Off topic, 1980-1985 L5 News

[Keith Lofstrom]

5 moves = 1.67 fires . I wrote a few pages about the Launch
Loop (http://launchloop.com) which appeared in the L5 News
around 1982. Somewhere in my moves, or in my wife's "company
coming shovel out your office NOW", that issue disappeared.

So - does anyone have a complete collection of L5 News, or
better yet a complete INDEX of the issues 1980 to 1985?
I do have many of the issues, all the way back to L5 News
#1, (and I just spent 3 hours sorting them chronologically)
so I would be happy to return the "search L5 News" favor
for others on this list.

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Related, my FIRST publication about the Launch Loop was
in the American Astronautical Society Newsletter Reader's
Forum - two separate UNDATED sheets that were sent out
with the DATED newsletter. I have the sheets, but I
didn't date them or staple them to the dated newsletter.
My best guess is that "my" reader's forum was sent with the
November 1981 newsletter, minus two to plus four months.
Did anyone save those newsletters, in order and STAPLED?

----
IRRELEVANT EXPLANATION:

The reason for this foofaraw is establishing a priority
publication date. I don't care, but some academics do.
Many of my now-friends invented similar ideas around that
time. We all read Sir Arthur's "Fountains of Paradise",
and some of us said "THAT won't work, but THIS will!"

Over the years, many science fiction authors destroyed
launch loops in their novels, in spectacular ways.
This is an SF author's highest complement. Fred Pohl
abused the loop in TWO novels. Free alpha testing!

When Fred was asked to write "The Last Theorem" from
A.C.C.'s outline (while A.C.C was on his death bed and
incapable of writing), Fred was commanded to include
a dismissal of the launch loop idea by the novel's
genius teacher/protagonist Volhurst (page 55 of my
trade paperback).

Fred apologized with a nice letter. I wrote back that if
I was his shoes, I would push three dear friends through
a woodchipper to share a byline with A.C.C. I would chip
chip one or two in order to be "victimized" by A.C.C.
himself, on the wrong end of Clarke's First Law:

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that
something is possible, he is almost certainly right.
When he states that something is impossible, he is very
probably wrong."

My professional field (semiconductor engineering) was one
of Clarke's early "First Law" mistakes in 1948. A.C.C.
published a long article in the March 1948 Journal of the
British Interplanetary Society, dismissing many aspects of
interplanetary radio communication, at the same time that
Bardeen and Brattain were inventing and developing the
first semiconductor transistors (and their boss William
Shockley was hogging the credit).

Bell Labs shared early transistor samples while that JBIS
issue was being printed. I have a copy of that JBIS issue,
and I own trillions of transistors on chips, but I don't
own one of those first Bell Labs sample transistors. Sigh.

I also have a complete set of JBIS from 1934 to 1963,
and hundreds of scattered issues after that, but not a
full set of L5 News / Ad Astra. HOW MESSED UP IS THAT?

Keith L.

--
Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com