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"If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Pneumatic Suit | ||
| An airtight spacesuit. |
Very thorough description of a space suit; see additional comments for other references.
| "There is one thing I do not yet understand, Gus. How in the world can a person live in a spaceship, in which he has none of the prerequisites for existence, air, pressure, heat and even weight?"
"...naturally the crew must be able to leave the spaceship." "On the airless moon?" "Not only on the moon but also during the trip through space, sir!" Isn't that a mere fancy said the Russian skeptically. He regarded the scheme as madness. Korf opened the doors of the chamber built into the wall, entirely finished in rubber and provided with an airtight door. "Two things (aside from cold which can be overcome) seem to make a stay in space impossible for human beings; the absence of pressure and the lack of air. I'm going to pump the air from this room, which really amounts to nothing more than a laboratory flask on a large scale, so that the interior will be like airless and pressure-less space." With great excitement the visitors watched Korff take from the drawer a bundle, which he opened up. "This is a suit made from rubberized leather, like a diving suit, and absolutely airtight. By means of a special air magazine so much air is constantly produced in the suit that there is a constant pressure of one atmosphere, regardless of the external pressure.
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| Technovelgy from The Shot Into Infinity,
by Otto Willi Gail. Published by Science Wonder Quarterly in 1929 Additional resources -
|
As far as I know, the earliest specific reference to the idea of a space suit is in Edison's Conquest of Mars, an 1898 novel by Garrett P. Serviss; see this article on air-tight dress.
The earliest use of the phrase "space suit" that I've found is from The Emperor of the Stars. a 1931 short story by the great team of Schachner and Zagat.; see space suit. Also, see the somewhat less formal space overalls from Lost Rocket, a short story by Manly Wade Wellman.
Compare to these other early space suit references;
the air-tight suit from Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898) by Garrett P. Serviss, the pneumatic suit from The Shot into Infinity (1929) by Otto Willi Gail, the altitude suit from The Black Star Passes by John W. Campbell and the Osprey Space Armor from Salvage in Space (1933) by Jack Williamson.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Shot Into Infinity
More Ideas
and Technology by Otto Willi Gail
Tech news articles related to The Shot Into Infinity
Tech news articles related to works by Otto Willi Gail
| The New Habitable Zones Include Asimov's Ribbon Worlds |
| Will Space Stations Have Large Interior Spaces Again? |
| Reflect Orbital Offers 'Sunlight on Demand' And Light Pollution |
| Chrysalis Generation Ship to Alpha Centauri |
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'...each of them is a neural mapping of the mind of a Tibetan monk who actually lived.'
'...there's a narrow belt where the climate is moderate.'
'The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain, through the mediation of the electronic brain in the leg.'
'... every veephone on the continent would display, over and over, two propositions.'
'Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty meters. No recoil...'
'He wore spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.'
