Author Topic: Robert Heinlein and the "No Stars" argument in "Have Spacesuit - Will Travel"  (Read 3799 times)

Offline AtomicDog

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I was listening to an audio book version of this novel, the part where the hero, Kip, and his companions were trekking across the lunar surface in an attempt to escape interstellar villany, when I came across a passage familiar to all moon hoax busters:

 ...I counted degrees using Earth as a yardstick. I marked a place by eye, then tried again judging fifty-three degrees as a proportion of ninety. The results didn't agree, so I tried to spot some stars to help me. They say you can see stars from the Moon even when the Sun is in the sky. Well, you can-but not easily. I had the Sun over my shoulder but was facing Earth, almost three-quarters full, and had the dazzling ground glare as well. The polarizer cut down the glare-and cut out the stars, too.
   

-Robert A Heinlein,  "Have Spacesuit - Will Travel", 1958


In other words, Heinlein correctly predicted how hard  it would be to see stars from the lunar surface in a novel written eleven years before the first moon landing.
"There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death." - Isaac Asimov

Offline ka9q

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Quite possibly because he had a reasonably good understanding of physics.

Offline raven

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Arthur C. Clarke's A Fall of Moondust, published 1961, also mentions this.

Offline ineluki

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Quite possibly because he had a reasonably good understanding of physics.

Oh the good old days...  when Science Fiction authors at least knew the physics they would break...

Offline Dalhousie

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Quite possibly because he had a reasonably good understanding of physics.

Not really - his grasp of quantum theory, thermodynamics, and relativity were really quite poor.