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"I went [to the top of] Vehicle Assembly Building and looked down, and tears burst from my eyes. The size of this cathedral where the Rockets take off to go to the moon is so amazing."
- Ray Bradbury
 |
| Lunar Monorail | ||
| A monorail constructed above the surface of the Moon. |
| The Monorail was losing speed as it climbed up out of the shadowed lowlands. At any moment now, thought Sadler, they would overtake the sun...
He had been racing through that night, across the land that the first pioneers had opened up two centuries ago, at a steady and comfortable five hundred kilometers per hour... Ahead of the speeding car, the single rail - supported by pillars uncomfortably far apart - arrowed into the east... The low-slung monorail car, straddling its single track, bored through the shadows on a slowly rising course. In the darkness around them, dimly seen crags and cliffs rushed forward with explosive swiftness, then vanished astern. Sadler realized that probably nowhere else could one travel at such velocities so close to the ground. No jet liner, far above the clouds of Earth, ever gave such an impression of sheer speed as this. If it had been day, Sadler could have seen the prodigies of engineering that had flung this track across the foothills of the Apennines. But the darkness veiled the gossamer bridges and the canyon-fringing curves; he saw only the approaching peaks, still magically afloat upon the sea of night that lapped around them. |
| Technovelgy from Earthlight,
by Arthur C. Clarke. Published by Del Rey in 1955 Additional resources -
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Tech news articles related to Earthlight
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Lunar Monorail-related
news articles:
- FLOAT Levitating Train On The Moon ala Clarke
- Solar-Powered Space Trains On The Moon
| Is China Mining Helium-3 On The Moon's Farside? |
| Solitary Black Hole Wanders In Space |
| Spaceplane From Virgin Atlantic |
| Taikonauts Exercise In China's Tiangong Space Station |
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'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
