The Moon - or bust!

The Cannonball Approach to Space Travel
By Morten Monrad Pedersen

Space travel is impossible. According to Mark Peeters, that is. Mark Peeters is the author of this website , where he claims that it is not possible to make an object move so fast that it escapes Earth's gravitation. Peeters does not hide his light under a bushel:

"I will give all my money (and even my life) to the first person who knows a scientific publication, f.i. in PHYSICAL REVIEW, that contradicts the current 28.800km/hr-limit."

How can one not look into a claim like that?

The author of the site calls himself Mark Peeters, but according to this that is an alias. Peeters' argument consists of two parts:

1. No object weighing 1 kg or more has ever moved with a greater speed than 4,000 km/h.
2. Speeds of at least 28,000 km/h are required for space travel.

Before getting started I would like to note that Peeters' article is brief and a bit ambiguous, therefore I tried to look for other sources about Peeters and his ideas. On Peeters own homepage I found a cutting from a news group , where a guy who had apparently talked to Peeters wrote about his ideas. I can't know whether this guys presentation of Peeters' ideas are correct, but since it's on Peeters' homepage and since it seems to fit well with his article, I hope it's reasonably correct, but the quotes I use from that source should be treated with some caution.

To back up my arguments in this article I have performed some calculations. To increase the readability of the article I have chosen not to present the calculations directly in the article. Instead I have placed them in an appendix (TODO link til appendiks).

Current Maximum Velocities

Peeters start out by looking at the relationship between mass and maximum velocity. In this connection he presents a table with data linking mass to maximum speed currently attained for that mass.

The first entry claim that the mass of a Photon is 0.0...1. I don't know how many zeroes there are supposed to be in that mass, but it doesn't really matter, because photons have no mass (see The Standard Model , Physical Constants or Ask a High Energy Astronomer ), and according to the theory of relativity, movement at the speed of light is impossible for objects having a non-zero rest mass (see FAQ about Special Relativity or Ask A High Energy Astronomer ).

The link to Physics News in the fourth entry in the table contains the following text:

"A HYPERVELOCITY LAUNCHER has accelerated a quarter-inch disk of metal to a velocity of 15.8 km/sec, or about 36,000 miles per hour, a record for a macroscopic object. For comparison, the Space Shuttle's orbit velocity is 17,500 mph, while the velocity for total escape from the Earth is 25,000 mph."

17,500 mph is roughly equivalent to 28000 km/h, which contradicts the assertion that Peeters make in the last entry in the table, which states that no object of 1 kg or more has travelled with a velocity of more than 4000 km/h. This means that the web page, which Peeters use as documentation support one of his irrelevant assertions, but contradicts his main argument. To me this looks like a clear indication that Peeters accept supporting evidence, but ignores contradictory evidence even when both types of evidence come from the same source.

The last four entries of the table deal with masses from 2 g to 1 kg, and all four of them contain a link as support, however all four links are broken.

Bye Bye Blackbird

Following the table we find the following paragraph, where Peeters tries to argue that the maximum velocity of a rocket is lower than that of a bullet in an airless tube:

"Since there is more energy and momentum lost during 1000 seconds (a ballistic rocket), than in the case of 0.001 second (a bullet), and since the laws of physics are the same, i.e. the conservation of energy and momentum, the current maximum velocity of a rocket is LESS than the current maximum velocity of a bullet in an airless tube. Theoretically, it is possible to get any velocity by the use of multi-stages, but experimentally, NOT one rocket has already had more speed than the maximum velocity of a bullet in airless tube."

The assertion that "the current maximum velocity of a rocket is LESS than the current maximum velocity of a bullet in an airless tube" is without any supporting evidence, and therefore we can hardly consider it dooming evidence for space travel.

Peeters goes on to consider speed limits for objects travelling at the surface of the Earth and for airplanes. He states that

"In the air and at ground-level, the highest speed is 1.190km/hr . High in the sky and only at the equator and only with a flight to the west, airplanes can get 2.860km/hr and nothing more , due to the rotation of the earth (40.000km in 24 hours = 1.666km/hr).
This is the reason why the Concorde is NOT supersonic from NY to Paris."

speed record

Nova

This means that the link, which Peeters use as documentation, supports the assertion that fighter planes currently doesn't fly faster than 2,860 km/h, but it doesn't support his assertion that 2860 km/h is the speed limit for all planes, because the Blackbird breaks the limit.

Furthermore I fail to see why the speed of fighter planes are proof of anything concerning space travel - after all the requirements of a fighter plane is quite different from the requirements of a space rocket. How often do fighter planes need to transport astronauts to the Moon? And how often are space rockets involved in dogfights?

The speed 1,190 km/h, which Peeters mentions as the speed limit at ground level, could very well be the speed of sound (there is no fixed value for the speed of sound, since it depends on several parameters), and this fits well with the following quote from the guy , I mentioned in the introduction, who apparently has talked with Peeters:

"One of the basic elements of Mark Peeters theory is the impossibility of 'breaking through the sound barrier'"

ThrustSCC

BBC

USAF fact sheet 96-03

Scientific American

The speed limit of 2,860 for planes going west seem to be the sum of the speed of sound and Earth's rotation speed, and this fits with the following quote about Peeters' theories taken from the same source as the quote above:

A plane can never fly faster than 340 m/s or 1200 km/h at sea level. (All of you AngloSaxons, please convert these figures to the appropriate units..). You'll find out when asking an air company about flight times Europe - U.S. The air at the Earth surface rotates along with the= ground (that's one full tour in 24 hrs). But higher air layers move slower, and eventually the top layers hang perfectly still. This means there's a constant "draft" high above the ground; an aeroplane can take advan- tage from this by climbing high enough. Then, it still flies no faster than the speed of sound, relative to the air surrounding it. But to an observer at sea level, it does seem to break the barrier.... Note that this effect will only work in one direction - and that's why a transatlantic flight can take substantially more time in one direction than the other.

