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"I was involved in a cloning project. .. to send me into outer space along with a lot of other people. Not the whole me - just a hair from my head, while I still had some. I would thus pop up in another galaxy in the distant future."
- Arthur C. Clarke
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| 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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'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
