Nick Smith interviews fine art photographer Stuart Klipper in ‘Outdoor Photography’ magazine

The art of outdoors

Stuart Klipper is an American fine artist who shoots the world mostly through a Linhof Technorama 617. He tells Nick Smith about his search for the ‘wide-field’

New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Library of Congress, The National Museum of American Art… just a few of the many organisations to have exhibited or collected Stuart Klipper’s photography.

An American fine art photographer with an international reputation, Klipper has spent decades travelling the planet in order to ‘seek out order’. His vision is expressed through a battered old Linhof Technorama 617 that he keeps in a battered old gadget bag. He wears rings of turquoise, sapphire and Navajo silver on every finger. He says the weight of the rings ‘helps to keep my trim on an even keel.’

Stuart Klipper doesn’t take photographs. He prefers to use the word ‘make’ in the way that an artist makes art. His images are panoramas in the 617 format, which he shoots on film. When asked why he prefers the ‘wide-field’ format he simply says ‘because it’s wider’. Sometimes he shoots verticals, but most of the pictures – from North Pole to South Pole and (even rarer) all 50 states of America – are horizontal panoramas.

Nick Smith: When did you first realise you going to become a photographer?

Stuart Klipper: Photography was a hobby among many. I went to college at University of Michigan and I read [John Van Druton’s] ‘I am a camera’. I realised I had a predisposition to seek out some sort of order. I realised I am a camera and so I decided to use one.

NS: What was your first camera?

SK: My dad documented my life with excess beyond even a presidential documentary photographer. Cameras were everywhere, mostly Kodak. My first real camera I got at 13 with my Bah Mitzvah money, a Rolleicord twin lens reflex.

NS: What formal training do you have?

SK: I’m pretty much an autodidact, but I hung around after my degree and took a few courses in the art school there: Phil Davies taught a very technical introduction to photography. There was another fellow that taught the aesthetics and design end of the spectrum.

NS:  How important is it to specialise?

SK: Of all the things I’ve been called in life one of the things I enjoy most is ‘a generalist’. I look at everything with equanimity. I don’t think anything is intrinsically more special than anything else. Everything’s fair game.

NS: What is the best assignment you’ve been on?

SK: Give me some assignments please. About a dozen years ago someone from the New York Times commissioned me to shoot a story about a small city in South Dakota that was remarkably economically successful. I was just going around town photographing street scenes.

NS: What’s the worst thing about being a professional photographer?

SK: You travel a lot and you mostly travel alone. There are certain aspects of the unsought solitude that can get to you. It’s finally started to become a bit corrosive, but you do your work no matter what.

NS: Film of digital why?

SK: I’m not a Luddite and I’m not old fashioned. Film is what the Linhof uses. A consignment of film arrived recently and the rolls all tumbled out. I was surprised by the feeling of looking at all these photographs waiting to be made.

NS: What’s the most important thing you’ve learned from another photographer?

SK: The two photographers that sum it up in one sentence are Ansell Adams and Garry Winogrand. For over 30 years I’ve been a close friend of Lee Friedlander. We hardly ever talk about photography, but there is something osmotic coming through about how to live life as a photographer.

NS: What does photography mean to you?

SK: I have an extremely broad range of interest, and if there is one place where I can synthesise what I know about the world it’s through photography. It’s the most important way of getting a handle on the world, how we all can.

NS: What makes a great photograph?

SK: Photography isn’t about photography; it’s about the world. I just make pictures. There are no rules. Find your own vocabulary.

Klipper’s 5 Golden rules

1)   Find your own vocabulary

2)   Photography isn’t about photography

3)   Know who came before you and what they did

4)   Your equipment is only the toolbox

5)   There are no rules

Klipper’s gear

Cameras: Linhof Technorama 617, Mamiya 7, Konica Hexar

Film: Fuji Provia 100F 120 roll film and Provia 35mm film

Stuart Klipper’s new book of panoramic photography The Antarctic: From the Circle to the Pole has just been published by Chronicle Books and is available on Amazon.

 

 

Nick Smith reviews ‘The Shackleton Letters’ in Bookdealer magazine, November 2009 edition

Yours faithfully, Ernest Shackleton

Nick Smith reviews

The Shackleton Letters: Behind the Scenes of the Nimrod Expedition

By Regina W Daly, Erskine Press, HB, £27.50

The trouble with history of course is that it’s not really very good at telling you what happened. It creates reputations and myths that so often seem to have so little to do with the facts. When it comes to the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration we are traditionally served up two protagonists – Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton – and as the wheel goes around one takes the ascendancy at the other’s expense. At the moment Scott is in the doghouse and Shackleton is in the firmament, and if you had only read Regina Daly’s The Shackleton Letters you would have no difficulty in seeing why. Whether by accident or design, the way it falls out portrays the Boss, or ‘Shackles’ as he often signs off, as a decent bloke in love with his men, his ship and his wife (in that order), while an imperious (and I think misunderstood) Scott comes across, in the argot of the day, as a thundering ass. Of course, these letters were written a hundred years ago, when people wrote letters and didn’t have phones to shout down, but on the other hand there isn’t and never was any compulsion to write with such vaunting self-aggrandizement as Scott does.

There had always been a history between the merchant seaman and the naval officer. As far back as 1902 Scott is supposed to have called Shackleton a ‘bloody fool’ to which the Irishman retorted: ‘You are the worst bloody fool of the lot, and every time you dare to speak to me like that you will get it back.’ This was on the Discovery (‘National Antarctic’) Expedition 1901-4, where Scott was the leader and Shackleton was his third lieutenant. It seems that this extraordinary insubordination – if it ever took place – was soon overlooked, because by Christmas they were lying in their sleeping bags reading Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to each other (not ‘Origin of the Species’, as Daly erroneously calls it). By the time Shackleton was scouting around drumming up funds for an expedition of his own, their relationship was under strain again due to a conflict over rights to an existing expedition base in Antarctica. Scott’s letters are arch and seem to accuse Shackleton of upstartishness, while Shackleton, who feels more sinned against than sinning, never once loses his thoroughly infectious charm (‘My Dear Captain Scott, To make everything clear as regards our arrangements… I am following your suggestion and writing it down.’) Incidents like this have lead commentators – especially Roland Huntford – to surmise that each man was the antithesis of the other. If only it were this convenient and it were true that Scott was an iconoclast and Shackleton a loveable rogue punching above his weight, how much easier our lives would be. But, the truth is that they were both fallible human beings whose passions for the Polar Regions informed their extraordinary lives and dramatic ends.

Another area where history seems to get Polar exploration all wrong is in its insistence that we remember Shackleton above all else for his impossibly romantic Endurance (‘Imperial Transantarctic’) expedition, 1914-17. This was the one in which he lost his ship in the ice and famously (although not strictly true) never lost a man. With a handful of men, Shackleton set forth in the plucky little whaler – the James Caird – across the seas of the world to fetch relief for his crew. Although this is without doubt one of the greatest stories ever told, we must remember that it was a rescue mission, and that Endurance in essence achieved nothing. As with Dunkirk, the British heart has never been so proud of something that shouldn’t have happened. But on the other hand the earlier Nimrod (‘British Antarctica’) Expedition 1907-1909 – the subject of The Shackleton Letters – was a triumph. Among its many successes were the first ascent of Mount Erebus, the attainment of the South Magnetic Pole and the publication of the first book on the White Continent, Aurora Australis.

As we celebrate Nimrod’s centenary, Daly’s new book couldn’t be better timed or more welcome, especially as the true significance of the expedition seems to have been lost on some sectors of today’s exploration community. In terms of the range and diversity of the material assembled, both written and photographic, it’s hard to see how this anthology could have been any better, although the stickler might complain that it could have been better named. After all, many of the 165 letters, reports and telegrams collected here aren’t by, or to, Shackleton (although in fairness to Daly, they perfectly satisfy the book’s sub-title – ‘Behind the Scenes of the Nimrod Expedition’). In the section of Letters called ‘Kudos, Criticism and Rumours of a New Expedition’ there are epistles from Charles Dorman to Emily Shackleton, from Roald Amundsen to J Scott Keltie, from Robert Scott to Major Leonard Darwin, from Clements Markham to Keltie, from Markham to Darwin, from Fridtjof Nansen to Emily, from Nansen to Darwin, from Markham to H.W.Feilden and even a report from Markham to the Royal Geographical Society (‘letter’ 124). But there is very little either to or from the Boss himself, and while this all makes for interesting – compelling even – background material, it is hardly sufficient to allow for the title The Shackleton Letters. The counter-stickler might argue that this isn’t the first time a book has set sail under the wrong flag, and that to judge a book by its title might be only one step away from judging it by its cover. But titles and covers set up expectations, and here sadly it’s all gone a little bit awry.

For all these niggles, The Shackleton Letters should be on the shelf of anyone interested in the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. This is the first time this collection of documents has appeared between one set of boards, arranged thematically, specifically to deal with the Nimrod expedition, and so it will prove useful to the scholar and the historian for years to come (especially if a second edition is graced with an index). Daly has done a good job tracking down and compiling the material and her historical sketches that set the papers in context are superb distillations of some of the classic Shackleton analyses by the likes of Hugh Robert Mill, Margery and James Fisher, Roland Huntford and Beau Riffenburgh.

Above all The Shackleton Letters is important because it gives the Nimrod expedition the credibility and attention that it so richly deserves, allowing us into the methodology, planning and execution of a grand scale expedition the way it used to be. And it’s quite comforting to realise how little has changed. Behind the scenes there is still the same mad scramble for sponsorship and patronage, the begging letters, the broken agreements, lonely wives and expectant public. Perhaps even more reassuringly, in the wings the cast of explorers still comprises the same unsung geniuses and braying bigheads, dignified elder statesmen and chancy upstarts, men of iron and posturing fraudsters as it did in the Heroic Age. And there’s not a damned thing history can do about that.

