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Mike Gruntman
ISBN-10:
1-4196-7085-5
84 pages with 24 photos
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Mike Gruntman
ISBN-10:
1-4196-7085-5
84 pages with 24 photos
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Books on history of rocketry and space
Space: From Firecrackers to Interstellar Flight (webcast)
Mike Gruntman
From Astronautics to Cosmonautics, 2007
Chapter 1. Astronautics Was the First
Chapter 2. Dreams about Space and Communism - this web site
Chapter 3. REP-Hirsch Encouragement Award
Chapter 5. Socialism Bites Back
Chapter 2. Dreams about Space
and Communism
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The story of the word cosmonautics is a story about a largely forgotten space pioneer. Step back in time to France in the late 1920s and meet a young Polish Jew Ary J. Sternfeld, 1905–1980.
Ary was born in a Polish town Sieradz. He got interested in space travel already as a teenager. After graduating from a gymnasium (high school) in the industrial Polish city of Lodz, he enrolled in the Jagiellonian University in Krakow in 1923. One year later, Sternfeld went to France to study mechanical engineering at the University of Nancy. He graduated in 1927.
A successful career of a mechanical designer and engineer did not satisfy Sternfeld. He remained fascinated with the ideas of space travel. Consequently, Sternfeld enrolled in a graduate program at the Sorbonne University in Paris, staying there for three years from 1928 to 1930. Unfortunately for Ary, his science advisors declined his proposal to write a dissertation about interplanetary flight. Sternfeld disagreed and left the Sorbonne. He did want to study spaceflight. As Sternfeld explained it later,
A dream of building a spaceship brought me [first] to the Jagiellonian University (Krakow), then to the Institute of Mechanics of the University of Nancy, and then to the Sorbonne [University]. Draft pages of the future book “Introduction to Cosmonautics” [published later in 1937] multiplied. But these pages had not, as I thought about it, become my [doctoral] dissertation on future space flights. My official [science] advisors … refused to approve such a fantastic topic [of spaceflight] for the dissertation. They suggested concentrating instead on theory of metal cutting (since I had designed by that time a couple specialized mechanisms for machining wood), offering an increased stipend and unlimited time for completing the dissertation. But I declined these offers and decided to devote my effort to cosmonautics and to continue my work in this direction relying on myself ... (Shternfel’d 1981, 134–135)
Sternfeld published his first two articles about space travel, titled “Utopie d’hier, possibilité d’aujourd’hui” (“Utopia Today, Possibility Tomorrow”), on 19 August and 2 September 1930 (Rolin 1930a,b). The subtitle of the articles asked, “Is it possible to go from the Earth to other planets?” Esnault-Pelterie had introduced the word astronautics two years earlier in 1928. The word had been widely accepted and Sternfeld used it four times.
Sternfeld’s first articles appeared in L’Humanité, the official newspaper of the French Communist Party. As early as high school, Sternfeld became involved in socialist movement. His elder sisters, especially a member of the Polish Communist Party Franka, influenced young Ary. Ary’s future wife, Gustava, was also an active member of the Polish Section of the French Communist Party (Prishchepa and Dronova 1981, 19, 30).
Fig. 2.1. Ary J. Sternfeld in France in 1932. Photo courtesy of Polytechnic Museum, Moscow. Figures and photographs are not shown here. Please see the print version of the book.
Sternfeld met in France and married Gustava Erlich, a schoolmate of his sisters in Lodz. Gustava studied psychology and teaching French language to foreigners at the Sorbonne University. Her knowledge of French would become handy later when her private language lessons helped the family to survive hardships in the Soviet Union.
Fig. 2.2. Ary J. Sternfeld with his wife Gustava in Paris, France, in 1934. Ary met Gustava in Paris where she studied teaching of French language to foreigners. She would polish the language of Ary’s publications in French. Photo courtesy of Polytechnic Museum, Moscow. Figures and photographs are not shown here. Please see the print version of the book.
Sternfeld’s articles in L’Humanité appeared under a French sounding name of “engineer L. Rolin,” concealing the identity of the author. It is possible that Ary coined the penname by transposing the letters in the name of a famous Frenchman René Lorin. Lorin studied applications of jet propulsion in aviation since 1907 and invented the ramjet in 1913. Sternfeld was well aware of René Lorin and his work (Sternfeld 1935).
Desire to immigrate to the Soviet Union
Already in 1929 I petitioned the office of the Soviet Trade Representative in Paris about my desire to relocate to the Soviet Union. However, my petition went unanswered. In July-August 1932 I traveled to Moscow to present the design of my robot. In 1934, I resumed my petition to relocate to the USSR. Since July 1935 … I have been living in Moscow and I am a Soviet citizen since September 1936.
From autobiography submitted by A.J. Sternfeld with his letter to the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR M.I. Kalinin, May 1944 (Shternfel’d 2002b, 30)
Sternfeld’s publications in L’Humanité described the rocket as the means of space travel. He wrote about major contributions to the concept of rocketry and spaceflight by Robert Esnault-Pelterie, Robert H. Goddard, Hermann Oberth, and Walter Hohmann. He especially credited the Russian Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky for developing the “scientific foundation” of the new field. Sternfeld first exchanged letters with Tsiolkovsky in June 1930 (Prishchepa and Dronova 1981, 36). He included a photograph of Tsiolkovsky in his article and suggested that a “justified title” for him was “a father of the astronautical science.”
Publicizing achievements of Russian space pioneers directly contributed to propaganda by communists and their fellow-travelers, who projected an appealing humane image of the Soviet Union in the West. Sternfeld concluded his second article in L’Humanité as follows,
Although the theoretical studies of the problem of interplanetary navigation are already sufficiently advanced, the practical solution of the problem still requires much research and many experiments, which would carry enormous expenditures. Lack of immediate profit makes a capitalist [commercial] company completely uninterested in this major problem [of interplanetary navigation]. It is known in fact that it is the socialist society of tomorrow that will be the heir of the scientific and industrial progress. It will be the socialist society that will master space. (Rolin 1930b)
By the early 1930s, the socialist society of the Soviet Union had exterminated millions of people in an unmatched feat of social engineering. Many more would perish — with a cheerful support of Western leftists — in the following years. Not only political opponents but also millions of other men, women, and children belonging to unwanted groups were murdered, tortured, banished, and confined to concentration camps where many died from maltreatment, starvation, overwork, and savage conditions (Courtois et al. 1999). As the U.S. Senate described it factually, “Communism has claimed the lives of more than 100,000,000 people in less than 100 years” (United States Senate 2005). Sternfeld became one of many Westerners who changed his life to support this social experiment. He himself would be cruelly punished by socialism.
Ary’s ideological and emotional links to the beloved socialist paradise further solidified in 1932, when he visited Moscow for one month (Prishchepa and Dronova 1981, 32; Shternfel’d 1981, 138). The French Communist Party recommended his design of a robot to the Soviet Ministry of Heavy Industry. For one month Sternfeld lived and worked in a luxurious hotel, Savoi (Savoy), in downtown Moscow. A team of assigned Soviet designers and draftsmen worked with Ary on blueprints of his invention. Sternfeld later described the effect of this trip to Moscow,
I felt such a captivating atmosphere of building the new [communist] world during this my trip to the USSR. Despite food rationing in the Soviet Union in those years, despite poorly dressed people in the streets, and [despite that] Moscow with its long lines [in stores] produced unhappy impression compared to fake glamour of Western capitals, all that could not dissuade me from the decision to move [relocate] to the USSR in order to live and work there. (Shternfel’d 1981, 138)
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