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"One could imagine a very ascetic sort of life ... where the body is ignored. This is something I've played with in my books, where people hate to be reminded sometimes that they have bodies, they find it very slow and tedious."
- William Gibson
 |
| Power Planet | ||
| A satellite that supplies the Earth with power. |
| The Power Planet, of course, is that vast man-made disk of metal set spinning about the sun to supply the Earth with power. Everybody learns in his grammar-school textbooks of its construction just beyond the Moon and of its maneuvering to its present orbit by a vast expenditure of rocket fuel.
 ('Power Planet' by Murray Leinster) Only forty million miles from the sun's surface, its sunward side is raised nearly to red heat by the blazing radiation. And the shadow side, naturally, is down to the utter cold of space. There is a temperature drop of nearly seven hundred degrees between the two sides, and Williamson cells turn that heat-difference into electric current, with an efficiency of 99 percent. Then the big Dugald tubes - they are twenty feet long on the Power Planet - transform it into the beam which is focused on the Earth and delivers something over a billion horsepower to the various receivers that have been erected. The space station itself is ten miles across, and it rotates at a carefully calculated speed so that the centrifugal force at its outer edge is very nearly equal to the normal gravity of Earth. So that the nearer its center one goes, of course, the less is that force, and also the less impression of weight one has. |
| Technovelgy from The Power Planet,
by Murray Leinster. Published by Amazing Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the near-space solar energy collector from Star Maker (1937) by Olaf Stapledon, the solar station from Doom Over Venus (1940) by Edmond Hamilton, the solar energy beam from Masquerade (1941) by Clifford Simak, the solar station from Isaac Asmov's 1941 story Reason and the solar beam from The Long Way (1944) by George O. Smith.
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Tech news articles related to The Power Planet
Tech news articles related to works by Murray Leinster
Power Planet-related
news articles:
- Space Solar Power - A Truly Limitless Source
- Space-Based Sustainable Energy Policy
- Space-Based Solar Power Roundup
- Solar Power Beamed From Space Studied By Brit Boffins
- Space-Based Solar Power A Priority - European Space Agency
- Solar Power Transmitted From Orbit Down To Earth
| Denmark Joins The 'Zero Debris Charter' To Clean Up Space |
| Starship Special Edition For Lunar Shuttle |
| Capturing Asteroids With Nets |
| Project Hyperion - Generation Ship Designers Needed! |
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