Nick Smith is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a Contributing Editor on the Explorers Journal, the magazine of the Explorers Club in New York

Nick Smith writes on Aeronwy Thomas’s ‘My Father’s Places’ in October 2009 Bookdealer

Lost girl in the land of my fathers

Nick Smith reviews

My Father’s Places: a portrait of childhood by Dylan Thomas’ daughter

By Aeronwy Thomas, Constable, £14.99, pp 218

On the fiftieth anniversary of her father’s death Dylan Thomas’s only daughter said in an interview with the BBC: “Some of my best memories are when we walked back silently to the Boat House and I just felt so comfortable with him and he obviously felt comfortable with me… because there wasn’t any need to speak.” Aeronwy Thomas had put up with a lot. Her father had died before she’d reached her teens and she’d been forced to grow up in public with hurtful, nasty comments made about her father without a thought for her feelings. Gutsy, she stuck to her guns, defended the poetry and made allowances for the father. But she did need to speak. “Beyond being a drunkard and a writer and a womaniser,” she said commenting on his belated inclusion at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, “he was predominantly a poet. So what if he was a drinker? There are many drinkers in the United Kingdom, but there are not that many writers.”

Aeronwy died in July this year as her last book – My Father’s Places – was going to press. It’s sad when an author doesn’t get to see the fruits of their labour, but in this case particularly so because it’s a posthumous labour of love that ‘took ten years to write from start to finish’. That it took a decade to get out of her system suggests that it was something she simply had to get right. She consulted her father’s biographer Paul Ferris, and academic Barbara Hardy ‘who never lost faith in the content of my own memories’. That the resulting book seems to contradict the diplomatically crafted public statements she made throughout her life, could mean that we have here a work that sheds important new light on the Swansea-born poet. Gone are the torch-bearing defences of the great 20^th century bard, and instead we have a more muted, sometimes overly-sunny, Tizer and Welsh cakes idealisation of hopeful youth: as with so many children of celebrities, she didn’t particularly want a famous father, she just wanted a father.

My Father’s Places, despite its title – recalling the phrase from St John that would have been hammered into the young Aeronwy in the chapels of west Wales – is neither much about her father or geography. It’s really a memoir of her own childhood, with the years at the famous Boat House in Laugharne clearly the most important. There is the complex relationship with her mother, Caitlin MacNamara, former professional dancer upon whom motherhood sat awkwardly. Caitlin, though she undoubtedly loved her children and her husband too, was a hard-drinking exhibitionistic firebrand would pull her daughter’s hair until she screamed because she looked ‘so much like your father. The harder I pull your curls, the better I feel.’ Caitlin often beat her daughter so violently that she would run to her grandmother’s to escape, only to find that upon her arrival she was physically incapable of sitting down. And yet there were times when she’d go skinny-dipping with her mum, secretly pleased that they were shocking the neighbourhood.

The trail of writers and artists that drank and vomited their way through the Boat House of Aeronwy’s youth hardly made her life easier. One of Dylan Thomas’s many guests gave her a gold ring in exchange for her silence following an incident when he sexually assaulted her on a boating trip. Her father by special arrangement would be allowed into the local pub before 11 o’clock when it officially opened, and by lunchtime was often incapable of recognising his own child in the street (at her baptism he got her name wrong, giving it as Aeron Hart, instead of Aeronwy Bryn). At seven o’clock Caitlin and Dylan would go to ‘the Brown’s’ pub together leaving their daughter to look after baby Colm. On their return there were routinely fights, singing and slanging matches, and worst of all for the young Aeronwy, her mother would get dolled up and dance in front of the guests, doing cartwheels, showing her knickers and drunkenly knocking over the furniture. These are the memories of their only daughter in her final memoir.

Maybe none of this was so shocking in post-war rural Wales, but this disorganised and dysfunctional childhood was certainly a long way from the norm. And wistful, nostalgic and romantic as My Father’s Places may be, it’s also a bleak insight into a cracked family of unstable megalomaniacs with no parenting skills and no desire to acquire them. As she wanders around the emotional bombsite of her childhood memories, Aeronwy seems to become ever more desperate to put a brave face on things, make it all normal, make it all go away.

One of the ways she does this is to imitate her father’s prose style. Every phrase is well chosen, well turned and written to be read aloud. There is the same inebriation with language: the artful zeugma, transferred epithets and tumbling tricolons. There is the same compressed musicality of dialogue and the same searching for a (probably non-existent) primal Welsh lyricism, mixed up with the effing and blinding of the public bar at chucking out time. Of course, she’s nowhere near as good as her father, but of his many imitators, she’s the best.

Oddly My Father’s Places reveals almost nothing about Dylan that we don’t already know, although Aeronwy is very good at reminding us that he was of course very young. We tend to forget that. Even when he was old he was very young, and when he died he was only thirty-nine and not that much older than Keats. When she recalls that he hero-worshipped Henry Miller and thought Tropic of Cancer the ‘best fucking book’ ever written, it is a tremendous insight into the mind of the young poet, because only thrusting young men bursting with literary ambition are likely to admire Miller. For all the clichés of being locked in his writing shed by his fiery wife, hacking out every ponderous syllable with a Woodbine dangling from his lips, here was a man in love with words, who thought writers and writing were cool. For all the tangled over-written madness of the ‘sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea’ that was Under Milk Wood, here was a man with who loved experimental literature, whose legacy is a handful of the most profoundly glorious poems of the 20^th century.

You leave My Father’s Places the way you leave much of Aeronwy Thomas’s father’s best work. Inspired and slightly depressed. In an appendix she has included a poem of her own that in some respects resembles her father’s terrific piece of occasional verse – ‘Prologue’ – that he wrote to introduce his Collected Poems in 1952. In ‘Later than Laugharne’ she writes of the ‘balmy, never-to-be-forgotten days, green and golden…’ a reference also to the final lines of ‘Fern Hill.’ Brave? Self deluded? Its rhapsodic, mellifluous, self-consciously Welsh tone can do nothing to cover up a little girl’s lost childhood subverted by her parents alcoholism and poverty. And yet she was the child of one of the great poets, and there are times when she seems to happily accept that this comes at a price.

Nick Smith was brought up in Swansea, Dylan Thomas’s ‘ugly, lovely town’ before reading English at Balliol College, Oxford. He now writes for the Daily Telegraph

Nick Smith interviews extreme photographer Gordon Wiltsie in Outdoor Photography magazine

The Call of the Wild

Dangling off a craggy cliff face in the name of work is not a daunting prospect for adventure photographer Gordon Wiltsie. Nick Smith hears his story…

After more than three decades as a professional photographer, Gordon Wiltsie is known as one of the best adventure and expedition photographers out there. Brought up among the wide-open spaces he started off as a keen mountaineer studying chemistry, before a chance meeting with Galen Rowell lead him to his true vocation. He quickly switched his academic interest to the creative fields, but before long realised that he simply wanted to be in the mountains with his camera.

After a ‘long hold-out to film’ Gordon switched to digital two years ago and says he’ll never go back. But it’s not as though he’s a newcomer to digital because he’s been scanning his old transparencies for a decade now, in order to supply them to magazines, and to build up his photographic library – Alpenimage – a famous resource for art directors on the lookout for unusual adventure images.

Gordon has ‘done a lot of work for National Geographic and Geo’ as well as broader cultural photography, and has recently won the 2008 Lowell Thomas Award for best Magazine Travel Photography for his piece in National Geographic Adventure on Russian reindeer nomads called ‘Vanishing Breed’. He has contributed to many books, and his most recent is To the Ends of the Earth: Adventures of an Expedition Photographer.

Nick Smith: When did you realise you were going to become a photographer?

Gordon Wiltsie: When I was 17 I met a guy called Galen Rowell. He wasn’t even a famous photographer at that time, but he’d had stuff printed in various magazines, and I thought: ‘wow, if this guy can do it then so can I…’ To make that kind of assumption was a bit ridiculous.

NS: What was your first camera?

GW: I got a Brownie when I was 8 and I had some ancient Kodak bellows camera from the 1920s. But finally my parents bought me a Pentax Spotmatic and I’d say that was my first real camera which I had until I accidentally backed my car over it.

NS: What formal training do you have?

GW: I started off as a political science major and then I became a chemistry major and then I wanted to go to Nepal, which was a life dream. So I changed my major to creative writing and photography. But I’d say I’m largely self-taught.

NS: How important is it to specialise?

GW: It’s important to be known for something. For a long time I was known for ski, mountain and adventure photography. Going to really wild places that no one had ever really been before was my niche. If it was cold, miserable and dangerous, editors would send me.

NS: What is the best assignment you’ve been on?

GW: There are two actually. My assignment to Queen Maud Land in Antarctica was probably the best adventure because it worked so well for me as an expedition leader as well as photographer – it was my first cover story for National Geographic. The other one was a story I did of a migration in Mongolia. It was an unbelievable human story experience.

NS: What’s the worst thing about being a professional photographer?

GW: Uncertainty. Because I’m freelance my employer is me. Also, with the advent of digital photography and easy-to-use cameras the supply of photography outstrips the demand and as a result quality falls off as some magazines realise they don’t have to pay so much for photographs.

NS: Film or digital? Why?

GW: I used to always shoot film because I thought that it gave a better image in the long run. I do a lot of lecturing and I thought slide shows using real film looked better than digital. Bt the latitude you can get out of digital compared with film is astonishing.

NS: What’s the most important thing you’re learned from another photographer?

GW: I went on to assist Galen Rowell and he became a bit of a mentor. I learned a lot from him, but the most important thing was always ‘be ready with your camera set to go’. Other photographers who really inspire me are Steve McCurry, Reza, Bill Allard. They’re all trying to capture a moment in time with their own different way of seeing things.

NS: What does photography mean to you?

GW: For me it is a means of communicating a human relationship with a natural world that is beyond description in words. People sometimes call me a landscape photographer, but I’m not. I’m a people photographer.

NS: What makes a great travel photograph?

