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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts
 |
| Big Push | ||
| A linear accelerator built on a long track; a mass driver. |
In principle, it is kind of like having a slingshot with a rubber band that is a hundred miles long. Put your vehicle on the track, then accelerate it until it can fly off.
| Probably there will never be another funeral like Jack's. The Big Push is only a third finished, and it's still two hundred miles of the biggest linear accelerator ever built, an electronic-powered railway crawling across the Earthside face of the Moon. One day we'll use it to launch starships. |
| Technovelgy from Limits,
by Larry Niven. Published by Del Rey in 1985 Additional resources -
|
From the story Spirals by Niven and Pournelle.
The Space Studies Institute built prototype mass drivers as early as 1975; as far as I know, the concept originated with Gerard K. O'Neill in the early 1970's.
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'The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain...'
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'I ... set my automatic astronomical instruments to searching for a habitable planet.'
