Trivia / Mission of Gravity

• Technology Marches On: While what happens on the planet holds all up great with the story, the tech of the humans has shades of the book's 1953 publication date. Clement wrote this book in a world where no one had ever seen a picture of the Earth from orbit.
  • The difficulty in satellites getting the pictures they wanted is a little laughable in reading this book in the 21st century, but remember this book was published five years before Sputnik launched. Today we would not only have a camera take multiple pictures on multiple passes, but we would have a scanner on the satellite, and a laser altimeter making a 3D map of the surface so we wouldn't have to interpret shadows. Also, it's pretty obvious that Lackland is working with developed physical film pictures, not digital images.
  • Of course the strangest issue with the experiment is that it is unable to simply transmit the results from the findings. Probes built today have multiple redundant systems to ensure data gets sent if the probe returns or not. The humans evidently need the probe itself, not simply any data collected.
• Word of God: Clement did the math and found that the gravity at Mesklin's poles was around 700 times Earth gravity. Then he did it again after publication and found it to be about 200 times Earth. While people quibble about this, either of those factors are still hard to work with and very lethal to humans, so either way hiring Barlennan was still a solid decision.