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Mechazilla Arms Catch A Falling Starship, But Check Out SF Landing-ARMS
(Mechazilla Arms Catch A Falling Starship)
SpaceX's Mechazilla "chopsticks" are truly an incredible engineering feat. I love science fiction and the ability of sf writers to imagine future technology, but I can't think of any writers or engineer/authors who conceived of this idea.
However, there is an intriguing variation on the idea of landing legs - namely, landing ARMS! from Creatures of the Comet (1931) by Edmond Hamilton.
The rocket lurched and bucked, slowed. Its speed rapidly diminished, a sickening deceleration that crushed them deep in the control-chairs. The world ahead, a dark-green sphere, was shifting downward as the rocket turned in the grasp of its gravitation. They were still nearing it at terrific speed, though, with nosetubes still firing to check them...Air sang shrilly outside and Kirk’s mind automatically recorded the fact that this world had an atmosphere. The shrilling of air increased, green-clad hills and valleys rose stunningly toward them, and then at the very moment of touching Kirk’s hands flashed and the nose-tubes all blasted together with full power.
There was a shock that drove them down and then upward, an instant click and clang as the rocket’s landing-arms automatically unfolded to hold it in an erect position on the ground. Then silence.
In his 1931 story Atomic Fire, Golden Age great Raymond Z. Gallun describes a landing stage able to catch a descending spacecraft:
Aggar Ho and Sark Ahar walked over to the center of the landing stage. Here, supported by a funnel-shaped cradle was a big shiny sphere about seventy-five feet in diameter. There was a row of circular windows running horizontally around its circumference. Four cylindrical objects, looking like some kind of searchlights, were set at equal intervals around its lower hemisphere. They pointed slantingly downward at an angle of forty-five degrees with the platform. The globe was a space-flier.
(Landing Stage from 'Atomic Fire' by Raymond Z. Gallun)
Obviously, it requires a peculiarly shaped spacecraft.
Compare to the splashdown from From the Earth to the Moon (1867) by Jules Verne, landing arms from Creatures of the Comet (1931) by Edmond Hamilton, landing stage from Atomic Fire (1931) by Raymond Z. Gallun, landing cradle from The Radium World (1932) by Frank K. Kelly, landing on an asteroid from Murder on the Asteroid (1933) by Eando Binder, docking-cradle from They Never Came Back (1941) by Fritz Leiber, landing-grid from Sand Doom (1955) by Murray Leinster, landing pit from The Stars My Destination (1956) by Alfred Bester and launching cradle from Needler (1957) by Gordon Randall Garrett.
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