Word: spaceship
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Shooting any sort of projectile beyond the earth's gravitational field would take enormous energy. Prewar energy sources could barely do it, even in theory. One calculation: a 100-ton spaceship would need nearly 8,000 tons of gasoline and liquid oxygen to toss it into space...
...German film trust, hired the Professor to help produce a spaceship movie called The Girl in the Moon. As a publicity stunt for the movie's premiere, Oberth was to launch a tremendous rocket of his own design at a deserted spot on the Baltic coast. The rocket failed to go off and the humiliated professor retired from public view...
...death ray, always exciting to laymen, is an old familiar to scientists. After the interplanetary "spaceship," it is probably the most popular gadget in pseudo-scientific fiction. Even in Herbert George Wells's shrewdly written War of the Worlds (1898), the first act of arriving Martians is to spray spectators with a death beam. In real life death rays have been announced time & again, but never convincingly demonstrated. When one Harry Grinnell-Matthews loudly announced a death ray some years ago in England, Physicist Robert Williams Wood of Johns Hopkins said he would stand 65 ft. from the apparatus...