GW: Two things here: one is a travel story where there are ten different pictures that add up to something. But a single great photo needs a human element, it has to make you want to me there – or not want to be there – and it has to have some emotional component to it.

Gordon’s FIVE golden rules

1 Use the simplest lightest gear

2 Be prepared and ready for action

3 Simplify things – home in on what is important

4 Patience is important – wait for the shot

5 Build trust rust is important in cultural photography

Gordon’s gear:

Cameras: Nikon FM-2, Nikon D200

Lenses: Nikkor 12-24mm f/4, 35-70mm f/2.8, 80-200mm f/2.8, 400mm

Accessories: remote switch, monopod, polarising filter, split ND filter, flash

***

To the Ends of the Earth: Adventures of an Expedition Photographer by Gordon Wiltsie is available on Amazon

Nick Smith’s feature on wildlife conservation in Mauritius – ‘Miracle Workers’ – as published in Geographical magazine, October 2009

Miracle workers

When Gerald Durrell helped establish the Mauritius Wildlife Foundation 25 years ago, few could have predicted the overwhelming success of many of the organisation’s conservation projects. Words and photography by Nick Smith

Sitting in his office, windows flung open against a blisteringly hot day, Vikash Tatayah points to a painting of a bird of prey on the wall behind him. He explains that the copper-coloured kestrel is the symbol of the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation (MWF) of which he is the Conservation Manager. He’s just about to depart for neighbouring Mascarene island Rodrigues and can’t be late. He’s also writing his doctoral thesis and there’s a steady stream of colleagues knocking on his door asking detailed questions about various aspects of field science. He’s obviously in demand and the MWF headquarters in Vacoas is a busy place.

I’ve come to visit Tatayah to find out about the origins of the MWF that’s currently celebrating its 25^th anniversary. It’s a story revolving around the legendary British author and wildlife conservationist Gerald Durrell. But as Tatayah says, in order to understand what was happening on Mauritius a quarter of a century ago, you need to understand what happened 400 years ago, when the country was first discovered and colonised. Over the past four centuries there has been large-scale clearance of the native forest to make way for agriculture and human development. Sugar was the king crop and from the word go every conceivable pocket of land that could be found for its cultivation was exploited. All that remained of the forest were tiny fragments high up in the mountains: in fact there is now less than 1.5% of native forest left on Mauritius.

Deforestation, hunting and introduced species all had their effect on the biodiversity of Mauritius, which now has one of the highest extinction rates of birds, mammals and reptiles in the world. The lowest point for biodiversity was in the 1970s when the country could boast the rarest pigeon, parrot and bird of prey. But it wasn’t just birds that were on the brink. There were also habitats that were seriously degraded, including Round Island that, while rich in reptiles, had lost most of its forest to introduced goats and rabbits. Meanwhile the Rodrigues fruit bat become rare and had declined to perilously small numbers.

At this point the Gerald Durrell enters the story. He and his assistant John Hartley arrived on Mauritius in 1976 originally with the intention of – according to Tatayah – ‘lying on the beach, drinking lots of tea and whisky, smoking a lot and writing a book.’ But the government invited the naturalists to review their conservation projects. They are shown the pink pigeon, the Mauritius Kestrel, taken to Round Island and to see the golden bats of Rodrigues (later immortalised in Durrell’s book Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons). Upon being shown the extent of the decline of biodiversity on Mauritius, Durrell offered to start a captive breeding programme for some of the rare birds at his Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust in Jersey (as Durrell Wildlife was then called).

By the 1980s it was clear that there was a pressing need for an NGO dedicated to wildlife conservation on Mauritius capable of raising funds internationally. Durrell was the catalyst and the Mauritian Wildlife Appeal Fund was created in 1984. A quarter of a century and a name-change later the organisation employs around 130 staff (including volunteers) making the MWF not only the largest conservation NGO in the region, but the sole terrestrial wildlife conservation body for Mauritius and Rodrigues. The MWF is working on more than 20 bird, reptile, education, eco-tourism, habitat restoration and rare plant conservation projects and runs eight field stations: five within the Black River Gorges National Park and one apiece on Rodrigues, Round Island, Ile aux Aigrettes.

Birds, bats and giant tortoises

Although there have been other pink pigeons endemic in the Mascarenes, the Mauritian Pink Pigeon is the only survivor, and only just. The reason it’s become rare is because of habitat degradation and there are only a few pockets of suitable habitat remaining. The pink pigeon conservation project takes place on Ile aux Aigrettes, a tiny island on the southeast corner of Mauritius that has been cleared of predators and where the habitat has been restored.

When Durrell first came to Mauritius there was only one pink pigeon population, and that was at the appropriately named Pigeon Wood on the mainland where there was an estimated 12-20 birds in total. Although this total may seem low at its all-time low in 1990 there were only nine birds in existence. A PVA (population viability assessment) was done which concluded that the most likely outcome was that the pink pigeon would die out by 2000. Today, there are six sub-populations, with a total of 420 regularly observed birds. This success means the bird has been down-listed on the IUCN Red List from ‘critically endangered’ to ‘endangered’. Tatayah says that the MWF is talking to Birdlife International about down-listing the pink pigeon further to merely ‘vulnerable’.

The Mauritius Kestrel shares with the pink pigeon a steep decline and almost miraculous recovery, although the reason for its near extinction is quite different. In the twentieth century, one of the biggest health problems on Mauritius facing the human population was malaria and during the Second World War it was discovered that the synthetic pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (or DDT) was extremely good at eradicating the mosquitoes that transmitted it. And so DDT was sprayed in high concentrations all over Mauritius. It wasn’t until decades later that scientists came to realise that it was also extremely good at eradicating birds of prey (although other organophosphates had also played their part). As a result the Mauritius Kestrel became the rarest bird in the world – in 1974 there were only four left (with only one breeding female). With the aid of the Peregrine Fund, the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Fund and the ICBP (now Birdlife International) the MWF set up a captive breeding programme that reared and reintroduced several hundred hatchlings into three mountain ranges on the island. It’s estimated that there are now more than 600 free flying kestrels in the wild, making it as Tatayah claims ‘the most successful bird restoration project in the world.’

Originally, the only herbivores in the Mascarenes were tortoises and the highest density anywhere in the world was on Rodrigues. When the first settlers arrived they found the island covered with them and in some places you could walk a hundred paces on their backs without setting foot on the ground. The settlers over-harvested them for food, and within a few decades the entire population became extinct.

Tortoises have a significant influence on botanical ecology by controlling grasses, and dispersing seeds through their droppings. After their extinction in the Mascarenes the ecological functions they served such as selective grazing and seed dispersal, were not taken up by any other species. According to Tatayah, for a number of years the MWF debated what species could be introduced, not to replace the tortoise, but to plug the evolutionary gap left by the species. ‘It’s like a jigsaw puzzle’ he says. ‘It’s sad if you lose a piece, but if you can find a replacement part that maintains the integrity of the puzzle then, so long as it’s not an invasive species, why not?’

The MWF has experimented with the introduction of two different Indian Ocean tortoises: the Giant Aldabra from the Seychelles and the Madagascan radiated. Trials on Ile aux Aigrettes have shown that these tortoises are important in maintaining the low swathe of grass and are helping biologists to understand the co-evolution of plants and animals in the Mascarenes. Currently there are 20 tortoises on Ile aux Aigrettes, free roaming and breeding well. ‘It’s like having twenty labourers on the island’ says Tatayah. ‘They do the weeding and plant seeds. We’ve found that seeds dispersed by tortoises germinate better than those that simply fall off the tree and grow.’ Tatayah believes that tortoises can eventually return to the mainland – possibly to the Black River Gorges National Park – where they could play a part in controlling invasive plants.

Facing the future

What Mauritius needs, says Tatayah, is a halt to the invasion of exotic species. ‘We have a large number of plants and animals that are causing great havoc and so we need for an effective quarantine policy so that no more invasive species enter into the country.’ But alongside deceleration of the invasion it is also a requirement to restore the native forest.

The MWF estimates that 6,000 hectares of forest are needed to establish a self-sustaining ecological balance on the island. The sheer scales of such a project presents a huge environmental challenge for Mauritius. One of the ways of achieving this is to reclaim so-called marginal land. In Mauritius most of the sugar plantations are planted right up to the foothills of the mountains. These lower-yield areas are no longer profitable for agriculture because of the fall in global sugar prices, but would assist in reclaiming the forest, which is rich in indigenous biodiversity, including many species of critically endangered snail. The top third of the island’s mountains have been kept as forest fringe due to a law passed in the French colonial days. ‘But one of the things we would like to do’ says Tatayah ‘is to go down-slope. We need to see if we can reverse the trend by reclaiming these marginal areas. So instead of the agriculture encroaching we want the forest to reclaim the land.’

The MWF has been pushing for a policy to restore the marginal lands and it has become one of the highest recommendations in the National Forestry Policy Action Plan. But the big question is whether there is the political will for this to happen. ‘It’s very difficult to convince a politician that a snail on top of a mountain is important. If the snail could vote, that would be a different thing.’

For further information on, or to make a donation to, the Mauritian Wildlife foundation visit www.mauritian-wildlife.org

Nick Smith reviews Robin Hanbury-Tenison’s new book ‘The Land of Eagles’ in August 2009 Bookdealer magazine

Breughelesque farmers in Byronic landscapes

Nick Smith reviews Robin Hanbury-Tenison’s ‘The Land of Eagles: Riding through Europe’s Forgotten Country’

The trouble with the Balkans, Winston Churchill is supposed to have said, is they create more history than they can consume. And while, as with so many of the old Bulldog’s more epigrammatic sayings, this may on the surface appear to make sense, it’s also an expression with hidden shallows. Certainly, the geographical region we now call Albania (or more likely ‘plucky little Albania’) has had more than its fair share of invasions, bloodshed, ethnic cleansing and political upheaval over the centuries, largely because of its situation on the political fault-line between the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires. But paradoxically, from the 21^st century perspective at least, As Robin Hanbury-Tenison points out in his superb Land of Eagles, it is also one of the most dormant, remote and traditional countries in a fast-changing Europe that has apparently forgotten all about it.

