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Elon Musk STILL Wants To Make Heinlein's 1940's Speedster
In his wonderful 1941 novel Methuselah's Children, science fiction writer Robert Heinlein described a car with rocket boost - the Camden Speedster:
[Mary] peered out and studied the controlway. The flexosteel barrier separating them from the adjacent local control strip was about a hundred yards to their right but no changeover ramp broke its length for at least a mile — and that, naturally, was under the eye of its associated traffic tower.She started the car again and zigzagged toward the barrier through the stopped or slowly moving traffic. As she neared the barrier the car surged and lifted, clearing its top by a negligible margin. She set it down rolling on the far side...
Lazarus finally let his jaw muscles relax and breathed out gustily. “Whew!” he sighed. “I hope we won’t have to do that again.”
She looked at him, grinning. “What’s the trouble? Do women drivers make you nervous?”
Elon Musk has been working on this idea (in his mind, at least) for years. In fact, he was talking about it with Joe Rogan just last week:
“I want it to hover, and I was trying to figure out how to make this thing hover without, you know, killing people,” Musk told Joe Rogan in a new episode of of the Joe Rogan Experience released Thursday. “Maybe it can hover like a meter above the ground, or something like that. If you plummet it’ll blow out the suspension but you’re not gonna die.”
If anyone can bring the Camden Speedster to market, it's Elon Musk.
Via TheVerge.
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