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"The bottom line in the Dune trilogy is: beware of heroes. Much better to rely on your own judgment, and your own mistakes."
- Frank Herbert
 |
| Guided Missile Control Station | ||
| An orbital missile base. |
This is an early description of what today is called an orbital weapons platform.
| Circum-Terra was a great confused mass in the sky. It had been built, rebuilt, added to, and modified over the course of years for a dozen different purposes - weather observation station, astronomical observatory, meteor count station, television relay, guided missile control station, high-vacuum strain-free physics laboratory, strain-free germ-free biological experiment station, and many other uses...
"Don't you realize that the war is already over? Man, this place isn't just a traffic depot; it's the main guided-missile control station. They can bomb every last city on Earth from here, like ducks in a pond!" |
| Technovelgy from Between Planets,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1951 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the space station from Flaming Frontiers (1934) by Bernard Buley. See also the discussion of the space platform from E.B. White's excellent 1950 short story The Morning of the Day for an earlier example.
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'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
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'...copy was turned out in a charming and entirely feminine handwriting.'
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