See You Later, Astrogator!

[beamjockey]

I wrote a comment on wcg's blog I thought might be worth sharing here.

He was talking about software called Astrogator, whose manufacturer made the following claim:

In 1953, Robert A. Heinlein published a book named Starman Jones. Aside from being one of Heinlein's better juvenile novels, it coined the word astrogator, meaning a person who

Comments

[beamjockey]

By "real" I think you mean "people who navigate spacecraft don't use it." Quite true.

It's a "real" word in the Velveteen Rabbit sense: nobody needed it before spaceflight could be contemplated, and somebody needed to coin it. It did get a lot of use in SF for a few decades.

The similar word "Astronaut" didn't exist until, I believe, Percy Gregg (about whom I have written before) gave that name to his interplanetary spaceship in Across the Zodiac. I found a contemporary review of that book which uses "astronaut" in the "person who travels through space" sense. But it was scarcely used after that until the Americans decided that their spacemen would be called astronauts.

"Astronaut" was a big success. "Astrogator" didn't get picked up when the real Space Age came along. Other words coined in the era of delicious anticipation of the spaceflight era, such as "planetology," also failed to make it big. "Zero G" has been superseded by "microgravity," though "weightless" is still hanging on

[maiac]

I am impressed by your research. (Being cynical, I don't expect the manufacturer of the Astrogator software to change their citation. There's more value in being associated with Robert Heinlein than with whatshisname who really was first to use the term.)

[wcg]

Good bet. After I told the instructor, he showed me the revised splash page, which now says the term is from Starman Jones by Robert A. Heinlein and other science fiction.

[ext_1160982]

I saw "waldo" used on TV, in the context of real manipulators, long bef atore I read the story. The term had made it at one time