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"My feeling is that the chance of our surviving into the twenty-first century as working civilization is less than fifty percent but greater than zero."
- Isaac Asimov

Momentum Screen  
  Allows a spacemen to avoid the problem of "high gee" forces on take-off.  

A clever twist on the idea of artificial gravity, or a gravity shield, inside a spacecraft.

The two wipers jumped to their bunks, threw up a lever and lay down. I followed suit; in a few seconds there was a grinding roar and our beds slid on quadrantal rollers up against the bulkhead. There was a moment of crushing weight and just when I thought I'd never get the strength to draw in another breath, the beds slid back off the bulkhead and were parallel with the floor again. In those days the momentum screens were inoperable inside the Heaviside Layer, and during the few seconds it took to get outside, the acceleration was really rough...
Technovelgy from Completely Automatic, by Theodore Sturgeon.
Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1941
Additional resources -

The Heaviside layer (also called the Kennelly-Heaviside layer) is a layer of ionized gas that occurs at about 56-93 miles above the earth's surface. It makes possible radio waves that can propagate beyond line-of-sight.

Compare to the gravity screen from Edmond Hamilton's 1929 classic Crashing Suns.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Completely Automatic
  More Ideas and Technology by Theodore Sturgeon
  Tech news articles related to Completely Automatic
  Tech news articles related to works by Theodore Sturgeon

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