As might be expected, one thing that grates on me is when aerospace data, experience and history vanishes. This happens entirely too often… mostly in the form of documentation being fed into shredders, incinerators or landfill. But it also happens with events. Events that should have been documented, but appear not to have been. One such event was the 4th Conference on Planetology and Space Mission Planning.
The first three of these conferences were held in the late 60’s/early 70’s, and are documented in densely packed proceedings published by the New York Academy of Science. The 4th Conference was different. Instead of being held in a hotel or a conference center, the 4th Conference was held on the Holland America cruise ship S.S. Statendam. The cruise was from December 4 through 13, 1972, left from New York, and lurked seven miles off the coast of Cape Canaveral… where the lucky passengers got to watch the launch of Apollo 17.
The list of presenters/speakers at the conference is fairly spectacular. I’ve got a list of who was supposed to speak on what topic… and nothing else. Unlike the first three Conferences, no proceedings seems to have been published. According to one source, a book was put together… but never released. There was some sort of problem between the Conference organizers and the cruise line, but exactly what, and what happened with the proceedings, I’ve not yet been able to determine. The closest I’ve come to a possible hypothesis: as a financial enterprise, the conference was apparently a disaster of epic proportions. From Time magazine, December 25, 1972:
The problem: only about 40 people bought the premium tickets; the remainder were various “guests,” including travel agents, some Philadelphia clothing-store executives and 15 fashion editors. Estimated loss on the great idea: $250,000.
According to the book Katherine Anne Porter: the life of an artist by Darlene Harbour Unrue (found in fragments on Google Books), only 100 people in total paid for the cruise, and those 40 “premium tickets” were the tickets to the conference itself. It seems that staggeringly few people wanted to pay the $400 for the conference on top of the $400-$900 for the cruise itself.
I don’t know who ate those losses. I expect that there were probably lawsuits… there’s always a lawsuit when a business venture tanks. Lawsuits might have interfered with any planned Proceedings. Or the financial disaster might have drained whatever budget there may have been for such a thing. Additionally, the brochure advertising the cruise listed as speakers Arthur C. Clarke and Werner von Braun, both of whom failed to appear (cause unknown to me).
Here’s what I know about the conference, how it was broken down into seminars and who was to speak on what (and, yes, I’ll probably make some spelling errors). I got this years ago from one of the presenters; I have been unable to determine if the pages these lists came from were just a brochure themselves, or part of the full Proceedings. Note that while the first three Conferences were pretty dry, technical stuff, the bulk of these presentations seem to have been highly steeped in the philosophical:
CORNUCOPIA OF SPACE (1st seminar 6th December)
Bruce Hunt: Co-Chairman
Donald Banks: Co-Chairman
Isaac Asimov: What is a Cornucopia
Norman Mailer: Is there a Cornucopia out there?
Pandora Duncan: Planetary rover designs
Robert D Enzmann: Out of the Cornucopia
Richard Hoagland: The Space Shuttle
Ben Bova: Expanding the Cornucopia
Berguet Roberts: Last Lunar Flight Dreams
ECOLOGICAL NICHES
Krafft Ehricke: Co-Chairman Extraterrestrial Industries
Kenneth Franklin: Co-Chairman
Eric Burgess: Emerging Conscience of Man
Roger Caras: Earth the Teacher, Lessons learned from out 1st planet
Isaac Asimov: A heirarchy of niches from comets to Earthlike planets
Neil Ruzic: Development of the moon as a niche
Richard Sternbach: Experiment that failed
Don Davis: Paintings: Clones
PROPULSION INTELLIGENT MACHINES AND SOCIO-GENETIC CHANGE
Roger Caras: Co-chairman
Harry Stine: Co-chairman The Third industrial Revolution
Robert Heinlein: Genetic fitness, Social fitness, training & technology and communications
Marvin Minsky: Artificial intelligence
Sarah Meltzoff: Universals, Cultural viability, economic specialization
Janet Jepperson: Psychological barriers to full realization
Linda Sagan: Comment: Ultimate Machines
Krafft Ehricke: Comment: Ultimate Machines
ENERGY AND PROPULSION
Donald Banks: Co-Chairman Energy
Ben Bova: Co-Chairman
Werner Rambauske: Observation of the Universe
Brude hunt: Propulsion
Robin Anderson: Plowshare: Big guns for the benefit of the people
Fred Pohl: The shape of shadows from the future
Carl Sagan: Interstellar probes and Pioneer 10
Neil Ruzic: Human acquisition of Moon and its effects on war and peace
THE GRAND DESIGN
Gillet Griffin: Co-chairman
Eric Burgess: of Mankind but no longer Men
Cassandra Boell: Space states and the howling of beasts
Harry Stine: Comment: Ultimate Machine
Robert D. Enzmann: Statement of grand design, & galactic fertile crescent
Robert Heinlein: The grand design
Theodore Sturgeon: Communications, The Cold Equations, and the grand design
Fred Pohl: Star flight and relativistic twins “lost in space”
Fred Ordway: Use of satellite systems for education
Marvin Minsky: Artificial intelligence and the grand design, have we nurtured “The Descent of Machines?”
