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"The point sticks in your head: physics rules. Virtue does not triumph unless the physics allows it."
- Larry Niven
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| Space Station | ||
| A base of operations in space, typically in orbit around a larger body. |
As far as I know, the first use of this phrase in a science fiction story (see below).
| Challis, sitting cramped and stiff in the pilot seat, shook his head against the numbing lethargy of cold. He listened again to the hoarse, droning voice of old Stanislav at the klystron-beam communicator:
“Experimental Rocket Venus III calling Space Station A. Please relay to Captain Dent, Antarctica Station. We are down in Liberator Crater. Generator burned out. Main communicator dead. Please rush relief.” |
| Technovelgy from Backlash,
by Jack Williamson. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1941 Additional resources -
|
This phrase was attributed by Hugo Gernsback to physicist Hermann Oberth, who described "revolving space stations" in the April 1930 edition of Air Wonder Stories:
It might be asked : what useful purpose would be served by converting a space-flyer into a permanent, rapidly-revolving satellite of the earth in this manner?
Professor Hermann Oberth, perhaps the greatest authority on interplanetary space, points out many uses for such revolving “space stations,” as he calls them. A better word, perhaps, would be “revolving space observatories.”
In the first place, from such a height, it will be possible to make any amount of astronomical observations in free space without having to worry about clouds or the interference of the atmosphere. Marvellous photographs can thus be taken, not only of distant stars and planets, but of the earth’s surface as well.
One important purpose, as Professor Oberth points out, is the invaluable aid that such an observatory can give > to the science of meteorology, or weather prediction, as it is more popularly known.
Once the space flyer has reached the critical speed, it will continue to revolve around the earth — in a period of less than two hours at this distance — exactly as the moon now revolves about us, and without the need of added propulsive force.
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