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"[Science fiction is] nightmares and visions, always outlined by the barely possible."
- Gregory Benford
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| 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.
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.
Going above the ecliptic was also recommended to avoid asteroids in Recoil (1943) by George O. Smith.
Compare to space-lanes from Crashing Suns (1928) by Edmond Hamilton.
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'I request that you feed the correlation between those dots and the levers of the panel into my memory banks.'
