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Will A Steel Umbrella Stop Russia?
This cool tweet (* now extinct, from Fred Kiesche *) made the rounds this past week:
(A steel umbrella for Earth!)
This graphic came from an issue of Amazing Stories published in April of 1953, credited to artist Jack Coggins.
Concerns about an armed space platform had surfaced a few years earlier. In his 1950 short story The Morning of the Day They Did It published in The New Yorker in 1950, author E.B. White paints a chilling picture. Yes, the same E.B. White who wrote children's classic Stewart Little.
We had arranged a radio hookup with the space platform, a gadget the Army had succeeded in establishing six hundred miles up, in the regions of the sky beyond the pull of gravity. The army, after many years of experimenting with rockets, had not only got the platform established but had sent two fellows there in a Spaceship, and also a liberal supply of the New Weapon.
(Read more about E.B. White's space platform)
Not to be outdone, the Russians are planning a real life space platform; see the article Russians Plan New Space Platform, which offers more detail and drawings from early concepts about this idea.
Thanks to @FredKiesche for posting this forgotten classic.
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