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"If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction."
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Is it possible to jump out of a supersonic plane traveling at 2,000 miles per hour so high above the Earth that it is in near vacuum? Not as far as the Norheimans were concerned.
This is a very early reference in science fiction to the idea of ablative cooling applied to the problem of dissipating heat upon reentry. The idea of having a flexible device that can be used by a single individual appears to be Smith's.
He probably got the idea from a careful reading of Robert H. Goddard's works:
Here's another early reference from around 1952 from the RAND corporation:
The US Centennial of Flight Commission has this to say:
Something similar to this was designed by Goodyear in the seventies- the concept was that this was an inflatable "escape pod" that could be used in emergencies. Space suits were required.
Airmat Compare to the braking disks from A Daring Trip to Mars (1931) by Max Valier. Comment/Join this discussion ( 3 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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