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"This category [science fiction] excludes rocket ships that make U-turns, serpent men of Neptune that lust after human maidens, and stories by authors who flunked their Boy Scout merit badge tests in descriptive astronomy."
- Robert Heinlein
 |
| Space-Weather Men | ||
| Predictors of the 'weather' in space. |
As far as I know, the first use of this phrase.
| Space-weather men had been placed at their disposal, had plotted their course to take advantage of weather. The four-hundred-inch scope on Rainer had been used for three months previous to the strat (sic) of the flight, radar-electronic recording devices had measured and calculated the exact path they had to take, had looked far enough into the future for them so that they knew just what to expect. |
| Technovelgy from Revenge of the Robots,
by Lawrence Chandler. Published by Fantastic Adventures in 1952 Additional resources -
|
Don't miss the description of a space weather map from The Storm by AE van Vogt, published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1943 (note that the phrase "space weather" does not occur in that story).
Here's an interesting article from Space Weather journal The Origin of Space Weather:
The astronomer John Herschel, the son of William Herschel (the discoverer of infrared radiation and the planet Uranus), appears to be the earliest to use terms similar to space weather. Writing in 1847 of his observations of sunspots, he uses “solar meteorology” and makes an analogy to terrestrial meteorology...
So what about the actual term space weather? There are several instances of the term being used in the 1950s with each instance having a slightly different meaning. We believe the distinction of the first appearance goes to Fred Hague, a junior high school teacher, in an article written for the Journal of Geography in 1953. In “Motivation Via Video,” Hague writes about using a scenario of aliens visiting the Earth as a way of learning geography [Hague, 1953]. In discussing questions the aliens might ask, he writes “would the climate be suitable for us since we are used to outer space weather?” This is unlikely to have been widely read by the space science community, so it is doubtful that this is the source of space weather as we know it today.
However, it appears that Lawrence Chandler got there first!
Compare also to the interstellar storm from The Storm (1943) by AE van Vogt.
Although “space weather” is a fairly recent term, there is a rich history of similar terms being used beginning in the middle to late 1800s. “Solar meteorology,” “magnetic weather,” and “cosmic meteorology” all appeared during that time frame. The actual first appearance of space weather can be attributed to the publication Science News Letter in 1957 (with the first modern usage in 1959) and was possibly coined by the editor at the time, Watson Davis...
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Revenge of the Robots
More Ideas
and Technology by Lawrence Chandler
Tech news articles related to Revenge of the Robots
Tech news articles related to works by Lawrence Chandler
Space-Weather Men-related
news articles:
- Space Weather Forecasters Surprised By Strong Solar Storm
- NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory Sees Extreme Flare
| Will Space Stations Have Large Interior Spaces Again? |
| Reflect Orbital Offers 'Sunlight on Demand' And Light Pollution |
| Chrysalis Generation Ship to Alpha Centauri |
| The First Space Warship For Space Force |
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