The title is the topic. As someone noted on Twitter this seems to be quite the overworn trope, especially lately (it was used in the latest George Clooney movie, Midnight Boredom… er, Sky, sorry… ) and I’m wondering when it was first used, as well as other memorable uses of this.
I seem to recall this being done in a TOS episode, one where Kirk, etc, went back in time…? Does this sound right?
The correct term is gravity assist or swingby maneuver, and although the mathematics of the maneuver were developed by Soviet mathematician Yuri Kondratyuk and later Friedrich Zander in the 1920s even though the first practical use for interplanetary flight was in 1973 with Pioneer 10. The Star Trek (Original Series) episodes where a “slingshot maneuver” was referenced it was used in some nebulous fashion along with ‘warp drive’ to facilitate time travel into the past, so I don’t know that I would actually count it as a specific reference to actual swingby maneuvers. I don’t know about this being an “overworn trope”; I’m hard pressed to recall many science fiction media where it is actually referenced. The Expanse (the show, and to a lesser extent, the books) has made use of swingby maneuvers, often exaggerating the effect that they would have in reality, but beyond that it is really limited to really hard science fiction. For the most part, spacecraft in science fiction are assumed to be able to fly from Point A to Point B without much reference to external gravity fields or limits of propulsive capability.
Stranger
I thought they did a GA in Star Trek: The One With The Whales?
I believed that a gravitational slingshot was used in The Martian, both the book and the movie.
Don’t know when the first one was, but There’s A TV Trope For That.
It was? Jeez, I sat through all of that and I don’t remember it. Though I WAS definitely bored. Perhaps I drifted off during that part.
I would be completely unsurprised if the first fictional use were in one of Heinlein’s books.
A gravity assist is done in Methuselah’s Children as I recall (with some unique variations, of course).
I’m reluctant to quibble with Stranger, especially on space ballistics, but according to the Wikipedia article on the topic:
According to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Eric Frank Russell used gravity assist in his 1941 story Jay Score. It’s an essential part of the plot.
I’ve read the story, but it’s been a long time, and I’m not sure of the details, but you can usually trust the ESF to be accurate.
Intriguingly, Russell was not primarily a hard-science writer, being better known for his humor. I would’ve expected a more technical writer, like Arthur C. Clarke or (as suggested above) Robert Heinlein to be the first to use the concept.
Lol. ISWYDT.
… I think.
Anyway, the GA is how they got back to Miracle Planet.
That one, to the extent that it corresponded to real-world physics at all, was about light pressure, not gravity. I was thinking that The Rolling Stones was more likely.
The Rolling Stones does feature an Oberth effect maneuver.
Yeah, you’re right. The light pressure was the key there.
I was going to say that Luna 3 didn’t really count because they used the Moon’s gravity to merely shape the trajectory around the far side, but upon further reading I do see that it was also used to affect a plane change and return the spacecraft to Earth where it could transmit the pictures it took from the unseen face of the Moon. It is not an interplanetary flight, though (at least, not by current IAU guidelines, although the Moon is large enough to be considered a dwarf planet in its own right if it were not a moon) so Pioneer 10 is still the first interplanetary swing-by maneuver, which is amazing when you actually consider the precision required to execute the maneuver successfully, and it paved the way for Mariner 10, the Voyager spacecraft, and pretty much all other interplanetary missions except pseudo-Hohmann trajectories direct to Mars.
Stranger
BTW, I wrote a Mailbag article for this many moons ago [apologies] which has since been lost to the mists of time, but it didn’t address any use of swing-by maneuvers in fiction because there really aren’t many and none that I though were worth referencing.
I just now recalled another one, though, in Larry Niven’s Protector, where a maneuver around an unknown non-rotating neutron star is used to misdirect and destroy pursuing Pak ships. There is a Steven Baxter short story (the name eludes me but it was part of his Xeelee Sequence) that used a black hole in a similar fashion, although the pursued ship, moving very close to the speed of light, steals all of the momentum from the black hole causing the pursuer’s vessel to fall into the even horizon and be destroyed. For the most part, however, science fiction assumes ships with propulsive systems that take them from Planet A to Planet B without mucking about with gravity assists and the fine details of orbital mechanics.
Stranger
Spoiler alert
The title character in Jay Score is a robot, J-20. Eric Frank Russell, Isaac Asimov, and other writers were transforming the alphanumeric “names” of robots into things less mechanical ages before George Lucas gave us Artoo-Detoo (R2D2) and See-Threepio (C-3PO)
A slingshot from the opposite directon is breaking. KSR’s Aurora uses a shit-ton of those.
Shouldn’t that be “braking”?
Not if you do it wrong.