space platform n.

In 50 years’ time even the space platform may not appear so absurd, but it won’t take many years for the development of gunnery to a point where such aerial forts could be destroyed as they were built.

June was breathless in anticipation, especially after the marvelous mechanisms and perfect appointments she had seen in the space platform.

Businessmen who kept the space platform from being a reality offered to provide money necessary to build rockets which would carry them to safety.

We have demonstrated that space flight is possible, that a space platform is feasable.

We had arranged a radio hookup with the space platform, a gadget the Army had succeeded in establishing six hundred miles up, in the regions of the sky beyond the pull of gravity. The Army, after many years of experimenting with rockets, had not only got the platform established but had sent two fellows there in a Spaceship, and also a liberal supply of the New Weapon. The whole civilized world had read about this achievement, which swung the balance of power so heavily in our favor, and everyone was aware that the damned platform was wandering around in its own orbit at a dizzy distance from the earth and not subject to gravitational pull. Every kid in America had become an astrophysicist overnight and talked knowingly of exhaust velocities, synergy curves, and Keplerian ellipses. Every subway rider knew that the two men on the platform were breathing oxygen thrown off from big squash vines that they had taken along. The Reader’s Digest had added to the fun by translating and condensing several German treatises on rockets and space travel, including the great Wege zur Raumschiffahrt. But to date, because of security regulations and technical difficulties, there had been no radio-television hookup.

He watched the helicopter roar overhead, its black propeller scudding, then disappear…towards the hull of the wrecked space platform.

A space platform…. Would you like to know what it’s for?…. My plan…is to mount a huge lens on this platform. The focal length will be three hundred miles.

Building a space platform at the orbital point called L1…turns out to be one way to test it, launching nuclear-propelled spacecraft to the moon.