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"Evolutionary success ... is going to absolutely require mobility on, at a minimum, an interplanetary scale. We either go or we die out."
- Richard Morgan

Solar Power Apparatus  
  An ingenious device to gather solar energy, melt water, power a turbine and get hydrogen and oxygen fuel from ice.  

Ingenious idea for getting unlimited electric power on the moon, without complicated electronic solar panels.

The engineer had judged correctly for the ground on which the space ship had landed consisted of ice...

"...Now be quick, get out the solar power apparatus and send it down to us from the air-lock by the crane."


A huge parabolic mirror built of light sheet silver collected the intense heat of the sun and first melted a small amount of ice in a closed container. The water thus formed - which cannot exist free on the airless moon - was heated to boiling, and provided the steam for a little turbine. This was connected with a generator of electric energy, whose current was used for the electrolytic dissociation of melted ice in special containers.

The entire system was of such dimensions that in four terrestrial days it would exactly fill the tanks of the ship with liquid hydrogen and oxygen in the right proportions.

Technovelgy from A Daring Trip To Mars, by Max Valier.
Published by Wonder Stories in 1931
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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from A Daring Trip To Mars
  More Ideas and Technology by Max Valier
  Tech news articles related to A Daring Trip To Mars
  Tech news articles related to works by Max Valier

Solar Power Apparatus-related news articles:
  - TransAstra Lunar Mining Idea Was Max Valier's In 1931
  - Chang'e-5 Lunar Lander Seeks Water
  - Privatized Moon Mining Appeals To Entrepreneurs

Articles related to Space Tech
Is China Mining Helium-3 On The Moon's Farside?
Solitary Black Hole Wanders In Space
Spaceplane From Virgin Atlantic
Taikonauts Exercise In China's Tiangong Space Station

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