Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 71 — page 126: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION some form of heat, either by friction, chemical processes or radiated energy To retain that heat, in space, is no problem. A ship with a polished surface will radiate only one tenth of a ship with a blackened hull. If we surround a polished ship with a second hull, also polished on both sides, we _ have enclosed the vessel in a heat shield. Owing to the reflection-radiation between the opposed polished sides of the shields the actual heat loss will be cut to a point where the unshielded vessel would have lost heat 2.9 times as fast. Increasing the number of shields cuts down’ the loss in geometrical progression so that a ship or object sur- rounded with three shields would have a ratio of 70, five shields a ratio of 200, etc., so that a vessel protected with five shields would only lose one two-hundredth of the heat it would have done if unprotected. So negligible would be the heat loss of an interstellar 125 vessel protected with a multi- plicity of shields that the body heat from a single crew- man could possibly more than restore the heat radiated away. Obviously, the man in a spacesuit need have no worries. All he has to do is to cover his shiny spacesuit with a thin, polished, metallic bag of say, flexible aluminium and he would be quite safe from freezing. But he would prob- ably suffer intensely from heat prostration instead. Keeping warm in space is no problem. Keeping cool is. There is only one practical way to lose heat in space, and that is by radiating it away. Obviously, the closer we go to the sun, the less efficient our system for cool- ing the ship is going to be. For, as we near the sun, so we gain more and more heat from its absorbed radiation. A compromise would be to have our ship in the shape of a flat disc, one side polished and the other darkened. The polished side would be kept © facing the sun so as to reflect, conmiclsooks.con