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"Every scientist worth his salt that I know of has read science fiction."
- Greg Bear
 |
| Space Tug | ||
| A small vessel used to maneuver other ships. |
As far as I know, the first use of this term.
| The costs of prospecting in the asteroids were far more than local prospecting on an inhabited planet. The prospector had to buy his own ether boat, fuel, oxygen, implements and food. Then the costs of getting his boat into space were a very big item. Small boats like those were never equipped with the powerful engines that big liners had to leave and land on a planet. The owner had to pay a professional concern a certain sum of money for which they would clamp his little boat onto a huge-engined space tug-boat. This boat would take him about five hundred miles up where the little engine would then have enough power to propel it away from the powerful pull of the planet. On the return trip, the prospector had to stop his ship some thousand or so miles away from the planet and radio for a tug-boat to bring him to the ground. |
| Technovelgy from Murder on the Asteroid,
by Eando Binder. Published by Wonder Stories in 1933 Additional resources -
|
Jack Williamson also had a good description in his 1941 story Collision Orbit:
...the quiet little asterite had a stubborn independence... he was waiting for better times to come - living aboard the little space tug to save the cost of lodgings.
...the square nose of the Goodby Jane was visible across the steeply convex field, at the end of a row of rusting ore barges. The space tug was somewhat larger than a twentieth-century railroad car turned on end and stripped of wheels. The angular, neglected hull, pocked with meteor blisters stood five decks high. With only a few instruments protruding, it looked very much like a rectangular ingot of rust-reddened steel.
He had bought the Goodby Jane out of his own savings... and built up a good salvage and towing business. But since the war, only the great monopolies could afford to buy salvage and towing permits from the Mandate government. There were no more jobs for spatial engineers...
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| Spaceplane From Virgin Atlantic |
| Taikonauts Exercise In China's Tiangong Space Station |
| SpaceX's Starman Tesla Roadster In Space |
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'He found a barber shop which, he thought, would be good for an idle hour.'
'Thirty rounds of fighting is tough work. Even for machines.'
'...the excavations were already in progress, for he saw gray slopes of rubble.'
'...the walking mills of Puffy Products began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat fields of Kansas.'
'Here is a Clerk that would work incessantly, and neither eat, sleep, want payment, or grumble.'
'ZARNAK, YOU'RE TO COMMAND A SCOUTING EXPEDITION --- FIND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT!'
'These are your rudimentary seed packages... Some will combine in place to form more complicated structures.'
