, so that “we should with the least weight unite the greatest strength,” but he also speculates about the meaning behind the Moon’s removal of itself from Earthly life. In a sequel story, “Life on the Brick Moon,” one of the entrepreneur-narrators spends a moment imagining how nice life might be if the portions of Earth were, like the Brick Moon, as physically divided as they are socially. The period in which Hale was writing was one where, thanks to the technology of the telegraph, the steam train, and—with the Board of Longitude’s help—reliable shipping, the concerns of the formerly distant now seemed newly omnipresent and inescapable.

For Fedorov, as a cosmist, writing around the same time as Hale, this trend was an unconscious global movement toward the Common Task. After all, “sorrowing over disunity” was a “universal grief.” Like Tsiolkovsky and the occasion of the October Revolution, the rebellion that had just been put down in the American Civil War gave Hale cause to think, not about unification, but about secession—and its potential on a cataclysmic global, if not cosmic, scale. His narrator imagines:

I did have just the faintest feeling that IF—if if—it should prove that the world had blown up into six or eight pieces, and they had gone off into separate orbits, life would be vastly easier for all of us, on whichever bit we happened to be.

Gradually people and despatches came in, who said that they had parted company with some of the other islands and continents. But, as I say, on each piece the people not only weighed much less, but were much lighter-hearted, had less responsibility.

Now will you imagine the enthusiasm here, at Miss Hale’s school, when it should be announced that geography, in future, would be confined to the study of the region east of the Mississippi and west of the Atlantic,—the earth having parted at the seams so named. No more study of Italian, German, French, or Sclavonic,—the people speaking those languages being now in different orbits or other worlds. Imagine also the superior ease of the office-work of the A. B. C. F. M. and kindred societies, the duties of instruction and civilizing, of evangelizing in general, being reduced within so much narrower bounds. For you and me also, who cannot decide what Mr. Gladstone ought to do with the land tenure in Ireland, and who distress ourselves so much about it in conversation, what a satisfaction to know that Great Britain is flung off with one rate of movement, Ireland with another, and the Isle of Man with another, into space, with no more chance of meeting again than there is that you shall have the same hand at whist to-night that you had last night! Even Victoria would sleep easier, and I am sure Mr. Gladstone would.¹⁵

Some of the assumptions in both of stories remain the same. Both authors assume that Earth exists mostly as a stock of resources ready and waiting for human reengineering. The entrepreneurs in Hale’s story practically salivate when they find a piece of land rich with clay, rivers, and woods. They can’t wait to start ripping up the ground of one for bricks, damming the other for hydropower, and burning the third for kiln firing. “Alas! that one drop should be wasted of water that might move a world, although a small one!”¹⁶ They are willing to lie and cheat to make this territory theirs.

The colonization of space is preceded by, and proceeds alongside, the colonization of Earth. The points of intersection and divergence between the two stories and the two moons are illuminating. Hermetically sealed, Tsiolkovsky’s greenhouses are emblematic of the program of control and unity that generates and maintains them. Hale’s Moon, on the other hand, is open, both spatially and politically. The Brick Moon’s inhabitants have rejected the law books, and they’ve rejected the control and precision that their Moon’s role as indicator of longitude would have symbolized.

Paradoxically though, these two types of moon operate on culture in opposite ways than one might expect. Tsiolkovsky, in his story, stresses how the very strangeness of living in space would open up many questions about life on Earth that had previously been taken for granted. Hale’s characters, despite their rejection of political ties to the old planet, and despite the place in which they find themselves, quickly normalize their odd situation. They build a daily routine of work, ritual, and leisure; they sing, grow food, and even form families and have children. “There are disadvantages attached to their position; but there are also advantages. And what most of all tends to our accepting the situation is, that there is ‘nothing that we can do about it.’ ”¹⁷

The sharpest distinction here is that between technique and accident. Fedorov wrote about how his Common Task was, first and foremost, “a response to catastrophes affecting all humans.” And Tsiolkovsky’s book, in both rhetorical style and practical intent, is about the application of precise technique to plan for, and overcome, any possible accident. Fedorov’s hope—that “through the union of all the forces of reason, we would find it possible to redirect the irrational force which produces evil and death and all the resulting disasters”¹⁸—found narrative realization in Tsiolkovsky’s text. And so his characters proceed stepwise, from first physical principles to the large-scale occupation and inhabitation of orbital space. In this way, conscious being and rational procedure triumph over blind force. In Hale’s story, on the other hand, everything that can go wrong, does. The entrepreneurs’ pitch, despite their fancy rhetoric, fails to earn them sufficient funds; their construction project suffers from a potentially tragic undoing right before it’s finished; the Moon does not enter its intended orbit; and the attempt to send rescue supplies and books goes awry. The only thing the residents of the Moon have to say in the face of all of this failed conscious effort is “Go to thunder!” But not only does it all turn out fine in the end; the narrator also speculates on the potentially constructive power of still-greater catastrophes—nothing short of the breakup of the planet Earth itself. In Tsiolkovsky, the application of world-making techniques becomes one of Sassen’s capabilities, a new and dangerously productive, unpredictable capacity for change. In Hale, it is accidental world breaking—and the corresponding independence that comes along with it—that is demonstrated as the new capability, whose powerful potential is yet to be known.

