Erich Von Daniken - The Gold Of The Gods

6 - Rarities, Curiosities And Speculations
In the spring of 1973 Skylab, the first world space station and Wernher von Braun's
"favorite child," will leave Houston.
Whereas on all the previous Apollo flights every pound of weight was grudged-each
pound of payload needed" 2,360 pounds of fuel-Skylab will offer a degree of comfort on
its four-week journey through space that might have been invented by science-fiction
authors. It will be 45 feet long and 19 1/2 feet wide, and the astronauts will have a
workroom and a sleeping cabin at their disposal, not to mention a bathroom supplied
from a tank containing 600 gallons of water. The refrigerators hold a ton of selected
foodstuffs. The astronauts will not only be in permanent contact with Houston by radio
and television as before, they will also be able to type the results of their scientific
missions on 160 rolls of telex paper and telex them to earth. And so that the astronauts
do not have to wear the same clothes all the time, Skylab will have an extensive
wardrobe with 60 items of clothing.
What an outcry I should have heard if I had foretold Skylab for 1973 in Chariots of the
Gods? in 1968!
Pioneer F, the American spaceship which is to report on Jupiter, was the first man-made
flying object planned to leave our solar system. In March, 1972 it shot from the
launching pad at Cape Kennedy on a journey that might last 100,000,000 years. After
approximately 360 days, at the end of February, 1973, Pioneer F will pass the biggest
planet in our solar system, Jupiter (diameter 88,700 miles). With a mass 318 times as big
as the earth's Jupiter is bigger than all the other planets put together.
Then Pioneer F will leave our solar system.
The launching of the ship alone with a weight of nearly 600 pounds caused a sensation
in the technology of space travel. With a three-stage Atlas Centaur rocket it had to be
accelerated to 32,500 miles per hour so that the right ballistic curve- passing Jupiter with
extreme accuracy-could be reached. This feat has broken all speed records. Pioneer F has
an especially significant technical novelty on board. As sunlight in the vicinity of Jupiter
has only l/27th of the force it has on earth, it has not been possible to build solar batteries
for storing the sun's energy. For the first time a tiny atomic power-station will be
constructed for Pioneer F. The reactors will be driven by plutonium 238 dioxide and the
energy produced will suffice with its wattage to send radio signals to earth on the 28
quadrillion (=10 <15>) kilometer-long space flight.
The data that Pioneer F will supply, however important they may be at the beginning of
the age of inquiry and research into the outer planets, do not interest me as much as the
aluminum and gold plaquette that Pioneer F has on board. The American astrophysicist
and exobiologist Carl Sagan of Cornell University and Frank Drake of the United States
Astronomical Research Center persuaded NASA that a gold-covered aluminum plaque