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"Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket."
- George Orwell
 |
| Guided Missile Control Station | ||
| An orbital missile base. |
This is an early description of what today is called an orbital weapons platform.
| Circum-Terra was a great confused mass in the sky. It had been built, rebuilt, added to, and modified over the course of years for a dozen different purposes - weather observation station, astronomical observatory, meteor count station, television relay, guided missile control station, high-vacuum strain-free physics laboratory, strain-free germ-free biological experiment station, and many other uses...
"Don't you realize that the war is already over? Man, this place isn't just a traffic depot; it's the main guided-missile control station. They can bomb every last city on Earth from here, like ducks in a pond!" |
| Technovelgy from Between Planets,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1951 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the space station from Flaming Frontiers (1934) by Bernard Buley. See also the discussion of the space platform from E.B. White's excellent 1950 short story The Morning of the Day for an earlier example.
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'It hurtled on down with inconceivable speed until it was visible as thousands of tiny robot planes...'
'Then she looked up with a smile and moved closer to the camera.'
'... folios and tapes and playable discs of platinum alloy.'
'... another corner of his mind began to think about the shields.'
'Michel Ardan, as a Frenchman, was declared chief cook, an important function, which raised no rival.'