Everything Feels

Hale’s Brick Moon, and its population, gains autonomy by way of catastrophe, whereas in the utilitarian imagination of Tsiolkovsky and Fedorov, any independence must be captured and recuperated to the benefit of the Common Task. In Tsiolkovsky’s writing, the impulse to recapture and utilize difference extends, like Fedorov’s ambitions, outward to the planets of the cosmos, and inward to the fundamental particles. In another pamphlet, Panpsychism, or Everything Feels, Tsiolkovsky outlines his beliefs about worlds, species, atomic particles, and the purpose of the universe: “It is difficult to imagine the mental world of future man, his security and comfort, his understanding of the universe, his quiet joy and confidence in serene, unending happiness. Not a single billionaire has anything like it now.” Since satisfaction and contentment with the way things are expands with the capacity for control, then it is imperative that humanity must do everything in its power to exercise that capacity.

This is the end to which space travel is the means. Tsiolkovsky writes, “Future technology will make it possible to overcome Earth’s gravity and travel through the entire solar system. All its planets will be visited and researched.” But only, it turns out, so they can be put to highest and best use possible: human use. “Imperfect worlds will be eliminated and replaced with our own population.” Tsiolkovsky doesn’t use the phrase “Common Task” in his writing, but the same kinds of methods and goals obtain here as in Fedorov’s project. Unlike Fedorov, he doesn’t deal explicitly with the bodily resurrection of all of the human dead who ever lived, but his is still an undertaking that privileges human experience—its preservation and extension—to the utmost.

In Panpsychism, Tsiolkovsky derives this position from a belief, as the pamphlet’s title reflects, that everything, down to the level of atomic particles, really does feel. He has the same fascination with the utility of fine dust that his teacher Fedorov did, but in this system, it is not necessary to resurrect the dead from the dust, because death is only the temporary dissolution of a collective particle existence into a set of more singular ones. For Tsiolkovsky, since humans have the best known capacity for feeling, and for feeling happy in particular, humans are the best thing that any feeling particle could aspire to be a part of. The consequences of this happy conclusion, though, are genocide and apocalypse: the literal unmaking of those worlds—even Earth—that blind chance has given to the nonhuman.¹⁹

So there is no need for anyone to fear death or pain. As long you are engaged in the process of taking over the entire cosmos, and eliminating all lesser forms of life, there is a greater chance that the particles that compose you will become part of a future joyful human. This through line in Tsiolkovsky’s thinking gives a more sinister undertone to his oft-quoted polemical observation (which is carved on his tombstone) that “this planet is the cradle of human mind, but one cannot spend all one’s life in a cradle.” Once the human mind, and human feeling, is able to crawl out of Earth’s cradle, it will only want to make more of itself, so long as it is unable to realize the value in the autonomous existence of anything different from it.

In the end, these models—Brick Moon and glass moon (and glass Earth)—are about the ends (the destruction) and the other ends (the purposes) of worlds. Everything about Tsiolkovsky’s glass moons in his story, and in his worldview—his planetary or cosmic imagination—is for intentional human use; if it’s not, it must be turned in that direction, or eliminated. Everything must be made to have a purpose, for a unified human race, like all of the specialized components in Tsiolkovsky’s orbital greenhouses that float, as the title of his science fiction novel has it, Beyond the Planet Earth. But at least one other world is possible.

The titular Brick Moon doesn’t have a purpose as such; it had been intended to serve as a navigation satellite, but that intention went sideways along with its orbit. The voids within it had been excavated simply to save on weight, materials, and cost, but they ended up becoming home to a polyglot population of immigrant laborers, farm animals, and one newly radicalized entrepreneur. And Hale’s Moon residents don’t work toward anything like a Common Task; rather, they more or less just hang out all day. The Brick Moon is an accidental affordance, a demonstration of other kinds of existence, on Earth and beyond it.

Hale’s planetary imagination, his vision of a kind of cosmic secessionism, is a very different one than Tsiolkovsky’s. Hale anticipates the possibility that a thousand worlds could blossom for a thousand perspectives, and a thousand ways of life. Though his is a counterfactual response to the American Civil War, not a critique of Tsiolkovsky’s Russian Revolution–era cosmic empire, the existence of the two stories points to the existence of at least two kinds of primary cosmic imaginations—one unitary, the other separatist.

The Monument to the Conquerors of Space in Moscow has a gleaming, seamless, Tsiolkovsky-esque rocket ship at its peak, not a dusty sphere made of bricks, but it might’ve. Edward Everett Hale does not extend his articulation and speculation as far as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, but we can imagine another cosmism built on his logic, on the capability of accident, catastrophe, disunity, and autonomy. Such a cosmism would uphold an imperative for common leisure, rather than common tasks—a future cosmos of Brick Moons rather than glass ones.