Obscured by communism and locked away behind ramparts of impassable mountains, Albania may have been overlooked economically and may well lack what we today call development. But it has long and constantly attracted the literary and cultural traveller.

As Hanbury-Tenison points out, Albania is awash with literary and cultural references. Shakespeare set Twelfth Night in Illyria, an ancient region of the Balkan Peninsula on the Adriatic coast that is modern Albania. In Così fan tutte Mozart casts his two scheming lovers as ‘Albanian Noblemen’. Edward Gibbon describes Albania as ‘a country within sight of Italy, which is less known than the interior of America’. And of course Byron set his lengthy narrative poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in Albania, the country the romantic poet rode through with his friend John Cam Hobhouse in 1809. Edward Lear swung into the saddle to ride across the landscape, a journey ultimately expressed in his 1851 Journal of a Landscape Painter in Greece and Albania. Noted Victorian traveller Edith Durham, often described as the first woman war correspondent and a great enthusiast for the Albanian people, also rode through the mountains before publishing her epic book High Albania. For the record, Hanbury-Tenison comments that up in the high mountain passes of the north ‘these are the woods where Voldemort, the villain of the Harry Potter books goes to lie low after being defeated. We could see why, as they felt quite divorced from the rest of the world.’

Hanbury-Tenison is a renowned and veteran horseman, and he likes to do his travelling on horseback. A few years ago I interviewed him for the Royal Geographical Society’s magazine, and he told me that ‘on foot with a pack you see nothing but your feet. In a car you are insulated from the real world. But on a horse, you have an intelligent animal doing all of the work and most of the thinking, leaving you free to look and listen, to communicate with those you meet.’ These could so easily be the words of the explorer’s hero and mentor, Wilfred Thesiger, and in emulating the great desert traveller Hanbury-Tenison is preserving something of a noble tradition that sees exploring as being about discovering things rather than breaking records. And it’s a formula that has obviously worked and stood the test of time, with Hanbury-Tenison previously riding through and writing about China, Spain, New Zealand and France.

And now Albania. Although the real question is probably ‘why Albania?’ Why not, the author seems to imply, recounting a story of how he first met the Crown Prince Leka of Albania at Sandhurst. The prince had been on a military exercise with the explorer’s son and was covered with mud. He clicked the heels of his boots together in the manner of a Prussian officer before announcing: ‘You will always be welcome in my country.’ Hanbury-Tenison took him at face value and in 2007 he and his wife Louella went on an expedition along the length of the country from Theth in the north to Erind in the south. The result is Land of Eagles, a good old-fashioned travel book, and the sort that would win the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award if it were still going. It’s got just the right balance of travelogue and digression, contrasting a gruelling expedition journal with riveting trivia and occasionally complex political history. One minute Hanbury-Tenison will breezily relate an anecdote about how Norman Wisdom became a national hero, while the next he’ll describe the Balkan Peace Park Project, an initiative where an environmentally protected area is set aside to unite communities and encourage tourism into a war-torn region. This appeals to the environmentalist in Hanbury-Tenison who explains in some depth how substantial chunks of Southern Montenegro and western Kosovo have been joined to the Albanian section, making a total area of 3,000 square kilometres… ‘The fact that this just happens to be the most beguiling and least known corner of Europe makes it a winner.’

Although Hanbury-Tenison’s knowledge of the region is impressive, both historically and culturally, he’s at his best when he’s in the saddle on the open road, which is quite often little more than the narrowest of tracks, often with a precipice one side and a cliff the other. He makes no secret that it is a hard journey: some of the mountain passes and suspension bridges would be terrifying to a man half his age, but now in his seventies Hanbury-Tenison occasionally allows himself to admit just how onerous the task is. To make matters worse the tracks that he uses are dismally signposted in a land without map or seemingly reliable guides. But for all his frustrations he is boyishly optimistic and genuinely enchanted by the hospitality of the people he meets along the road. In a sentence that could only have been written by Hanbury-Tenison he describes ‘the bucolic charm of Breughelesque farmers, who belong to the Byronic landscape so perfectly.’

Robin Hanbury-Tenison has always been an intensely busy man. Download his CV from his website and you will read what you’d be forgiven for thinking is a description of several action-packed lives. Of course he’s best known as an explorer – having lead or taken part in more than 30 expeditions – in which capacity he’s brought to the wider public the plight of the tribal peoples of the world as well as the rainforest. He’s also been named by the Sunday Times in 1982 as ‘the greatest explorer of the past 20 years’, and again in 1991 as one of the 1000 ‘Makers of the 20th Century’. He deserves to be much better known as an author and perhaps with the publication of Land of Eagles this slight injustice is about to be put right.

The Land of Eagles is published by I B Tauris, HB, £19.99 · ISBN 978-1845118556

For more information about Robin Hanbury-Tenison’s books visit www.robinsbooks.co.uk

Nick Smith is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a Contributing Editor on the Explorers Journal, the magazine of the Explorers Club in New York

Nick Smith reviews Christopher Ondaatje’s ‘Woolf in Ceylon’ in the Literary Review (archive stuff)

Candour in Kandy

Nick Smith reviews Christopher Ondaatje’s ‘Woolf in Ceylon’

Christopher Ondaatje’s best book to date is a refreshingly creative illustrated biography of Leonard Woolf in the years preceding the Great War. Woolf in Ceylon is simultaneously a reconstruction of its subject’s term of office as a civil servant on the colonial outpost; a photographic archive of a long-vanished society in the heyday of empire; a literal journey in Woolf’s footsteps through war-ravaged twenty-first-century Sri Lanka; and an autobiographical travelogue. These four threads are woven together to make a well thought-out book, similar in genre to Ondaatje’s Hemingway in Africa: The Last Safari (2003). The literary world may well be thirsty for Victoria Glendinning’s much-anticipated biography of the man of letters, but Ondaatje’s timely offering constitutes a valuable analysis of Woolf in his most formative years.

Ondaatje is well placed to comment on Woolf: born in Ceylon, the son of a tea planter, his early life is a curious mirror image of his subject’s. While the young Woolf, freshly graduated from Cambridge, sailed eastward to Ceylon for a stint in the Civil Service in order to learn the imperial ropes, Ondaatje was packed off in the other direction to a private school in Devon to discover how to become an English gentleman. The parallels continue, and it’s not hard to see why Woolf holds such a fascination for Ondaatje. Nor is it hard to draw the conclusion that Ondaatje’s return to Sri Lanka in 2004 to take photographs for the book has a personal significance akin to that of Woolf’s triumphant return to the island in the 1960s.

Woolf in Ceylon contains detailed explanations of some of the imperial workings of the British Civil Service, a system that plagued the highly-strung Woolf. He was one of the first to see the cracks appearing in the British Empire, and his understanding of the situation clearly influenced the thinking of the Fabian Society and the Labour Party in the years leading up to 1945.

The volume also comprises an important reappraisal of Woolf’s early novel The Village in the Jungle, which is set in Ceylon during the time of his posting there. Currently revived under the Eland banner (having been out of print in the UK since the early 1980s, though it has never gone out of print in Sri Lanka), the new edition has an afterword by Ondaatje. In this essay, as in Woolf in Ceylon, he convincingly contends that The Village in the Jungle ’s importance lies primarily in its being one of the very few books to deal with a colonial situation from the perspective of the colonised rather than the coloniser – a blatant clue to Woolf’s developing mistrust of, and later disgust with, imperialism. In his epilogue Ondaatje indulges in some literary forensics as he sets out to find the original village of the title, long thought to be fictional. Working on the basis that Woolf’s fiction is nearly always rooted in established, demonstrable fact, the author makes the not unreasonable assumption that the double murder central to the novel’s plot must have happened in a real place. True to his explorer’s instincts, Ondaatje not only finds the actual site of Beddagama, but also makes a plausible case for Woolf’s association with it. Importantly, Woolf in Ceylon also offers an insight into and critique of Woolf’s incredibly rare Stories from the East, three brilliantly revealing short pieces relating to his time in Ceylon that have previously only been available in a 1921 Hogarth Press edition limited to 300 copies (expensive!), or as an appendix to the improbably entitled Diaries in Ceylon, 1908–1911: Records of a Colonial Administrator, being the Official Diaries maintained by Leonard Woolf while Assistant Government Agent of the Hambantota District, Ceylon … ; & Stories from the East: Three Short Stories on Ceylon , available as a paperback only, and after considerable effort, in Sri Lanka.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ondaatje focuses much of his critical attention on the second volume of Woolf’s acclaimed autobiography, Growing – the instalment that deals specifically with the Ceylon years. Much of the attraction of Woolf’s five-volume autobiography is his lucid and candid self-examination. Sometimes this can border on the downright odd (as when, for example, he ponders humankind’s relationship with its companion animals), but for the most part he is simply and elegantly matter-of-fact (and often very funny). His recollections of his youthful sexual promiscuity are only sensational in as much as they are an intellectual exercise in candour. He even reproduces a letter to his closest friend Lytton Strachey, in which he reveals how he lost his virginity to a Burgher girl in Jaffna.

But, sexual awakening aside, the real issue and defining characteristic of Woolf’s Ceylon years – something that was to serve him well in later life – was his punishing work ethic: his ability to ‘stick at it’ was to effect his meteoric rise to influence in Ceylon. He did the work of his superiors in Jaffna, organised social events in Kandy with great efficiency for Sir Hugh Clifford (the acting Governor of Ceylon and a notorious ladies’ man), and was rewarded with the job of Assistant Government Agent in Hambantota, the youngest civil servant ever to be appointed to the post. Woolf’s efficiency and industry in the dry, south-eastern Hambantota district resulted in its becoming the best-run region in Ceylon. He doubled salt production as he had doubled pearl-fishing profits during his earlier posting in Jaffna.

