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"I feel like I've been very fortunate in that I've stuck like a burr to the dog-leg of the next generation of nerdism. I've been carried into the XXIth century on Bill Gates' pants-cuff."
- William Gibson
 |
| Rocketeering | ||
| Racing around in rockets |
| Rocketeering, you know, is a lot more
than just blasting the jets and lancing
straight up and out into cosmic space.
Have you ever seen a man-carrying skycraft that didn’t take a run? The old
aeroplane, autogyro, helicopter — which
didn’t simply blast into the air, but ac-
celerated slowly upward — liquid-powered rocket or gyrotomic? Spaceships
must also take a run, unless you want
the human cargo inside to suffer a miniature egg-scrambling at every take-off.
Steinfahl, of course, used the predestined method of checking recoil and thrust-pressure in later rockets: the old twin hull idea. But that necessitated a freely suspended inner chamber, plus intricate hydraulic shock absorbers connected to the outer hull. |
| Technovelgy from Ra For The Rajah,
by John Victor Peterson. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1938 Additional resources -
|
See also rocketeer from Sunward Flight (1943) by Leo Zagat, in the sense of a person who pilots rockets.
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| 'If Anyone Is Watching Earth...' |
| Cloud Of Space Rubbish From China's Long March Rocket |
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| The United States Space Academy Is Official |
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'Our study of your race has convinced us that you are not fitted to leave your planet in the present state of your civilization.'
'...the spreading beam of the deranging ray struck them, and Then one toppled and fell. Then another.'
'Within seconds the material was spread out over fifty yards, in a matter of hours it might occupy several cubic miles of space...'
'The men are dead, but their acquired wisdom lives on and I am the beneficiary.'
'Young people found the driverless car admirable for petting.'
'After twenty generations of shillyshallying...'