Richard Sternbach: Paintings: Mankinds’ grand design
SCIENCE, ART, COMMUNICATION, AND COSMOLOGY
Neil Ruzic: Co-chairman
Eric Burgess: Co-chairman
Donald Burgy: Order theory: an art exhibit in the clipper room
Gillett Griffin: Migrations of men and their art
Isaac Asimov: stellar types and organic evolution
Robert D Enzmann: Force= dp/dt (F=/ma) and e=hv(1-d/D) That is an intellectual revolution
Ben Bova: galaxies and quasars
Norman Mailer: Revolutionaries of science and technology
Donald Davis: Paintings: Cupules and stick charts
POST SYMPOSIUM COLLOQUIUM
REVOLUTIONARY
POST SYMPOSIUM
COLLOQUIUM
GRAND DESIGN
AND
PHYSICS
—————
Now, a lot of the topics… I don’t even know what they hell they’re talking about. Presumably the “Grand Design” was some agreed-upon concept prior to the conference, but I’ve no idea what it is other than a hundh it was something about interstellar colonization.
There were a great many events in history that I’d like to have a time machine and a video camera for (along with body armor, adequate weaponry and a complete series of vacinations). This is one of those. Not so much because we can look back on this event as one of those “and this is when it all began” moments… because it’s not. It seems to have quite effectively vanished down the memory hole, with little to no historical impact (although some references I found online suggest that this gathering was the start of the modern pro-space movement). No, I want to go back and record this… just to find out what the hell actually happened.
If you happen to know one of the speakers listed here, I’d certainly be interested in anything they have to say on this topic. I’d be thrilled if they say somethign like “Yeah, I got a copy of the Proceedings, let me dig it up.”
I used to listen to a radio talk show here in Chicago called Coast to Coast AM with George Noory who did have Richard Hoagland on his show
once in a while. The station that it was on was WLS 890 AM here in
Chicago and was on different stations in other states. The best advice I
can give you is to just listen to the show and get their call-in number and
have George Noory contact him for you. The show comes on between 12:00 am and 2:00 am CST here in Chicago. Good Luck.
I attended the cruise and was involved in preparations for the event. I recall the ‘Grand Design’ meaning a robust expansion of Humanity to space, including gigantic manned starships sending expeditions to nearby systems. The Orion nuclear pulse ship designs were the ancestors of these migratory behemoths, described in an article by G. Harry Stine in the October 1973 issue of Analog magazine. The cover of that issue is a Rick Sternbach painting of the Enzmann Starship, named for Robert Duncan Enzmann, primary designer and one of the organizers of the conference. Sternbach was involved in the cruise preparations before me, together we also made numerous hand painted nametags for the illustrious guests.
Alas, many of the grand plans of a movie, a publication and the presence of a few hoped for guests fell through. Still it was a gathering of visionaries run by visionaries and It would be a pity if all the presentations made in the spirit of those times were lost to history.
Belated thank you, Don, for the above info. A movie and publication about this event would of been a must have.
Don, Many years later I see this, now producing and maintaining the Enzmann Starship blog, and publishing much of the great Doc E’s work. We are in collaboration with a video team to produce his life’s legacy. Would love to have you along. We have digitized the paintings you and he did.
> the spirit of those times
Slightly before my time, but I gather that by 1972, the “spirit of the times,” at least as far as space was concerned, had largely fallen into “meh.” Hell, it looks like the public stopped giving a damn around about Apollo 12 or so… we’d run the race, now who cares what happens next.
