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"The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction. You look at the world around you, and take it apart into its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Photograph of Earth from Space | ||
| An aerial photograph from outside the atmosphere. |
The first description of this that I've ever read. Also, it is the first use of satellite photography for reconnaissance that I know about.
| "I have a color photograph here."
Bill studied it, saw that it looked like an aerial photograph of a vast stretch of mountain and desert, a monotonous expanse of gray, tinged with green and red. A photograph, taken from space, of part of the state of Chihuahua, Mexico. And see!" He pointed to a little blue disk in the green-gray expanse of a plain, just below a narrow mountain ridge, with the fine green line that marked a river just beside it. "That blue circle is the first ship that came..." |
| Technovelgy from The Prince of Space,
by Jack Williamson. Published by Amazing Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
|
The first actual pictures of the Earth from space were taken on March 7, 1947:
Mengel conducted upper atmosphere experiments by launching the rockets into near-earth orbit. He designed and fabricated the first research nose shell to replace of the V-2 warhead and began placing cameras in the nose shell.
Science fiction illustrator Frank R. Paul drew this illustration for "The Voyage of the Asteroid", a story by Laurence Manning, published in Wonder Stories Quarterly in 1932.
...a group of soldiers and scientists in the New Mexico desert saw something new and wonderful in these grainy black-and-white-photos - the first pictures of Earth as seen from altitude greater than 100 miles in space. Just the year before in 1946, scientists like John T. Mengel, a NASA pioneer who later oversaw the Vanguard Program, began experimenting with captured German V-2 rockets.
(The hidden side of earth's satellite)
See also the story The Far Side Of The Moon, By NASA (2015) And By PAUL (1932).
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| Reflect Orbital Sunlight On Demand |
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'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