Ondaatje is probably at his best when analysing Woolf’s strange courtship of Virginia Stephen, whom he saw, with characteristic honesty, as less beautiful than her sister. Ondaatje is also observant on Lytton Strachey’s influence on the couple’s early relationship, as well as on the sensitive issue of Virginia’s sexual abuse as a child by her elder half-brothers Gerald and George Duckworth (published posthumously in Sketches of the Past). These passages illuminate the loving but sexless marriage between two of the most influential figures in Edwardian literary circles.

The text of Woolf in Ceylon could easily stand on its own, but the inclusion of more than sixty photographs of Ceylon in the first decade of the twentieth century, drawn from the archives of the Royal Geographical Society, add real value. These heritage photos are more than ably supported by the author’s own documentary shots of modern Sri Lanka, which serve to broaden the book’s appeal and take Leonard Woolf on a quite unexpected journey into the mainstream. Woolf in Ceylon is certain to give today’s reader a much clearer understanding of why his importance goes way beyond simply being Mr Virginia Woolf.

To find out more about Christopher Ondaatje’s books visit www.ondaatje.com

Nick Smith reviews Ian Fleming’s ‘Thrilling Cities’ in September 2009 edition of Bookdealer

Revelling in the Reeperbahn

Nick Smith reviews a new edition of Ian Fleming’s ‘Thrilling Cities’

It’s been a busy time of late for James Bond aficionados. There’s been the release of the latest movie Quantum of Solace as well as Sebastian Faulks’ Devil May Care, apparently the last ever Bond novel. The latter was published last year on 28^th May, on what would have been Ian Fleming’s 100^th birthday, and the Queen Anne Press brought out a sumptuous 18-volume centenary edition of the author’s complete works at the same time.

For those not suffering from Fleming fatigue, wondering if there’s a little something left in the tank, there are reissues of two of Fleming’s works of journalism: The Diamond Smugglers, a piece of investigative journalism that penetrates the world of international gem trafficking, and Thrilling Cities, thirteen essays of travel writing, urban portraiture commissioned by the Sunday Times exactly 50 years ago. Of the two Thrilling Cities is by modern standards the better book, and there will be travel editors up and down the land tearing their hair out that they neither have the budget nor a sufficiently imaginative publisher to allow for the commission of a series of such sustained brilliance as this.

Despite being overlooked by collectors – you can get a decent UK first for around £100 (compare that with, say Thunderball) – Thrilling Cities is Fleming at his best. There are a few negative comments to make about it because any collection of newspaper articles bundled up for publication, as a book will suffer from inconsistencies and repetitions. And although it is tempting to say that Ian Fleming Publications could have produced an edition with more critical apparatus and textual analysis, at the end of the day we’re dealing with journalism that was – no matter how good – of its day. To me at least the most important concern is that we’re presented with the unexpurgated versions of Fleming’s essays. He rather revels in the strip clubs, topless mud wrestling and red light districts of Hamburg’s Reeperbahn and so would have been peeved to have found these details hacked out by assiduous sub-editors working under a nervous editor’s instructions.

Another problem with reproducing newspaper journalism is with the contractual obligation stuff that all travel hacks have to (quite often against their will) include. There will be nightclubs that have given you a smashing night out, restaurants that have killed the fatted calf, as well as airlines and hotels that have upgraded you to both seats and suites bigger than your house. All this has to be paid for with name checks and superlatives. Despite having bought a round-the-world air ticket for £803 19s. 2d. and having drawn £500 in travellers’ cheques from the Chief Accountant, Fleming is no exception to this time-honoured barter system and there are times when his (often very amusing) ‘Incidental Intelligence’ notes extend to several pages, as with New York.

By contrast there is no incidental intelligence relating to Monte Carlo, the last thrilling city in the series. Maybe this is not that much of a discrepancy, as the essay on Monte Carlo is so lacking in local colour of any description it is hard to believe that Fleming ever even went there, at least for this commission. Some early editions of Thrilling Cities have the so-called ‘lost Bond story’ – ‘007 in New York’ – appended to the New York essay, but this reprint doesn’t, which is a shame because it’s not well-known and this edition might have benefitted from its inclusion.

Fleming’s journey is divided into two series: the first is a truly global jet-setting affair, with the second a rather glamorous blast around Europe in his seven-litre Thunderbird, which he tells us is ‘very comfortable, roomy, and as quick as hell.’ And off he went leaving ‘humdrum London’ not because he could see much literary merit in the enterprise but because he wanted to ‘see the world, however rapidly, while it was still there to see.’

Anyone expecting Fleming to be a fish out of water in the travel genre will be sorely disappointed. He’s a terrific journalist and travel writer whose observations are blunt, colourful, patriotic and at times reassuringly elitist. Hard for us to imagine now of course, but at the time you could only do journeys like this if you were the creator of James Bond with a seemingly unlimited license to travel. This license came from Leonard Russell, Features and Literary Editor of the Sunday Times, who in October 1959 ‘came up with the idea that I should make a round trip of the most exciting cities of the world and describe them in beautiful, beautiful prose.’

Of the 14 cities Fleming visits I’ve been to only four, which in itself says much about what cities were thrilling then and are no longer now. The way in which European travel has changed over the past half a century means that many of the places Fleming visits are now industrialised clichés where you might stop in order to change plane while heading for somewhere thrilling in Africa (a continent studiously avoided by Fleming). Having said that, the shared experience is important because it shows just how good he is at grasping the essential character of the city.

Even so we’re worlds apart: I can honestly say that I’ve never stayed at the house of the most powerful English taipan (‘big shot’) while in Hong Kong. Likewise, in many visits to New York I’ve never dined where it’s necessary to tip the headwaiter $50 simply to get a table and wouldn’t know where to. While in Hamburg I’ve certainly been to gigantic Bavarian beer halls, my head half blown off by brass bands, but I’ve never found places where ‘you can enjoy really hot jazz.’ In Geneva I’ve paid ten pounds for a fried egg and yet never encountered a single occasion where a working knowledge of the anonymously numbered banking account system has been absolutely necessary.

Fleming’s world is swanky and suave – just like James Bond – and the reason his cities are thrilling is simply that he seeks out what the guidebooks omit. Doors fling themselves open before his fame and charisma, both a better passport than a passport. But at other times the thrills turn into grief simply too hard to bear. He leaves Berlin without regret: ‘From this grim capital went forth the orders that in 1917 killed my father and in 1940 my youngest brother.’ For all these quite unexpected personal reflections, Jan Morris is entirely correct when she says in her introduction to this new edition of Thrilling Cities that as P.G.Wodehouse is to the comic novel so is Ian Fleming to the thriller. His travel journalism is wonderfully flashing, humorous and quick as hell. Those who through over-familiarity with the Bond novels have grown tired of Fleming should get hold of a copy of this marvelous edition of Thrilling Cities and have their faith restored.

Ian Fleming’s ‘Thrilling Cities’ is published by Ian Fleming Publications, £15.00 · ISBN 978-1 -906772-00-0

Nick Smith regularly writes travel features for the Daily Telegraph and has been a judge on the Thomas Cook Travel Book of the Year award

To find out more about Bookdealer magazine visit http://www.bookdealer.org.uk/

Nick Smith’s exclusive interview with Buzz Aldrin – ‘Out of this world’ – taken from E&T magazine

Out of this world

Not only was NASA’s Apollo 11 mission to the moon one of the great voyages of exploration of the 20^th Century, but it was also one of the greatest collaborative feats of engineering co-ordination. Nick Smith, spoke with Buzz Aldrin about how the project got off the ground…

On 20^th July 1969, when the first men stepped on the moon, mankind had finally achieved its ambition of reaching another celestial body. Mr Armstrong and his co-pilot, Col. Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. of the Air Force, as the New York Times of the day described them, had managed to bring their ship to rest on a level, rock-strewn plain near the southwestern shore of the arid Sea of Tranquility.

It was one of the great human stories of the 20^th Century, a measure of how far we had come. But it was also a technical story; a story of how computer coordinated re-entry and rendezvous had made space travel and an all–too-brief walk on the moon possible.

It’s now forty years since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made history, and although NASA and other bodies have since made great strides in space exploration, there seems to be a lack of political will to get back out into space. Although we regularly go into Earth’s orbit, many, including Aldrin, believe that the real mission before us is today is to find a way to get men on Mars.

As a fighter pilot serving in Korea, and with a career in the military, Buzz was an all-American hero even before becoming an astronaut. By the time he’d been into space with the Gemini programme and then actually set foot on the moon, he was seen by the world as superman. But despite the universal adulation, Buzz Aldrin was a troubled man.

While some have mid-life crises, Aldrin went into meltdown. Today we tend to think of what happened to him as a combination of ill health and bad luck. But in the 1970s the military wouldn’t tolerate mental illness such as depression, and to admit to being a sufferer meant curtains for any further career development. Moreover, Buzz was what we now call a ‘high-functioning alcoholic’, meaning that while he was perpetually locked in mortal combat with alcohol, he could (and did) at least attempt to keep his career on track with a degree of success.

Unfortunately, the problem for Aldrin was that he wasn’t able to star in a career befitting a moonwalker, and as his new book Magnificent Desolation explains, back then merely being a celebrity didn’t pay the bills. He was dogged by ‘Status versus income disequilibrium syndrome’, which meant that while he was invited to the most elevated of social occasions that America could offer, by day he had been reduced to selling second-hand cars.

Things started to look up when, in his fifties, he married banking heiress Lois Driggs Cannon. This turn of events provided him with the opportunity to clean up his act, and he has now been sober for three decades. But it wasn’t all plain sailing, and in the recession of the 1990s Mrs Aldrin’s financial affairs took a turn for the worst, leaving them (by their standards at least) penniless.

