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"It's hard to tell stories about critters that are not human. John W. Campbell tried it, in "Twilight," and everybody says it's a wonderful story, and nobody ever reads it twice."
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Once the rocket tubes were prepared, the course set, the rockets were ignited!
The Moon was traveling faster than it had for millions of years, and was gradually drawing away from the Earth.
A smaller-scale version of the same idea was used in Asteroid of Fear by Raymond Z. Gallun. In that story, it is assumed that the asteroid Vesta is an intact surface fragment of an ancient planet.
Yes, strangely enough there was still sufficient water beneath the surface of Vesta. Its parent planet, like the Earth, had had water in its crust, that could be tapped by means of wells. And so suddenly had Vesta been chilled in the cold of space at the time of the parent body's explosion, that this water had not had a chance to dissipate itself as vapor into the void, but had been frozen solid. The drying soil above it had formed a tough shell, which had protected the ice beneath from disappearance through sublimation...
Drill down to it, melt it with heat, and it was water again, ready to be pumped and put to use.
And water, by electrolysis, was also an easy source of oxygen to breathe.... The soil, once thawed over a few acres, would also yield considerable nitrogen and carbon dioxide—the makings of many cubic meters of atmosphere. The A.H.O. survey expeditions, here on Vesta and on other similar asteroids which were crustal chips of the original planet, had done their work well, pathfinding a means of survival here.
You might want to compare this idea with the more dramatic Romulan flame drill used in the new Star Trek movie series (and the real-life flame jet drill deveolped for drilling into solid rock).
Also, here's a neat illustration of drilling into an airless moon or asteroid from The Radium World (1932) by Frank K. Kelly:
![]() (Mining claim stake-markers from The Radium World by Frank K. Kelly) Compare this with the method for moving an asteroid described in Robert Heinlein's 1939 story Misfit. See also ship pushes moon from the Buck Rogers: 2430 AD comic strip (1930) by Nowlan and Calkin, the asteroid rocket from Salvage in Space (1933) by Jack Williamson, planetary propulsion blasts from Thundering Worlds (1934) by Edmond Hamilton and moving a planet from Triplanetary (1934) by EE 'Doc' Smith. Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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