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Elon Musk STILL Wants To Make Heinlein's 1940's Speedster
In his wonderful 1941 novel Methuselah's Children, science fiction writer Robert Heinlein described a car with rocket boost - the Camden Speedster:
She started the car again and zigzagged toward the barrier through
the stopped or slowly moving traffic.
As she neared the barrier the car
surged and lifted, clearing its top by
a negligible margin. She set it
down rolling on the far side...
Lazarus finally let his jaw muscles
relax and breathed out gustily.
“Whew!” he sighed. “I hope we
won’t have to do that again.”
She looked at him, grinning.
“What’s the trouble? Do women
drivers make you nervous?”
Elon Musk has been working on this idea (in his mind, at least) for years. In fact, he was talking about it with Joe Rogan just last week:
If anyone can bring the Camden Speedster to market, it's Elon Musk.
Via TheVerge.
[Mary] peered
out and studied the controlway.
The flexosteel barrier separating
them from the adjacent local control
strip was about a hundred yards to their right but no changeover ramp
broke its length for at least a mile
— and that, naturally, was under the
eye of its associated traffic tower.
“I want it to hover, and I was trying to figure out how to make this thing hover without, you know, killing people,” Musk told Joe Rogan in a new episode of of the Joe Rogan Experience released Thursday. “Maybe it can hover like a meter above the ground, or something like that. If you plummet it’ll blow out the suspension but you’re not gonna die.”
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