Resolved to work his way out of his newfound poverty, Aldrin became a ‘freelance astronaut’, and ever since he has devoted his life to touring the world advising governments, the aerospace industry and the public on what is needed to get space exploration moving again. Outspoken, opinionated and sometimes a thorn in the side of the establishment, Aldrin is renowned for talking to those who will listen. Especially about technology…

Engineering & Technology magazine:  Apollo 11 has been called one of the greatest collaborative ventures of the 20^th century. Do you think that this is true and can you describe, 40 years on, the sheer scale of the technical coordination required to land a craft on the moon and bring it home to Earth?

Buzz Aldrin: It certainly was a cardinal event. Apollo 11 will probably go down in history as one of the major responses of two nations facing each other with threatening technologies – sometimes called mutually assured destruction. It was also our response to the apparent superiority of the Russians in putting objects into space before we could. Both nations gave assurances to each other that it wasn’t going to be just dogs and monkeys, but it was also going to be humans. And in the case of the US, it was going to be very out in the open. I think the Russians responded to that by realising that they needed to be more open with what they were doing. Even though they launched and recovered well inside their boundaries and didn’t necessarily need to expose a lot of the technology, they became more open about what they were doing.

In the US we were faced with the question of who was going to carry this out, and the Navy’s Vanguard mission was chosen. When this didn’t succeed – the Atlas missiles were blowing up on the launch pad – the army then brought in its Explorer satellite programme and matched what the Russians had done with Sputnik. Then it became clear that humans were going into space and it also became clear that we weren’t progressing with Atlas as we had hoped. In 1961 Yuri Gagarin shocked the world by becoming the first man in space and the best response we had – less than a month later – was a sub orbital flight.

But then shortly after that I guess the world was surprised by Kennedy’s announcement about going to the moon.

E&T: Did you have any sense that the technology was ready for this, or did you think ‘this is way too ambitious’?

Buzz: There was still a long way to go with the not-so-successful launches of the Atlas and other rockets. But I think we charted a course at that time. As I reflect back on it from where we are now, we had two features that assisted with the transition from not having a space programme to reaching the moon – flexibility and continuity. When the President said we were going to the moon, the air force had already been studying missions to the moon – including manned flight – so it wasn’t a totally unexplored area. And we had a unity of purpose that was missing in the Soviet Union. The Russians at the time really had two space programmes competing with each other. Sometimes it’s a good idea to have alternate ways of accomplishing something. But when we said we were going to the moon we also had a Mercury programme and an Apollo programme, and we realised we couldn’t stretch one until the other started flying. And so we filled the gap and retained continuity between the two with the very ambitious and successful Gemini programme that accomplished long-duration flight, computer-controlled re-entry, space walking and rendezvous.

E&T: The computers of the time. It’s passed into urban legend that there is more computing power on your mobile phone now than there was on these missions. Is that true? How much computing power was there? What did the computers do, and how much computing power was there back at mission control?

Buzz: (Laughs) I can’t quantitatively give you the numbers, but there was no way you could possibly have had any kind of mechanical calculator and made the corrections needed to be able to get to the moon. Our computers gave us the sophistication of the mathematical smoothing techniques for the equations of motion and the perturbations. We were able to squeeze out of limited capacity some very, very remarkable achievements. We chose to use humans to execute and aid things like re-entry, final closure breaking and docking manoeuvres. We made use of the humans there, rather than try to automate everything and I think we made wise decisions when exploring how to do these things.

E&T: How important is it to have flexibility in developing your approach to solving huge collaborative efforts such as Apollo 11?

Buzz: We had the flexibility when the President said to go to the moon to look at the Nova rocket that was just on paper and wouldn’t be ready until 1970, as well as and two Saturn Vs that were the legacy of Werner Von Braun. But then an engineer came along and said: ‘wait a minute. If we optimise here and there, shed a little weight and send two more specialised spacecraft to the moon we can make do with just one Saturn V. One will land and the other will be available to take people home that doesn’t make the landing manoeuvre an operational asset’. And of course now this is the obvious way of going to the moon, instead of direct there and direct back. These were wise decisions. The Russians looked at other short cuts that we didn’t evaluate very much. We chose flexibility.

E&T: In 2004 George W Bush, then president of the United States, announced a goal for US astronauts to return to the moon by 2020. What are your views on that?

Buzz: That doesn’t impress me too much. Going back to the moon 50 years after we went there in the last century, without having a clear development plan for what we were going to do – other than to say it is a rehearsal for when we go to Mars – doesn’t make much sense. As a project, going to Mars is quite a bit different, much more advanced, and I think we ought to be much more about doing that.

My schedule says if we economise on certain areas and develop what we really need to develop, we can get to Mars by 2031. But we really need to get to a moon of Mars by 2025 first. And that I think we can do, but we can’t do that and go to our moon as well. We should leave that to other nations and encourage them to accept our advice, consultation and assistance and let them experience the development issues associated with going to the moon.

E&T: What are the issues politically or technically that might prevent this? Also, what you achieved 40 years ago… if you hadn’t done it then, would it be possible to do it now?

Buzz: Well sure it’s possible. I’m not really in a position to weigh that personally, but I do think that some of the consolidations in the industry have restricted innovation and new ideas, and the overheads have gone up as well as other costs plus contracting. And then there are changes that mean that we’re not making maximum use of what we’ve previously developed.

E&T: So, do you think these are potential threats to going to Mars by 2031?

Buzz: Yes. If we continue to develop two different launch vehicles, Aries I and Aries V we can go to Mars by a different way. But if we think we can do it by going to the Moon in 2025 it’s going to take a whole lot of time to transition away from the moon to Mars … I think in the US we have lost a tremendous investment in leadership.

E&T: Here in the UK it is often said that we need something or someone really inspirational to attract new talent into the science, engineering and technology (SET) sector. Can you describe what effect Apollo 11 missions and the Lunar Ladings had on the youth of that time?

Buzz: All sorts of people from engineers to airline pilots say it was the Apollo programme and the expansion into new and different technological adventures that inspired them. That can exist again – but I don’t see it as clearly now, because a lot of things can be done by robots as they increase in capability.

E&T: What role will robots play in our efforts to get to Mars, and do you think that they will do away with the need to send humans into space?

Buzz: We can control robots pretty well at the space station, but we need human experience. Once we factor in human experience, robots are much more effective, especially when they are using somebody else’s ability to fix things and do the human housekeeping efforts as they learn how to operate in low-earth orbit. The same thing can apply to the moon: robotic efforts can determine which development industries’ products and activities can be sufficiently productive to justify the big investment in maintaining human habitation. After we’ve experienced that and are in a position to expand our human habitation to fly-by comets, to station-keep with asteroids, to look at asteroids that could possibly threaten us, then we can begin to use human intelligence at a moon of Mars (much safer) to control robots on the surface in real time and assemble items necessary for occupancy on the surface. But to go direct to the surface would be a great mistake. The more prudent way is to make an incremental commitment to a pathway first that can clearly lead toward permanence at Mars and then reinforcing that commitment with resources at a later date. But not on the surface. The great cost in sending people there is not returned if you bring them back after two, three or four trips. You need a certain critical number of people to develop the resources to become self-sustaining. Think about the pilgrims on the Mayflower who left your jolly land to come over and establish a colony here. They didn’t hang around Plymouth Rock waiting for the return trip. But this an adjustment to how we think of human beings participating in space flight. They go somewhere, they do their thing, they turn around and then they come back.

E&T: Are you optimistic that this will happen?

Buzz: I think we have to make a decision one way or another to re-evaluate the destination, and who’s going to do what. Not everybody can do everything over and over again and I think co-operative ventures don’t gain much by simply being a race to the end. Maybe a race to develop something better, that we can do something with, so then you decide whose rocket is better, whose spacecraft is better and you can consolidate your efforts there. We haven’t got to the point where we have the luxury of dual competing efforts.

E&T: Looking back on Apollo 11, what have we learned from that great voyage of exploration 40 years ago?

Buzz: Apollo 11’s legacy is one of significant investment and pioneering effort that achieved a new degree of sophistication in leadership, technology advance and reliability that has become the pattern for how to do these things. But we need to keep doing that and we need to keep draining minds in order to keep doing new innovative things. We can’t just keep recreating the same thing over and over again. But then, we don’t want to terminate good operable machines like the Saturn V prematurely and venture out on something that may not live up to its expectations. There’s a great temptation to claim that something can do a great deal more than it may actually do. And then we have to pay the price of increasing costs.

E&T: What do you think you’ll be feeling personally on the anniversary? Apollo 11 must have dramatically changed your life?

Buzz: For sure Apollo 11 changed my life. But each individual has their lives changed by different events. I had to turn my life around at a very crucial point of transition at the age of 45-50. What I knew about was the future of space, but not being affiliated with a big company that made it kind of difficult to do all those things. So I started projecting, talking, discussing and designing future improvements and learning. It’s in my blood to want to look at better ways of doing things. Several of us engineers were 15 years ahead in looking at reusable booster rockets, ejectable pods and spacecraft that could come back and land. But those things just didn’t seem to meet the fancy of what the air force, the military or NASA wanted, but it seems to be getting a whole lot closer now. I’m just not sure that we have the right destination and I’m not sure that we have the right means of carrying it out. But there are so many political and business contractual activities, that it may seem evident that it needs reevaluation when things don’t seem to be working out quite the way we hoped. There’s this attitude: ‘Don’t change what we’re doing – let’s keep with it – right or wrong – let’s do what we said we’re going to do.’

E&T: How important in a project such as Apollo 11 are the qualities of leadership and the ability to work as a team? How highly do you rate these managerial skills?

Buzz: In forming an organisation we looked around to try to find out where to get the talent we needed. Some of it came from Canada because they had some cancelled programmes. A good bit of it came from military leadership. Of course internationally we made use of some of the German technology and used a pattern of development that they seemed to be able to contribute. That worked out well. There were significant leaders in industry that banded together, and instead of trying to win all the contracts they just took what came out. There was more than enough for everyone involved. Everybody got a reasonable piece of the action, and it all came together in a very well managed, integrated way. When it came to testing and advancing the testing so that we could progress to what we called ‘all up’ testing, a lot of people had to get a lot of things together at the same time.

