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"I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development."
- Arthur C. Clarke
 |
| 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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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
