Word: spaceship
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Bucket on a String. The general idea of space travel, Porter concedes, is "sound enough." Using the pull of gravity-allowing the spaceship to "fall freely"- would permit small fuel loads. Five thousand miles from earth, a satellite way station could be established, revolving continuously around the earth at 1,400 m.p.h. like a bucket on an invisible string. Moored alongside, the spaceship would require only 50% increase in speed to take it out to an elliptical orbit swinging half a million miles to the moon and back...
From here on, Porter implies, the engineers have little cause for optimism. With the moon, earth and spaceship all moving at high speed in their respective orbits, there could be no arrow-straight courses. The spaceship would have to be directed and launched so that its orbit coincided exactly with the moon's passing; an error in initial speed of a thousandth of a mile per second (5 ft.) might mean missing the moon altogether. For the moon's gravitational pull to take effect, the spaceship must first exactly match the moon's 2,278-m.p.h. speed...
...Metaluna looking like a giant pinball machine screaming "Tilt!" in seven different colors. What with dodging flaming meteors and grappling with odious mutants (half-human and half-insect monsters that have a weakness for female earthlings), Rex and Faith are mighty lucky to grab a seat on the last spaceship back to earth...
Atomic Pineapples. What makes a cocacolo? They must be students, says Semana, and from the well-to-do suburbs. They wear blue jeans, sweaters and moccasins (though mostly at home), they must dance well, and "cultivate at least five of the following tastes : comics, spaceship adventure books, U.S. jazz, iced soft drinks, the movies, the radio, sports, chewing gum or hot-rods." Most notably, they must know the vocabulary. Samples: "phantasmagoric," "atomic" or "pyramidal" (for great), "pineapple" and "mango" (for a kiss), "curse of the green turkey buzzard" and "horror, horror, three times horror!" (as all-purpose exclamations of surprise...
...earth's ring. To understand it better will help in dealing with the magnetic storms that mess up communications. When and if space flight comes, says Dr. Chapman, the ionized ring can be studied at close hand, but he does not think that it will bother a spaceship that passes through...