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"There was a time when one old eccentric guy with a notebook could do something important to science. Now even the resources of a major university are often not enough."
- Jerry Pournelle
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| Lunar Ice Mining | ||
| The practice of mining for ice on the moon. |
In the novel, water could be found by mining on the Moon. The habit of clipped speech Russian style is seen in the words of the narrator.
| One shy little fellow with bloodshot eyes of old-time drillman stood up. "I'm an ice miner," he said. "Learned by trade doing time for Warden like most of you. I've been on my own thirty years and done okay... I should say did do okay... because today you have to listen farther out or deeper down to find ice.
"That's okay, still ice in The Rock and a miner expects to sound for it..." |
| Technovelgy from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by GP Putnam in 1966 Additional resources -
|
This is not the first reference to the idea of mining ice on the moon; I don't know if there are earlier references in science fiction - readers?
The possibility of ice in the floors of polar lunar craters was first suggested by scientists in 1961 by Caltech researchers Kenneth Watson, Bruce C. Murray, and Harrison Brown. The first scientific suggestion that water ice existed on the lunar surface came in 1994; Clementine, a military space probe, beamed radar energy onto the lunar surface in such a way as to bounce it to radar stations on Earth. Analysis appeared to show that the echoes were consistent with an icy surface as opposed to a rocky surface.
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Tech news articles related to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
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Lunar Ice Mining-related
news articles:
- 'Significant Amount' Of Lunar Water Found
- Will We Mine The Moon For Ice?
- Texas-Sized Ice Slab Found On Mars
- Subsurface Martian Ice Slabs Piece Of Cake For Miners
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'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
