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"What television does is rent us friends and relatives who are quite satisfactory. This is quite something, to rent artificial friends and relatives right inside the house."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
 |
| Space Craft Rope Ladder | ||
| Equipment used for debarking from a space craft. |
Russell makes good use of the fact that, in traditional Fifties-style rockets, entrance to the rocket was gained far up on the side (when the rocket has landed on its tail).
| After scrambling down the precipitous side of the ship on a rope ladder... |
| Technovelgy from Diabologic,
by Eric Frank Russell. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1955 Additional resources -
|
There is a long (!) tradition of using ladders from the side of upright rockets that have landed on their fins. For example, in the 1932 story The Radium World, Frank K. Kelly writes:
Here's an illustration of the idea from a 1951 Galaxy magazine:
He took her arm politely, stepped out beside her on the top of the narrow steelite debarking-ladder that led down to the ground.
(Ladder to ground on tail fin rocket)
Find more illustrations on Winchell Chung's Embarking page.
Here's how the problem was solved in the 2015 film The Martian. Note that the ladder extends from the center of the bottom of the MAV (Mars Ascent Vehicle, a small shuttle ship designed to go from the surface to orbit only).
Compare to the escaladder from Neutron Star (1966) by Larry Niven.
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'The crawling... object was V-Stephen's surgeon-hand...'
'Joe got out the gravity-simulator harnesses...'
'You couldn't have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.'
'the unobtrusive inspections with tiny remote-cast snoopers...'
I'm hoping that this procedure becomes a normal part of medical practice!
'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
'...its streets were of remarkable width, with few or no buildings so high as mosques, churches, State-offices, or palaces in Tellurian cities.'
