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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
 |
| Extraecliptic Travel Lanes | ||
| Organized interplanetary travel using routes not confined to the ecliptic. |
The ecliptic is the extension or projection of the plane of the Earth's orbit out towards the sky.
| It is described as an elongated ellipsoid of about five million miles along major axis and the gravitic equivalent at center is estimated to be of the order of several thousand megabars. Correspondingly strong ‘highs’ have been detected both above and below it as well as in front of and behind it, so that extraecliptic travel lanes are as impassable as the usual ones. |
| Technovelgy from A Question of Salvage,
by Malcolm Jameson. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1939 Additional resources -
|
The use of the word "extraecliptic" is quite unusual, and this is probably the first appearance in science fiction. You might find it in texts about astrology or surveying earlier in the 20th century.
There are several earlier uses of this idea, although without the fancy nomenclature. For example, in Moon People Of Jupiter, Isaac Nathanson writes:
He was navigating the “Martian" so that its course was parallel with, yet somewhat out of the plane of the ecliptic, to minimize the ever possible danger of collision with any of the innumerable small moving bodies known to be coursing around the sun.
In the 1939 Lester del Rey story Habit, racing rockets head from Mars to a point above the ecliptic, down to Jupiter and back to Mars.
Isaac Asimov calls it "the hop" in Marooned Off Vesta (1939):
“What’s the ‘hop’?” asked Brandon.
“Oh, I take it that friend Mike means that we should have avoided the asteroid belt by plotting a course outside the plane of the ecliptic,” answered Moore.
Going above the ecliptic was also recommended to avoid asteroids in Calling the Empress (1943) by George O. Smith:
Compare to space-lanes from Crashing Suns (1928) by Edmond Hamilton.
It was Commander Lowell’s plan to continue increasing our speed till we had attained a velocity of 28 miles per second. At that rate, counting the days taken for acceleration as well as retardation, his plans would bring us within landing distance of Mars in about twenty days.
“You’ve got to expect things like this to happen sometimes,” he said. “Bucking the asteroids is risky business. We should’ve taken the hop. It takes longer, but it’s the only safe way. But no, the Captain wanted to make the schedule; he would go through,” Mike spat disgustedly, “and here we are.”
Her course, as we see it from the Station here, will be a long radius upward curve, slightly on the parabolic side. Like all long-range cruises, the Empress of Kolain will hoist herself above the plane of the ecliptic to avoid the swarm of meteors that follow about the Sun in the same plane as the planets, lifting the highest at the point of greatest velocity.
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