In some mid-20th-century science-fiction novels, people in the 21st century are piloting rockets by manual control, using slide rules to calculate trajectories.
I remember a moment like this in Asimov’s Foundation series, a series set in a far-off setting of a galaxy-spanning empire built on easy interstellar travel. At one point a couple gets on board their personal interstellar space ship. As they’re getting on, the husband tells his wife to go cook dinner.
Oh, and for an added bonus, their ash trays are nuclear powered.
Yep. I was thinking of Heinlein’s 1952 The Rolling Stones, where the person doing the timing calls out commands to the person controlling the engines, like an old-timey sea captain. (And in German, despite being an English-speaking family, because rocketry is German, donchaknow: Brennschluss!)
In some mid-20th-century science-fiction novels, people in the 21st century are piloting rockets by manual control, using slide rules to calculate trajectories.
I remember a moment like this in Asimov’s Foundation series, a series set in a far-off setting of a galaxy-spanning empire built on easy interstellar travel. At one point a couple gets on board their personal interstellar space ship. As they’re getting on, the husband tells his wife to go cook dinner.
Oh, and for an added bonus, their ash trays are nuclear powered.
Yep. I was thinking of Heinlein’s 1952 The Rolling Stones, where the person doing the timing calls out commands to the person controlling the engines, like an old-timey sea captain. (And in German, despite being an English-speaking family, because rocketry is German, donchaknow: Brennschluss!)