fancy
Haha...that's awesome. I had to enlarge it just to see if Dale Brown was the author (although it's probably a few years before he was popular).It also ties in nicely with the article mentioned recently in the Buran thread about how the Soviets were going to steal Skylab.
That's interesting.Is there a history of the RMS?
The remote manipulator arm ran almost the length of the cargo bay, a jointed tube fifty feet long. It was absurdly thin for its length and the motors in its joints were scarcely able to move its own weight now. Because it was designed for operation in space only, in free fall, beyond the reach of gravity. At its far end was a jaw-like mechanism designed to seize cargo and lift it free.
Okay, maybe this is heading off in a tangent, but is Skyfall the first fictional portrayal of space based solar power?Somebody asked me awhile back if the idea originated in fiction and then transitioned to more serious engineering literature, as many space ideas have. I believe the first serious discussion of SPS was in the late 1960s or so (I'm too lazy to look it up). Did any sci-fi writers mention it before then?
Quote from: Blackstar on 09/27/2009 04:02 pmOkay, maybe this is heading off in a tangent, but is Skyfall the first fictional portrayal of space based solar power?Somebody asked me awhile back if the idea originated in fiction and then transitioned to more serious engineering literature, as many space ideas have. I believe the first serious discussion of SPS was in the late 1960s or so (I'm too lazy to look it up). Did any sci-fi writers mention it before then?Isaac Asimov's "Reason" (1941) is the oldest story I could remember offhand, but I'm sure it goes back much farther than that. A lot of the SF I write is fairly recursive (i.e., mentions earlier uses of similar ideas within the story), so I do a lot of research, and frequently find out ideas can be very old indeed. Most ideas are older than the name "science fiction" (or its ancestor, "scientifiction"), and many go back so far as to become untraceable.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason_(short_story)