$1000 is a pretty stout chunk of change *today* to attend a conference; must’ve been far bigger in 1972. Still, a grand total of only forty people on the planet wanted to hear the speakers *and* watch Apollo 17 launch from a cruise ship? That sounds… remarkably low. Was there terrible advertising for it, perhaps? Was it in conflict with some *other* major space launch that week? Or had people really given up caring *that* *much,* *that* *fast?*
Asimov wrote an account of the cruise, “The Cruise and I”, which appeared in the July 1973 F & SF magazine.
> This conference, held in December of 1972 ona cruise ship, is
> virtually unknown. And while it had some real luminaries on hand
> (Sagan, Ehricke, Heinlein, Asimov, Minsky, etc.), it was apparently
> something of a disaster.
>
> I’ve put together what I know of it here:
> http://up-ship.com/blog/blog/?p=6879
Oh God, to see all those giant egos in one room at one time; it must have really been something. 😉
$300 in 1972 that must be $1500 in today value…
> July 1973 F & SF magazine
I will hve to try to find that.
> $300 in 1972 that must be $1500 in today value…
http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
1972: $300
2010: $1565
So the minimum $900 for the cruise & conference would be about $4694 today. Yeah, that’s kinda harsh.
So, was there a 5th conference?
Rick Sternbach is still around. His website has his contact info on it.
http://www.ricksternbach.com/
Rick Sternbach: We were 7-9 miles from the launch pad, the Saturn V went up in brilliant silence, and as it arced over the Atlantic, we caught the roar. Afterwards, Hugh Downs shook his head in disbelief; “But it took so long for the sound to get here!”
A Mr. Gosper, accompanying Marvin Minsky on the cruise, relayed his impressions of the launch in the book review excerpt seen here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=mShXzzKtpmEC&pg=PA145&lpg=PA145&dq=apollo+17+launch+cruise&source=bl&ots=UK2eoHEEEd&sig=eWCZNh5QLtYqLvpv2ePEZ_g6Kz8&hl=en&ei=6bd0TM_0AommnQeukaGjDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CDgQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=apollo%2017%20launch%20cruise&f=false
Sorry about the long URL.
another reference in print to the event: Hendrik Hertzberg, The Talk of the Town, “Launch,” The New Yorker, December 30, 1972, p. 21
I suspect that a similar cruise-conference (or just a conference on dry land), held on the occasion of something similarly momentous, and under the right management, could be truly historic. Heading back to the moon? The first crewed expedition to Mars? The *idea* of seeing Apollo 17 off with the cruise-conference was terrific; perhaps it needed a great deal more professional promotion to get the word out, which today I’m sure would be a lot easier to accomplish. A similar cruise to see Comet Kohoutek the very next year was also managed by Hoagland, this time on the Queen Elizabeth II. I don’t suppose many people heard about that one, either, and Kohoutek turned out to be a bust compared to Comet West, Hyakutake, and Hale-Bopp.
Glad to see this voyage is getting some exposure. I featured the Statendam cruise in the Prologue to a book I just co-authored with Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom, Realizing Tomorrow, the Path to Private Space Flight. The book will appear in the spring from the University of Nebraska Press. Here’s the preliminay announcement Web page from the Press http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Realizing-Tomorrow,674769.aspx although they don’t yet have any description of the book.
A graduate student in 1972, I lacked the resources to sign on for the cruise. So, I interviewed Don Davis, Rick Sternbach, and Ben Bova and relied upon some of the resources mentioned here to tell the story.
Rick Sternbach wrote:
“I suspect that a similar cruise-conference (or just a conference on dry land), held on the occasion of something similarly momentous, and under the right management, could be truly historic. Heading back to the moon? The first crewed expedition to Mars? The *idea* of seeing Apollo 17 off with the cruise-conference was terrific”
It probably would have been better from a tactical point of view for the cruise to watch the launch of Apollo 11 – the first planned to take people to land on the Moon – than Apollo 17, which was already known at the time to be the last Apollo flight to the Moon, with no obvious follow-up in the near future.
More like showing up for a wake than a birthday party.
I do get a kick out of Norman Mailer being there.
