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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts
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| Dome Shelter | ||
| A permanent domed structure for living on the Moon. |
As far as I know, this is the earliest description of a permanent lunar habitat that is reasonably accurate, in that it recognizes the harsh, airless environment.
The Moon, with its lack of atmosphere, needed special equipment.
“Johnny Grantline was a close friend of ours. He had organized an exploring expedition to the Moon. Uninhabited, with its bleak, forbidding, airless, waterless surface, the Moon – even though so close to the Earth- was seldom visited. No regular ship ever stopped there. A few exploring parties of recent years had come to grief.
But there was a persistent rumor that upon the Moon, mineral riches of a fabulous wealth were awaiting discovery… (p3)
| And there were humans here now. On this tumbled plain, between Archimedes and the mountains, one small crater amid the million of its fellows was distinguished this night by the presence of humans. The Grantline camp! It huddled in the deepest purple shadows on the side of a bowl-like pit, a crudely circular orifice with a scant two miles across its rippling rim. There was a faint light here to mark the presence of the living intruders. The blue glow radiance of Morrell tube lights under a spread of glassite.
The Grantline camp stood midway up one of the inner cliff walls of the little crater. The broken, rock-strewn floor, two miles wide, lay five hundred feet below the camp. A broad level shelf hung midway up the cliff, and upon it Grantline had built his little group of glassite dome shelters… …within the glassite shelter, a normal Earth pressure must be maintained. Rigidly braced double walls to withstand the explosive tendency, with no external pressure to counteract it… |
| Technovelgy from Brigands of the Moon,
by Ray Cummings. Published by Astounding Stories of Super Science in 1930 Additional resources -
|
Underneath this dome were various smaller buildings, including maintenance equipment to maintain the atmosphere.
The first use of the phrase seems to be in The Last Blast (1952) by Eric Frank Russell:
Of course, if you're lucky enough to discover a Moon Valley with Breathable Atmosphere like the one described in Moon Heaven (1939) by Dom Passante, you're all set.
Compare to the plastic igloo (http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1535) from Love Among the Robots by Emmett McDowell.
The day the bombs dropped there were forty-six cores lying outside the Moon-dome.
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Additional
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More Ideas
and Technology from Brigands of the Moon
More Ideas
and Technology by Ray Cummings
Tech news articles related to Brigands of the Moon
Tech news articles related to works by Ray Cummings
Dome Shelter-related
news articles:
- 2 Lunar Base Concepts 75 Years Apart
| Chrysalis Generation Ship to Alpha Centauri |
| The First Space Warship For Space Force |
| Is China Mining Helium-3 On The Moon's Farside? |
| Solitary Black Hole Wanders In Space |
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'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
'Gaines and Harvey mounted tumblebugs, and kept abreast of the Cadet Captain...'
Accompanied by a small selection of similar ideas from science fiction.
'...war-balloons, or, as it would be more correct to call them, navigable aerostats.'