E&T: You’ve got a new book out at the moment – Magnificent Desolation: the Long Journey Home from the Moon – can you tell us a bit about how that came to be written…

Buzz: One theme is the evolution of change from short-term thinking about the details of future space modifications to an even bigger picture of what is our destiny and how we should go about preserving the investments we have made. Going to the moon was pretty much an American event. We started out the Space station and the Space Shuttle in that direction, made it international, but not quite free and open. We need to change these things regarding the moon and help other nations to catch up with us, while we pioneer what we are able to do in the pursuit of US leadership in the technology of aerospace that allows us to pursue science in outer space.

E&T: So you think that the future of space exploration can be a unifying thing in terms of international political harmony?

Buzz: Certainly. It can also be an increasing irritant unless we begin to make efforts to open up and understand. We need to set a boundary for what will happen in space, say once you get past 100km. Certain things will happen on the surface of the earth to do with conflict, human rights, piracy and we’ll need to deal with those down here. But in space for the betterment of many, many people, we’d like not to see communications technology encroached upon.

E&T: Thank you

Buzz Aldrin: A great pleasure.

A Trio Triumphant: Where are they now?

On July 20, it will be 40 years since Apollo 11 astronauts—Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins—reached the Moon, with Armstrong and Aldrin walking on its desolate regolith.

In the years since, Lunar Module pilot Buzz Aldrin, 79, has remained a staunch advocate for space exploration, particularly in the realm of private space ventures, which includes his own rocket design company, Starcraft Boosters. More recently, he launched the ShareSpace Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to advancing education and affordable access to space, one of several new entities now operated under the aegis of Buzz Aldrin Enterprises.

Collins, 78, who has remained rather circumspect when it comes to his critical role as pilot of the command module Columbia, has chosen a quieter life, retiring to the Florida Everglades after directorship of the National Air and Space Museum and involvement in several private space companies. There, he has authored several critically acclaimed space-related books and indulged in his love of watercolors.

Mission commander Armstrong, 78, who saw no need to return to space after Apollo 11, chose instead to pursue his passion for teaching at the University of Cincinnati, near his Ohio home. In addition to serving on the corporate boards of several companies, including booster-rocket manufacturer Thiokol, Armstrong has remained committed to aerospace education. He recently donated his space-related papers to his alma mater, Purdue University, an institution with a long history of producing candidates for the American space program.

Whether staying in the limelight, fostering an interest in aeronautical engineering for the next generation, or enjoying more leisurely pursuits, all three have campaigned for a “return to the glory days of the space program,” particularly when it comes to the exploration of Mars. Aldrin has gone so far as to devise a spacecraft system known as the Aldrin Mars Cycler, which, he contends, could remain in perpetual orbit between Earth and Mars. For Collins, it is Mars and only Mars that should be our current space focus. In terms of time and money, he says, further exploration of the Moon could be “a bottomless pit.” When asked if he might be up for a journey to Mars, Armstrong has said simply, “I am available.”

Time travellers

Omega is celebrating the 40^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing with a replica of its Speedmaster ‘Moon Watch’, as worn by Buzz Aldrin

When it comes to pushing back the frontiers of human achievement, landmark years don’t come much bigger than 1969. British explorer Wally Herbert and his team of Arctic scientists were conquering the North Pole on foot, while Robin Knox-Johnston was becoming the first person to sail single-handedly, non-stop around the world. But the off-world activities of NASA’s Apollo 11 space mission outshone these terrestrial endeavours, as a trio of American astronauts fulfilled their late president John F Kennedy’s dream of ‘landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.’

On July 20^th 1969 the Lunar Module Eagle landed lightly on the moon’s powdery surface after a protracted descent. Following technical checks and preliminary contact with Mission Control the ceremony began. As the Eagle’s hatch opened and Neil Armstrong stepped out, 600 million watched the events unfold on their TV sets. A static glitch in the audio transmission muffled a vital syllable of the most famous line delivered in space, ensuring it will be debated and misquoted for evermore. ‘That’s one small step for a man’ is what Neil Armstrong actually said before delivering the historic payoff: ‘one giant leap for mankind.’

What is beyond doubt is that the time was 02:56 GMT exactly. Armstrong led the way, and Buzz Aldrin followed wearing his Omega Speedmaster Professional wristwatch. Armstrong had taken the precaution of leaving his chronograph aboard the Lunar Module as a backup to the electronic timing system, which had not been functioning correctly. Armstrong was right in thinking that his timepiece was one that could be relied upon.

In NASA tests the Speedmaster had withstood temperature fluctuations of over 100°C, shocks of 40g, acceleration of 16g – twice that of a fighter pilot. After two years strenuously testing models from different manufacturers NASA was left with an easy decision – the Speedmaster was the only contestant still in one piece. This famous chronograph was later to get Apollo 13 out of a jam when astronaut Jim Lovell used his to time the firing of the re-entry rockets after a power failure had knocked out the onboard electronics. It’s easy to see why Armstrong put so much faith in his.

To commemorate the Lunar Landing, watchmaker Omega has announced the release of the Speedmaster Professional Apollo 11 ‘40^th Anniversary’ Limited Edition, or ‘moonwatch’. Powered by the same movement Omega used four decades ago and fitted with the same Hesalite crystal – a man-made shatterproof material ideal for low-gravity environments – this replica watch is almost exactly what Buzz and his friends were sporting on their wrists back in the late Sixties.

And yet a few neat additions distinguish it from the original, such as the inclusion of the legend ‘02:56 GMT’ in red on the dial beneath the maker’s mark, while the stainless steel body design has been updated to make it even more durable. The Apollo 11 Eagle ‘mission patch’ is stamped on the back along with the words ‘The first watch worn on the moon’. Other information on the back includes the timepiece’s production limitation. But don’t worry: with the edition limited to 7,969 there should be plenty to go around.

Delivered in a black presentation box with a certificate of authenticity, the Moon Watch is accompanied by a 42mm silver medal bearing the mission patch again. Michael Collins, the third member of the crew – who never made it to the moon’s surface – designed this famous logo of a bald eagle with an olive branch in its beak, symbolising NASA’s ‘we come in peace’ mission statement. While Aldrin and Armstrong conducted scientific experiments, Collins was at the controls of the orbiting Command Module Columbia, counting the minutes until he was reunited with his colleagues, mission accomplished.

Men Walk on Moon – how the New York Times saw it

The following is an extract from the front page of the New York Times, Monday, July 21, 1969…

Houston, Monday, July 21 – Men have landed and walked on the moon. Two Americans, astronauts of Apollo 11, steered their fragile four-legged lunar module safely and smoothly to the historic landing yesterday at 4:17:40 P.M., Eastern daylight time. Neil A. Armstrong, the 38-year-old civilian commander, radioed to earth and the mission control room here: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

The first men to reach the moon – Mr Armstrong and his co-pilot, Col. Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. of the Air Force – brought their ship to rest on a level, rock-strewn plain near the southwestern shore of the arid Sea of Tranquility. About six and a half hours later, Mr. Armstrong opened the landing craft’s hatch, stepped down the ladder and declared as he planted the first human footprint on the lunar crust: ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’

His first step on the moon came at 10:56:20 P.M. as a television camera outside the craft transmitted his every move to an awed and excited audience of hundreds of millions of people on earth…

The ultimate gastronaut

When NASA initiated their space programme they soon started cooking up ideas for foods that astronauts could bring on spaceflights. The food needed to last without being refrigerated and not weigh too much. One of the more inventive ideas was to freeze-dry food, which removes almost all the food’s water content. The super-dried food then rehydrates in the astronaut’s mouth. The result was food that could keep for years which weighed almost nothing. Later astronauts were able to use hot water to boost the culinary merit of their space chow. And today’s space station even has a freezer for those hydrated chocolate chip goodies. But for the real freeze-dried McCoy, log on to Astronaut Foods for beef flavoured space dinners and astro-pack ice cream. Visit www.astronautfoods.com

With additional reporting by Angela M H Schuster, Editor of the Explorers Journal, and with thanks to the archivist of the Explorers Club, Dorothea Sartain, who made parts of this article possible.

Nick Smith’s feature article on the launch of the Solar Impulse aeroplane in E&T magazine

Solar powered flight grows wings

With the unveiling of the first prototype – the HB-SIA – the Solar Impulse environmentally friendly aeroplane project has entered its final test phase. Nick Smith flew (on a fossil fuel powered plane) to Switzerland to find out more

The curtains pull back to reveal the true scale what it takes to build a long-range solar-powered aircraft. Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, the two main pilots of the Solar Impulse HB-SIA aircraft, embrace; thumbs up signs are given, arms held aloft. Meanwhile the curtains are still retracting to the walls of a hangar that could easily house a commercial passenger airliner.

The wings go on forever. And they need to: not only are they there to provide the as much lift as possible, they also provide the largest possible surface on which the solar panels that will power the aircraft are mounted. Every spare centimetre is covered. To save weight the fuselage has been designed to be minuscule relative to the wingspan, hardly bigger than a conventional glider. Make no mistake: Solar Impulse HB-SIA is a huge presence. And it’s not even the size of the aircraft that the team will use to fly around the world using nothing but the power of the sun.

During Piccard’s presentation, fact after startling fact emerges. With the wingspan of a Boeing 747-400, the Solar Impulse aeroplane weighs less than an average family car (1,600kg). Close to 12,000 wing-mounted solar panels supply renewable energy to four electric motor gondolas that propel the plane. During the day these panels will also charge the lithium-polymer batteries that will supply power for the night-phase of Solar Impulse’s flight. With the batteries weighing in at 400kg – a quarter of the plane’s total weight – getting the balance right has been one of the key challenges in developing the aircraft.