They should have brought along Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley also, so that some sort of three-way NYC hissy fight could have occurred:
“You swine!”
“You queer!”
“You Nazi!”
Next thing you know, drinks are getting thrown in _everyone’s_ faces, like a scaled-up version of “The Caine Mutiny” movie.
Asimov would have _loved_ this. 😀
For real fun of course, Asimov sneaks up behind Pohl in the melee, pours a martini over his head, and then tells him Heinlein did that – due to Pohl’s membership in the Young Communist League back in the 1930’s. 😀
Greetings:
My local research libarian who reads my published work on aviation-aerospace history, recently informed me that he learned that the Government is slowly removing information (not specified) from the Internet, and that historical data is slowly becoming difficult to obtain.
My encounters with such are that NASA requests were blown off…either they have new-dumb employees who are unable to research a designated NASA Publication no less, or they are underneworders to not search out the requested Docs. Or…they are simply not intelligent enough to dig into the files to lcoate a requested file or publication…perhaps all of the above.
I have been turned down three times on obtaining English translations of Russian magazine articles, as though they don’t know what I’m talking about.
Like Duh…the Government is now so thoroughly paranoid it is doing the “Sufi-spin.”
One needs to peruse the garage sales, as many engineers, wind tunnel model builders, technicians, and production line people actually collected some material concerning projects they worked on back when.
Many did not, but still…there are treasures out there.
later
David the writer
It may not be just NASA that’s losing its history. A few years ago I contacted the Republic Aviation Museum (or what was called something like that) to find patent numbers of a couple of gadgets. They told me they don’t keep old stuff, and that I should ask NASA.
Why exactly should NASA be responsible for getting you English translations of Russian magazine articles?
That’s a bit outside their purview.
NASA translates a lot of stuff. The translated stuff I have has report numbers that start with TT-F on the NASA tech reports website.
Dave, try the DoD and/or AF instead. They’re the one’s that did the Russian to English translating that gave us Stealth.
You might try over at DTIC online; I just did a search for Russian articles over there, and they have translations of quite a few (as in 15,000+):
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/index.html
[…] to Up Ship, Katherine Anne Porter’s biographer reports only 100 people in total paid for the cruise, and […]
Over at *File 770*, five years later, Mike Glyer offers a rundown of this legendary cruise, acknowledging Scott as a source. Mike has found a half-hour documentary about the cruise on Youtube.
On the subject of suppression of systems studies and the space projects, you are correct. They were. Visit: http://enzmannstarship.blogspot.com/ – a blog where I am uploading Doc E’s archives regarding space travel and starships. I have papers outlining the fourth conference, however the NYAS did not publish a fourth book that I can find. We have known and worked with Enzmann for decades. The cruise for Apollo surely did take place and I have uploaded the papers and programs from that event. Your source of information would not be Hoagland or Sagan perhaps? Sternbach was there. Enzmann would have had no problem absorbing any financial loss from his conferences and would have considered them well worth the investment. To my knowledge there were no lawsuits. The cruise was a success in the eyes of other attenders. Be assured that my publicity and publication effort is an ongoing project, and I am constantly searching for references to Enzmann online. White Knight Studio owns the the enormous Enzmann Archives and they are our most treasured resource – M Snyder, editor and publisher of the Enzmann material. Any material posted on The Enzmann Starship is copyrighted, ask permission and give credit for its use please.
The Grand Design was what aerospace engineers and physicists like Dr. Enzmann envisioned as a progressive space program moved forward. Benefits to humanity on earth abounded, the program of exploration itself had specific layers that would put in place human ability to colonize. The stages of the rockets were to be rebuilt into orbiting stations, with one on the moon, not jettisoned into oblivion as they were. Research and development for life in space would have brought many blessings to those on earth. These were rejected when the moratorium on systems development of any kind came down upon humanity. see Enzmannstarship.com for Why Starships Now, and read a summary of what the Grand Design should have been. Written by Doc E in the 1980s. He is still alive, and as a colleague, I am publishing all his work. The Enzmann Starship would have put us on mars decades ago….
Enzmann and I have been friends since the 1980s. On his blog, I have posted many things from the Apollo cruise, as well as from the prior three conferences hosted by the New York Academy of Sciences. All copyrighted, please give credit to the blog or to Enzmann if you repost.