[Sorta OT] When did scientists come to expect weightlessness?
- From: nance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Anthony Nance)
- Date: 10 May 2006 17:13:22 GMT
I recently began to read Robert Sheckley's "Pilgrimage to Earth"
collection, and in "Early Model" from 1956, he mentioned a space
traveller would experience "no-weight" and would need to exercise
during his voyage.
SF-wise, Jules Verne mentioned weightlessness in _From the
Earth to the Moon_, and he likely wasn't the first. Some
websites mention Bishop Francis Godwind probably was, in his
1638 work _The Man in the Moone_ (published posthumously, btw).
However, here in the real world, does anyone know when the
scientific community began to suspect, and eventually widely
expect that orbital/space travellers would experience
weightlessness? The best I can confidently do is narrow
it down to some time between 1865 and 1961[1].
Tony
[1] The 1865 comes from Verne's account often being cited as
one of his uncanny predictions, so I'd guess it wasn't
widely expected in scientific circles when he wrote FtEttM.
On the other end of the span, I've read that training flights
before Gagarin's first space flight allowed pilots to
experience a few seconds of weightlessness, so it's more
likely that the latest end to the window is the late 1950's.
.
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