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"There's a tendency to think that maybe if we can just throw enough hardware at the AI problem, then evolution can take care of the rest. Certainly that's how God went about making us."
- Rudy Rucker
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| Airtight Tent | ||
| A temporary structure for living on an airless moon or asteroid. |
You've just homesteaded an asteroid, and you've been left there with your family. The first requirement: shelter, of course.
| Inside his space suit, he had begun to sweat furiously. And it was more because of the tension of his nerves than because of the vigor with which he plied his pinchbar, doing the first task which had to be done. Steel ribbons were snapped, nails were yanked silently from the great box, boards were jerked loose.
In another minute John Endlich and his wife were setting up an airtight tent, which, when the time came, could be inflated from compressed-air bottles. They worked somewhat awkwardly, for their instruction period had been brief, and they were green; but the job was speedily finished. The first requirement—shelter—was assured. |
| Technovelgy from Asteroid of Fear,
by Raymond Z. Gallun. Published by Planet Stories in 1951 Additional resources -
|
What would it be like to spend your first night in an airtight tent on an asteroid with your family? Gallun uses his imagination to help us imagine it:
Peering from the small plastic windows of the tent, he kept watching for hulking black shapes to silhouette themselves against the stars...
Otherwise, from all around, the stillness of the vacuum was absolute.
Compare this to the Igloo Inflatable Moon Habitat from Arthur C. Clarke's 1961 novel A Fall of Moondust and the synthetic spider silk inflatable roof from Robert Heinlein's 1939 story Misfit.
In another minute the small but dazzling sun had disappeared behind the broken mountains, as Vesta, unspherical and malformed, tumbled rather than rotated on its center of gravity. And several hours later, amid heavy cooking odors inside the now inflated plastic bubble that was the tent, Endlich was sprawled on his stomach, unable, through well-founded worry, even to remove his space suit or to allow his family to do so, though there was breathable air around them. They lay with their helmet face-windows open.
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and Technology by Raymond Z. Gallun
Tech news articles related to Asteroid of Fear
Tech news articles related to works by Raymond Z. Gallun
Airtight Tent-related
news articles:
- Seven (Ten!) Inflatable Space Structures From Science Fiction
- The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module Attached to ISS
| The New Habitable Zones Include Asimov's Ribbon Worlds |
| Will Space Stations Have Large Interior Spaces Again? |
| Reflect Orbital Offers 'Sunlight on Demand' And Light Pollution |
| Chrysalis Generation Ship to Alpha Centauri |
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'...each of them is a neural mapping of the mind of a Tibetan monk who actually lived.'
'...there's a narrow belt where the climate is moderate.'
'The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain, through the mediation of the electronic brain in the leg.'
'... every veephone on the continent would display, over and over, two propositions.'
'Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty meters. No recoil...'
'He wore spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.'