Piccard explained that the HB-SIA is the first prototype in the Solar Impulse project. In order to save weight and space, the aircraft’s cabin is unpressurised (restricting the maximum height to 8,500m), and this is where the test pilots will assess the feasibility of a complete day-night-day flight over 36 hours, propelled only by electricity generated on board by solar power technology. After fine-tuning, the aircraft is scheduled to make the first of a series of three types of test flights before the end of the year, cumulating in a maiden night flight in Switzerland in 2010.

The prototype has three main objectives. The first is to validate the results of the computer simulations and materials selection decisions. The flight will see how the aircraft performs in real life. Attaining a 63m wingspan with the necessary rigidity, lightness and flight controllability with just 1,600kg take-off weight is an aeronautical challenge that has never been achieved to date. And the flight will show how efficient the energy capture and storage system really is.

The results from the test flights will be fed into specification changes for the second aircraft – the HB-SIB – that will carry out the actual project mission of circumnavigating the world in five stages, each lasting several days, in 2012.

Bertrand Piccard is one of the great explorers of the modern era, perhaps most famous for the first ever non-stop circumnavigation of the globe by balloon. Accompanied by aeronaut Brian Jones, Piccard’s Breitling Orbiter 3 landed in Egypt after a 45,755 km flight lasting 19 days, 21 hours and 47 minutes, prompting the pilots to co-write the best-selling book ‘Around the World in 20 Days’. But it could have all gone so badly wrong. It was the realisation that the whole project could have been scuppered by lack of fuel that drove him to attempt a further circumnavigation flight – only this time without the use of fossil fuel or its attendant polluting emissions. Solar Impulse was born.

Piccard, who is not known for his ease with measured understatement, said: “If an aircraft is able to fly day and night without fuel, propelled only by solar energy, let no one claim that it is impossible to do the same thing for motor vehicles, heating and air conditioning systems and computers. Through this project we are proclaiming our conviction that a pioneering spirit and political vision can together change society and put an end to fossil fuel dependency.”

In summarising the achievement of the 50 staff employed by the project and the hundreds of experts and advisers who have co-ordinated the technology behind Solar Impulse, Piccard’s colleague Borschberg kept his feet on more solid ground: “A challenge like Solar Impulse,” he said, “can be met only by bringing together engineers from every background.”

At the unveiling of the aircraft the Solar Impulse company hosted a display of some of the components, materials and electronics that went into making the HB-SIA. These include carbon fibre structural pieces such as the wing ribs that give the aerodynamic profile. Despite being so light they can be easily lifted with just your little finger, perhaps the most interesting item is a cockpit instrumentation panel that is effectively a power status summary indicator. Parameters such as rpm and temperature are clearly shown for the four wing-mounted engines, but there is also a series of slider bars that show the condition of batteries or energy accumulators. The batteries are, of course, crucial to the success of the circumnavigation because this is where the surplus energy generated during the day will be stored to power the night-time flying.

Beneath the wings are four gondolas, each containing a 10HP motor, a lithium-polymer battery set and a management system controlling charge/discharge and temperature (represented in the cockpit on the instrument display). The thermal insulation has been designed to conserve the heat radiated by the batteries and to keep them functioning despite the outside air temperature of -40C at 8,500m (roughly the height of Mount Everest). Each engine is fitted with a reducer that limits the rotation of each of the 3.5m diameter, twin-bladed propeller to within the range of 200-4,000rpm (another parameter displayed inside the cockpit).

The energy is gathered by 11,628 monocrystalline silicon cells plastered all over the upper surfaces of the wings and horizontal stabiliser at the rear of the plane. Each cell is 150 microns thick, and has been selected for its light-weight and flexibility. But not, it would seem, for its efficiency. At 22 per cent, the Solar Impulse technical documentation is first to admit, these are nowhere near the most efficient available, but the additional weight required to improve efficiency would have thrown out the mathematical balancing act and the less efficient option won out on other considerations. The designers say that the maximum energy density for the aircraft prototype is 220Wh/kg and only the test flights will be able to provide clues as to whether this needs to be improved upon.

There is only a relatively small part of the day when the solar panels are illuminated at such an angle that they are operating at full efficiency. At midday, each square metre of the wing surface receives the equivalent of 1,000 watts of light power. Over the course of a day this averages out at just 250W/m ². With 200m² of photovoltaic cells and with 12 per cent total efficiency of the propulsion chain, the aircraft’s engines achieve, even after extreme optimisation of the energy chain, an average of just 8 HP, which is about the same power as a 50cc motorcycle. Or, in aeronautical terms, roughly the same amount of power the Wright brothers had available to them in 1903 when they made their first powered flight. The difference is that Solar Impulse is generating its own power on board from renewable resources.

Energy management aside, one of the most critical developments has been the electronic instrumentation panel in the cockpit. This allows the pilot to monitor the condition of the flight in two key parameters – ‘bank-angle’ and ‘side-slip’. The Omega instrument panel was the brainchild of Claude Nicollier, former European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut, with four space flights under his belt as well as an eight-hour EVA (spacewalk) to his name. Nicollier also sits on the Swatch Group board of directors that has provided financial assistance for the project, as well as the technical expertise to develop a performance simulation and testing system for the aeroplane’s propulsion chain. Omega already had the technical experience in the field of hybrid propulsion, but, more importantly, was in a position to align its own reputation for engineering excellence in the field of high-end horology with an environmentally friendly sustainable energy project.

“I came up with the idea for what we needed from the instrumentation and I made a drawing to show how I thought it could be implemented,” said Nicollier, demonstrating a prototype schematic at the Dübendorf airfield launch. According to Nicollier, there are two fundamental aspects to the instrument. First, there is a precise indication to the pilot of the bank-angle. This is a critical parameter on Solar Impulse, because, according to Nicollier: “Ninety nine per cent of the turns will be made with a bank-angle of less than 5 degrees. If you go beyond 10 degrees it becomes a little bit more difficult to recover. From our simulations we know that if you go beyond 15 or 20 degrees then you cannot recover. You will end up in a spiral dive and you will have to jump out.”

Second, because of Solar Impulse’s large wing-span to length of fuselage ratio, there is the tendency to pronounced sideslip, an error where the plane drifts off course relative to the direction in which it is pointing – in other words, it won’t go in the direction it’s being steered. Nicollier, who will be taking part in the later phases of the test flights, says that in the early simulator runs there was sideslip of up to 15 degrees, “which means that, because you are flying pretty slowly, as you approach a runway, you will not immediately be able to figure out which direction the aeroplane’s flying.” To indicate sideslip, Nicollier has devised an array of blue LEDs with a green light superimposed that tells the pilot at a glance whether he is good to land.

The wider environmental implications of a flagship technical challenge such as Solar Impulse is largely symbolic, giving bodies such as the European Commission a platform to display their green credentials. And there’s no doubt that Bertrand Piccard has made the most of the opportunity to display technology as a force for environmental sustainability. Piccard and Borschberg are travelling the world spreading the word. At the Beijing Olympics they presented Solar Impulse, and they have taken models to India and the UAE. Along the way they have been helped by a group of high profile ambassadors, including Prince Albert II of Monaco, Buzz Aldrin, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Paulo Coelho and Al Gore.

But it is probably the quietly spoken Nicollier who makes the message clearest. “We have not really made any quantum jumps in technology here today,”he said, “but what we have done is used technology at the limit of what is do-able. Ten years ago it was impossible. In ten years it will be much, much easier. If we can use stronger, lighter materials with more efficient energy management systems drawing on renewable resources, we are simply engineering for a better future.”

Solar Impulse HB-SIA – technical datasheet

Wingspan                  63.40m

Length                         21.85m

Height                          6.40m

Weight                         1,600kg

Motor power               4 x 10 HP electric engines

Solar cells                    11,628 (10,748 on wing, 880 on horizontal stabiliser)

Ave. flying speed        70km/h

Take-off speed            35km/h

How Solar Impulse got off the ground

1999 – Birth of an idea. Idea of Solar Impulse comes to Bertrand Piccard as his first round-the-world balloon flight nearly fails due to lack of fuel.

2001-2003 ­– Scientific support. Piccard scours world researching solar power technology and meeting solar aviation specialists. Teams up with André Borschberg. Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) agrees to conduct feasibility study.

2004 – Birth of a company. Solar Impulse SA is founded on 29 June 2004. Core technology team assembled and scientific partnership agreements are signed with EPFL, the European Space Agency (ESA) and Dassault Aviation. Dassault commit to review design of Solar Impulse while providing expertise in fields of aeroelasticity and flight commands, safety and systems reliability.

2004-2007 – Project start-up. Private asset management company Semper become first official supporter, while Belgian industrial group Solvay join as first main partner, providing innovative materials, modelling and simulation. Altran join as engineering partner offering project and risk management as well as aerospace expertise. May 2006 Swiss watch manufacturer Omega join team bringing with them technical expertise of former ESA astronaut Claude Nicollier, who develops instrumentation crucial to landing the plane. Feasibility study confirms that an aeroplane with large wingspan and high aerodynamic efficiency is possible.

2007 – Growing wings. After 4 years of research, Piccard and Borschberg present the final design of the first prototype, HB-SIA. Virtual flight mission in May confirms that the battery arrays can store sufficient energy to run engines all night. Pilot training starts.

2008-2009 – Construction assembly tests. Assembly of cockpit and tail boom begin in September 2008. Central wingspar is made from three rectangular carbon fibre and honeycomb sandwich beams laid end-to-end, totalling 63 metres. Vibration tests confirm that modulus of elasticity is lower than expected; meaning that structural rigidity of Solar Impulse is stronger than expected.

2010-2012 – Flight of tomorrow. After six years of design, calculations, simulation and construction the HB-SIB will embark on night flight tests, culminating in the first circumnavigation of the globe by a solar powered aeroplane.

For further details about the Solar Impulse project visit www.solarimpulse.com