Saturday, September 10, 2022

"Saturn Rising", six decades later

Nyrath has directed us to Arthur C. Clarke's minor work "Saturn Rising" which we may read in Fantasy & Science Fiction 20.3 (1961), archived. How's it doing in 2021? (Or in 2023.)

Clarke was of course over-optimistic about how the US (or USSR) space-programme could achieve any of this. I am unsure this is NASA's fault; we needed much better robotics than anyone had in the 1960s or even 1990s, to re-use the rockets so's to make spaceflight practical. Well okay; a bit of it is NASA's fault, for letting Congress design their "Space Shuttle" for them . . .

Also Clarke got Titan wrong, imagining a methane atmosphere with ammonia snow. The inner moons were, likewise, deemed fluffballs which they are not. And you'd think somebody would have mused about Enceladus as an ammoniate Europa-ulterior.

On the plus side: the rockets do use methane, which was science-fiction at the time, but now being successfully tested at Boca. (It's the launchpad that needs work, down there.) And heck with pulling methane from the atmosphere; at Titan, you scoop it from the lakes.

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