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"Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen."
- Larry Niven
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| Dust-Ski | ||
| Special vehicle adapted for quick travel over powdered lunar soil. |
This novel is famously concerned with the dust on the surface of the Moon - sometimes referred to as lunar soil to distinguish it from the chunkier forms of lunar regolith.
| At that very moment... one of the searching dusk-skis was passing directly overhead. Built for speed, efficiency and cheapness, not for the comfort of tourists, it bore little resemblance to the sunken Selene. It was, in fact, no more than an open sledge with seats for the pilot and one passenger - each wearing a space suit - and with a canopy overhead to give protection from the sun. A simple control panel, motor and twin fans at the rear, storage racks for tools and equipment - that completed the inventory. A ski going about its normal work usually towed at least one carrier sledge behind it, sometimes two or three, but this one was traveling light. |
| Technovelgy from A Fall of Moondust,
by Arthur C. Clarke. Published by Harcourt, Brace and World in 1961 Additional resources -
|
Planetary scientists fretted in the 1960's that a space ship landing on the Moon might actually disappear into the dust covering the surface.
This device is similar to a jet-ski, but for that lunar powder. Robert Heinlein wrote about the idea of skis for lunar powder by analogy to snow skis; see the entry for moon skis from his 1939 novel Requiem.
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"The robot solemnly hit a ball against the wall, picked it up and teed it, hit it again, over and again...'
'There was a wall ahead... It was riddled with holes that were the mouths of tunnels.'
'...support the interior human structure against Jupiter’s pull.'
'Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up and placed in a tray...'
'The German chemists have discovered how to supply the needed elements in compact, undiluted form...'
'Compounds devised by the biochemists for the rapid building of bone...'
'The car faltered as the external command came to brake...'
'It is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized...'