The sources I linked to above (USAF fact sheet 96-03, Scientific American, ThrustSCC and BBC) deals with planes and a car creating sonic booms, and they can only be created if the planes fly "faster than the speed of sound, relative to the air surrounding" them, thus contradicting Peeters claim.

Additionally the claim that "a transatlantic flight can take substantially more time in one direction than the other" seems ludicrous - just check the facts with any airline doing transatlantic flights.

Missing Links

So far I have discussed two of the links that Peeters use as documentation. The first one (Physics News) turned out to seem to support a claim he made, but the claim was not really relevant to space travel, and much worse it also contained information that were contradictory to his claims.

The second link (Fighter Planes ) didn't support what he claimed it supported.

All the other links in the article are broken. This is an unfortunate, but unavoidable problem with using web pages as documentation, so Peeters can't really be faulted for that, but when the links that does work, doesn't support him, then I find it hard to give him the benefit of doubt with the broken links.

The Cannonball Approach to Space Travel

The above has dealt with the first part of Peeters' article, where he tries to argue that no object of mass larger than 1 kg has travelled faster than 4,000 km/h. Now I will go on to the second part of his article, where he attempts to prove that space travel requires speeds of at least 28,000 km/h.

To argue this he tries to compute the speed required to overcome the tug of Earth's gravity (this speed is called the escape velocity). As can be seen from the following quote he computes this speed, by considering thrown objects:

"When you throw away a projectile, under an angle of 45 degrees, it will travel some distance before falling...So I asked myself...Is there a simple relation between the initial velocity and the realised distance?"

To get an idea of roughly how long time a space rocket keeps firing its thrusters, I contacted a friend of mine who works for the European Space Agency. He dug out some information for me, and as an example we can look at flight 145 of an Ariane 5 rocket. In this flight the main stage of the rocket burned for nearly half an hour. When we compare this with a projectile that is accelerated for only a fraction of a second, we see that Peeters' attempts to use projectiles as models for space rockets is more or less useless for computing escape velocity.

That he has this cannonball view of space travel is supported by a quote given earlier:

"Since there is more energy and momentum lost during 1000 seconds (a ballistic rocket), than in the case of 0.001 second (a bullet)"

It is also supported by this quote:

"As far as I've been able to determine, Mark Peeter's delusions all come from a single core-misunderstanding. He seems to think that the only way to get something into space, is to shoot it like a canonball."

Peeters thinks that this shows that a speed of around 8,000 m/s (roughly 28,000 km/h) is a requirement for space travel, and since he thinks he has established that no heavy object has reached a speed in excess of 4,000 km/h, he thinks that he has proven that space travel is impossible. Peeters argument seems strange to me, for a number of reasons:

1. Space rockets aren't 'thrown' at an angle of 45 degrees - they are fired vertically and they provide their own propulsion.
2. The computations used by Peeters seem to be the standard computations used for computing throwing distances (TODO link til appendiks). Such computations however assume that the Earth is flat and that the gravitation is of uniform direction and magnitude. These assumptions are reasonable for short throwing distances, but when we deal with distances as long as the radius of the Earth, they seem quite wrong.
3. An object that has travelled a bit longer 'horizontally' than the radius of the Earth is still affected by the Earth's gravitation. Peeters seem to believe that the Earth is flat and if you go beyond its edge, you will fall of into space.

"General Physics" by Sternheim and Kane

Furthermore Peeters should have noticed that something was wrong with his escape velocity computations, since one of the sources he use as documentation includes the following statement:

"the velocity for total escape from the Earth is 25,000 mph"

Even if Peeters' escape velocity computations had been correct, they would have been irrelevant, because as mentioned above rockets keep accelerating for a long time. You could actually escape the Earth with a speed of 1 m/s (or any other speed), you would just have to keep your propulsion system running for a very long time.

Satellites and the AWACS conspiracy

If Peeters is right then the International Space Station and satellites aren't possible, because their orbital speeds has to be much larger than the speed limit that Peeters sets for such large objects. The guy that I mentioned before who has met Peeters supports that Peeters denies the existence of satellites. According to him Peeters has stated something along the lines of this:

"Human-made satellites don't exist, because flying into space to launch them is impossible. Believe it or not, all the data transmission that is now being allegedly done by satellites, actually happens with the aid of AWACS airplanes [AWACS planes are planes that perform surveillance and communications work], which cover the whole Earth surface in a network of dozens of planes. They stay up in the air for 24 hours a day, and get a tank fill regularly from a special aircraft."

Meade Instruments Corporation

BBC

Conclusion

This article has attempted to show that Peeters claim is unsupported, he gets the facts wrong, he ignores contrary information in the references he use, and he misunderstands the physics involved in space travel.

I have tried to contact Peeters via three different email addresses that I found on the web, but none of them worked. If you know how to contact Peeters or has any comments to this article then I would appreciate it, if you would contact me.