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"People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research. I just enjoy reading the stuff, and some of it sticks in my mind and fits into the stories."
- Frederik Pohl
 |
| Moondozer | ||
| A bulldozer for lunar conditions. |
There's a lot of work to be done on the moon to prepare it for human habitation. What tools will we need?
| To shift those rockslides, one would have to import moondozers across the Sea of Thirst, and import whole shiploads of gelignite to blast a road through the mountains. |
| From A Fall of Moondust,
by Arthur C. Clarke. Published by Harcourt, Brace and World in 1961 Additional resources -
|
Clarke doesn't give us much to work with except the basic term. By the time you get to the future outlined in Niven and Pournell's Oath of Fealty (1981), you didn't even need to be on the moon to operate one - see the entry for telepresence bulldozer.
NASA engineers take it one step further - autonomous dozers. They've been playing with the idea of using bulldozers - on Mars. Here are some Bulldozer Rovers at play.
(Baby dozers for Mars - Bulldozer Rover)
"If water sources, such as hot springs, layers of ice or groundwater reservoirs are discovered on Mars, a network of these rovers could conduct scientific investigations and excavate the site piece-by-piece, just as humans would on an archeological dig," said Brian Wilcox, supervisor of the Robotic Vehicles Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Rovers like these may also play a role in establishing a space outpost for eventual human occupancy. They may be used to create buried habitats or utility trenches and to excavate resources to support life."
(NASA Bulldozer Rovers Could Get the Scoop on Mars)
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'A metal... light as cork and stronger than steel...'
'Ken lay full-length in the padded body compartment, his feet resting on the controlling bars of the directional planes, hands on the torpoon's engine levers.'
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'Recharge the batteries... in almost every town and village...'
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'The flycycles were miracles of compact design.'
These drones can provide situational awareness beyond visual line-of-sight capability.
'It resembled conventional human-operated transportation vehicles, but with one exception -- there was no driver's cabin.'
'Each one consists of a hub with many tiny spokes... On the end is a squat foot, rubber tread on the bottom...'
'A paper thin polycarbon screen unfurled silently from the top of the unit and immediately grew rigid.'
