Today science reaches many of its goals with seven- leagued boots. It took 112 years for photography to develop to the stage of a clear picture. The telephone was ready for use in 56 years and only 35 years of scientific research were needed to develop radio to the point of perfect reception. But the perfecting of radar took only 15 years. The stages of epoch-making discoveries and developments are getting shorter and shorter; black and white television was on view after 12 years' research and the construction of the first atom bomb took a mere 6 years. These are a few examples from 50 years of technical progress—magnificent and even a little frightening. Development will continue to reach its targets faster and faster. The next hundred years will realise the majority of mankind's eternal dreams.

The human spirit has made its way in the face of opposition and warnings. In the face of the archaic writing on the wall saying that water was the fishes' element and air the birds' element, man has conquered the regions which were not apparently intended for him. Man flies, against all the so-called laws of nature, and he lives under water for months in nuclear-powered submarines. Using his intelligence he has made himself wings and gills which his creator had not intended for him.

When Charles Lindbergh began his legendary flight, his goal was Paris; obviously he was not really concerned with getting to Paris; he wanted to demonstrate that man could fly the Atlantic alone and unharmed. The first goal of space travel is the moon. But what this new scientific-cum-technical project really wants to prove is that man can also master space.

So why space travel?

In only a few centuries our globe will be hopelessly and irremediably overpopulated. Statistics already calculate a world population of 8.7 milliards for the year 2050 Barely 200 years later it will be 50 milliards and then 335 men will have to live on one square kilometre. It doesn't bear thinking about! The tranquilliser-like theories of food from the sea or even cities on the floor of the sea will prove inefficient remedies against the population explosion sooner than their optimistic supporters would like to think. In the first six months of 1966 more than 10,000 people, who had tried in desperation to keep themselves alive by eating snails and plants, starved to death on the Indonesian island of Lombok. U Thant, Secretary-General of the UN, estimates the number of children in danger of dying of hunger in India at 20 millions, a figure which backs up Professor Mohler of Zurich's claim that hunger is reaching for world domination.

It has been proved that world food production does not keep pace with the growth of the population, in spite of the most modern technical aids and the large-scale use of chemical fertilisers. Thanks to chemistry, the present age also has birth control products at its disposal. But what use are they if the women in underdeveloped countries do not use them? For food production could only draw level with the population increase if it were possible to halve the birth rate in ten years, i.e. by 1980. Unfortunately I cannot believe in this rational solution, because the 'sound barrier' of prejudice, ostensibly due to ethical motives and religious laws, cannot be broken through as quickly as the calamity of overpopulation grows Is it more human or even divine to let millions of people die of hunger year after year than to save the poor creatures from being born?

Yet even if birth control were to win through one fine day, even if cultivable areas were enlarged and harvests multiplied by aids as yet unknown, even if fishing supplied much more food and fields of algae on the ocean bed provided nourishment, if all this and a lot more were to happen, it would all be only a postponement, a putting off of the evil day for about 100 years.

I am convinced that one day men will settle on Mars and cope with the climatic conditions just as the Eskimos would do if they were transplanted to Egypt. Planets, reached by gigantic spaceships, will be populated by our children's children; they will colonise new worlds, just as America and Australia were colonised in the comparative recent past That is why we must press on with space research.

We must bequeath our grandchildren a chance to survive. Every generation which neglects this duty is condemning the whole of mankind to death by starvation some time in the future.

It is no longer a question of abstract research which is only of interest to the scientist. And let me impress on anyone who does not feel that he is responsible for the future that the results of space research have already protected us from a third world war. Has not the threat of total annihilation prevented the great powers from settling opinions, challenges and conflicts with a major war? It is not necessary now for a Russian soldier to set foot on American soil in order to transform the USA into a desert, and no American soldier need ever die in Russia, because an atom bomb attack makes a country uninhabitable and barren owing to radioactivity. It may sound absurd, but the first intercontinental missiles guaranteed us comparative peace.

The view is occasionally put forward that the billions invested in space research would be better spent on assisting development. This view is wrong; the industrial nations do not give aid to underdeveloped countries purely on charitable or political grounds; they also give it, understandably enough, to open up new markets for their own industries. The aid that the underdeveloped countries require is irrelevant from a long-term point of view.

Approximately 1-6 milliard rats, each of which destroyed about 10 lb of food a year, were living in India in 1966. Yet the state dare not exterminate this plague, because the devout Indian protects rats. India also has a population of 80 million cows, which give no milk, cannot be harnessed as draught animals, or even be slaughtered. In a backward country whose development is hindered by so many religious taboos and laws, it will take many generations to sweep away all the life-endangering rites, customs and superstitions.

Here, too, the means of communication of the age of space travel—newspapers, radio, television—serve progress and enlightenment. The world has become smaller. We know and learn more about each other. But to arrive at the ultimate insight that national frontiers are a thing of the past, space travel was needed. The resulting increase in technology will spread the realisation that the insignificance of peoples and continents in the dimensions of the universe can only be a stimulus and incentive to co-operative work on space research. In every epoch mankind has needed an inspiriting watchword that enabled it to rise beyond the obvious problems to the apparently unattainable reality.

A quite considerable factor which provides an important argument for space research in the industrial age is the appearance of new branches of industry, in which hundreds of thousands of people who lost their jobs through rationalisation now earn their living. The 'space industry' has already outstripped the automobile and steel industries as a pace-setter in the market More than 4,000 new articles owe their existence to space research; they are virtually byproducts of research for a higher goal. These by-products have become an accepted part of everyday life without anyone giving a thought about their origin. Electronic calculating machines, mini-transmitters and mini receivers, transistors in radio and television sets, were discovered on the periphery of research, and so were the frying pans in which food does not stick, even without fat. Precision instruments in all aircraft, fully automatic ground control systems and automatic pilots, and last but not least the rapidly developed computer are parts of the space research that has so many persecutors, parts of a development programme, that also have an effect on the private lives of individuals. The things of which the layman has no idea are legion: new welding and lubricating processes in an absolute vacuum, photo-electric cells and new tiny sources of energy conquering infinite distances.