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"There was a time when one old eccentric guy with a notebook could do something important to science. Now even the resources of a major university are often not enough."
- Jerry Pournelle
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| 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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More Ideas
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Tech news articles related to works by Eando Binder
| SETI Suggests Prospecting The Solar System Without Landing |
| Cislunar Space And The Space Lanes of Golden Age Science Fiction |
| NASA Moonbase Update |
| The Solar Oberth Slingshot |
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'Space-sickness is one of the most unpleasant sensations that a human being can experience. Not all are subject to it...'
'...I saw a nice black heavy-looking cloud sailing by just now, and I can get the electrical machine out in five minutes to draw it down.'
'From a distance it could resolve the cosmic rays reflected from various substances.'
'The answer to the dumb student's prayer.'
'He had travelled the space-lanes of the solar system for the greater part of his life...'
'The dinner was excellent. It was completely vegetarian — grown in specially prepared gardens in this Moon base...'
'Telepaths had their sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind.'
'It was a relief to enter one of the comfortable autos, whisper a direction down the tube, and just know that you would be taken to your destination in the quickest, safest, and cheapest manner.'
'But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced...'
