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"Retire? Yeah, I want to die with my head in the typewriter. That's my idea of retirement."
- Alfred Bester
 |
| Lyle Drive | ||
| Propulsion system for use inside the solar system. |
| The Federation Ship Champion, manned by an all-male crew of eighteen experienced spacemen and carrying more than that number of male pioneers, made the crossing under Lyle Drive in only nineteen days. The Champion landed just south of Lacus Soli, as Captain van Tromp intended to search for the Envoy. |
| From Stranger in a Strange Land,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Putnam in 1961 Additional resources -
|
Heinlein does not provide a description of how this propulsion system works; however, he compares it to the method still in use today:
At that time, only eight Terran years after the founding of the first human colony on Luna, any interplanetary trip made by humans necessarily had to be made in weary free-fail orbits, doubly tangent semi-ellipses--from Terra to Mars, two hundred fifty-eight days, the same for the return journey, plus four hundred fifty-five days waiting at Mars while the two planets crawled slowly back into relative positions which would permit shaping the doubly-tangent orbit-a total of almost three Earth years.
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Lyle Drive-related
news articles:
- 30-Day Trip To Mars?
| Elon Musk Tweets Versions Of Clarke's Operation Cleanup |
| Espresso Telescope Searches For Exoplanets |
| Manned Maneuvering Unit From 1984 |
| Astronaut Gets Younger In Space |
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SF writers have thought about this since the 19th century.
