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"Generally, the human race avoids doing anything radical until forced into it."
- Frederik Pohl

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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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Ra For The Rajah
  More Ideas and Technology by John Victor Peterson
  Tech news articles related to Ra For The Rajah
  Tech news articles related to works by John Victor Peterson

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