He joined the board of the National Space Society, for instance. Unfortunately, nobody with any power, financial or political, wanted to listen. It was a vision he shared with a handful of others, inside and outside NASA: how, with a little imagination, the Solar System could, after all, be opened up for colonization, with the Moon as the key. “Then,” he said, “once you are on the Moon, there’s oxygen, and water, and materials for rocket fuel, and materials to make glass and concrete…Once you are on the Moon, with all those resources out of Earth’s deep, heavy gravity well, hell, you can go anywhere!” It would take longer to get there than the three days it had taken him, but that wasn’t necessarily a problem, for it would be a fraction of the cost in fuel and mass in low Earth orbit. If you gave your spacecraft the right kind of push, in the right direction, at the right time, you could use that instability to make your spacecraft drift to the Moon. For instance, orbits of spacecraft passing between the Earth and the Moon were actually unstable, because of the tweakings of the lumpy gravity fields of Earth, Moon and sun. Jays had said on a multitude of talk shows how he was dismayed by the Shuttle program-a clumsy, compromised, primitive design, just a V–2 with air conditioning, it seemed to him-and by the lack of any serious consideration being given to any more advanced follow-up.įor the fact was there were smarter ways to get into space, to reach the Moon and beyond. Of course, propagandizing was exactly what Jays was doing. If the book is out of print, second-hand copies can often be found via In that case, look up the story or novel in The Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Thirdly I tend to use novels that I personally think are forgotten and under-rated classsics, hoping you will be intrigued enough to look up a copy of the novel. Secondly it gives a bit of "slice of life" illustration of how the concept relates to the world of the novel. This not only makes the concept more clear, it also allows one to see it happening in context. I illustrate many concepts with quotes from science fiction novels. So don't complain if you find yourself reading the same thing twice. That way people will not have to jump around so much. If your disagreement survives, I will incorporate your contributions.īe told: since this site is so huge, and people tend to just look at one or two pages, I found it useful to repeat identical stretches of text on several pages. Be warned, those people are hard SF pros so be respectful or face the consequences. The Usenet newsgroup .science or the IO group SFConSim-l and present your case there. If you still disagree, your best bet is to go to the ToughSF server on Discord, If you disagree with something you read on this site, first check this page. There is some controversy over a few technical details on this site. Double check any yellow figures yourself before using them. Since I have been known to make stupid mistakes in arithmetic I label my calculated figures in yellow like this. In the data blocks I sometime do calculations to fill in missing figures (mostly calculating exhaust velocity given specific impulse). I write the paraphrasing sections for the benefit of people who are not familiar with aerospace and nuclear physics terminology, jargon, and phrasing (i.e., I'm trying to translate the material from Science Speak into English, and pointing out subtle easy-to-miss ramifications). I do my best to include hot links to the primary sources for that very reason. Serious students who encounter interesting concepts in this website are encouraged to go to the primary sources for the real information, instead of relying upon my paraphrasing and possibly-out-of-context quotations. I do it all alone with little or no help (except for those kind souls who point out inaccuracies, alternate data, later developements, and spelling mistakes). See me as sort of a scribe, not so much as an author.Īnd despite what some of you believe, this website is not written by a team of people, it is just me. Frankly this website is a glorified term paper. This is the " stone soup" method of website design, with me supplying the stones. However, if I do put inaccurate information on this site, occasionally Internet readers will send me corrections. Any and all of the information on these pages may be incorrect or inaccurate.īut since I have yet to find a website like this written by a real live rocket scientist, I had to write it myself, as unqualified as I am. DISCLAIMER: I am not a rocket scientist, merely an amateur that has read a lot of books.
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