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"...in fifty years, do you believe that people will be recognizably human?"
- Greg Bear
 |
| Rocketeering | ||
| Racing around in rockets |
| Rocketeering, you know, is a lot more
than just blasting the jets and lancing
straight up and out into cosmic space.
Have you ever seen a man-carrying skycraft that didn’t take a run? The old
aeroplane, autogyro, helicopter — which
didn’t simply blast into the air, but ac-
celerated slowly upward — liquid-powered rocket or gyrotomic? Spaceships
must also take a run, unless you want
the human cargo inside to suffer a miniature egg-scrambling at every take-off.
Steinfahl, of course, used the predestined method of checking recoil and thrust-pressure in later rockets: the old twin hull idea. But that necessitated a freely suspended inner chamber, plus intricate hydraulic shock absorbers connected to the outer hull. |
| Technovelgy from Ra For The Rajah,
by John Victor Peterson. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1938 Additional resources -
|
See also rocketeer from Sunward Flight (1943) by Leo Zagat, in the sense of a person who pilots rockets.
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'...the rocket’s landing-arms automatically unfolded.'
'...points and patches of light... sliding all over their faces in a programmed manner that had been designed to foil facial recognition systems.'
'...the combined Wind-Suncatcher, like a spray of tulips mounted fanwise.'
'I went to the control room where the three other men were manipulating their mechanical men.'
'The low-slung monorail car, straddling its single track, bored through the shadows on a slowly rising course.'
'It was a smooth ovoid floating a few inches from the floor...'
'... he thrust in his charging arm to replenish his store of energy.'
'...the terrible Jovian gravity that made each movement an effort.'
