1st Heinlein Prize Awarded

baxissimo writes "The first ever Heinlein prize for Advances in Space Commercialization is going to be awarded to Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, for various activities including his efforts as Founder and Chairman of the Ansari X Prize. The prize is a cool 1/2 million USD plus a few other nifty trinkets -- a gold Heinlein Medallion, the Lady Vivamus Sword (as described in Heinlein's book Glory Road) and a Laureate's Diploma. The award ceremony will be held in Houston, July 7, 2006. This prize has been around a good while (since Heinlein's death in 1988?) with no awardees. Hopefully this will make the existence of the prize a little more widely known, and help spur further developments like the X Prize."

The perfect lady

[neonprimetime]

This is a must see ... the Lady Vivamus Sword [albion-swords.com]

Slashdotted, of course

[Aladrin]

That poor server has been slashdotted, of course... but you can still see thumbnails at Google Images. http://images.google.com/images?q=lady+vivamus&sa= N&tab=wi [google.com]

Re:Science Fiction Classics

[IdahoEv]

while staying within the bounds (albeit loosely) of "possible" scientific reality.

Yes, Heinlein really cared about his science ... and particularly his engineering and orbital mechanics. He actually did the orbital mechanics calculations whenever he mentioned specific figures in a story. (I.E. if he said "We burned at 1.3G for 5 seconds to insert into a station-keeping orbit" it generally meant he had actually done that math.)

However, nearly all of his stories depend on "torchships": ships with nuclear drive engines that have a combination of high thrust and high specific impulse that is extremely unlikely in the real world. The closest thing that has been proposed is Zubrin's Nuclear Salt-water Rocket [wikipedia.org] which uses an aqueous solution of plutonium or uranium salt as both fuel and reaction mass, expelling this radioactive mixture out the back -- and a lot of physicists aren't even sure the NSWR could really work. It does have the charming feature of completely ruining the landscape underneath the launch site, which matches Heinlein's torchships pretty well.

There's a fantastic discussion of all this [projectrho.com] at a website called The Atomic Rocket [projectrho.com], which collects in one place all the useful scientific information about space travel and ship design for anyone who is writing fiction or designing games.

For my money, it's the best damn geek site in the history of the web by a clear margin. (Though you have to be an old-school geek who thinks space is even cooler than computers.) Every few months I get sucked in and read the whole thing over again (and it's huge).

Re:So Good!

[SatanicPuppy]

Oooo, the AC is quite right. For Heinlein, it was TANSTAFFL...It was later grammar snobs that culled the double negative out of it.

Re:So Good!

[drinkypoo]

"TANSTAFFL"? Is that a "fine" free lunch?

The funny thing is that bepolite has instantly marked himself as a poser by linking to "TINSTAAFL" - which actually goes to "TANSTAAFL", especially given the link text. If he'd even read the article he linked to, he'd have known how it actually went.

I guess people DO know you're a dog on the internet.