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| Orbital Mirror | ||
| A huge reflective surface in orbit around a planet or moon, the purpose of which is to focus sunlight onto the surface. |
| That ship was quite something. There may be a few of them left - bulky old KH-type ore carriers. The series has been discontinued now, but it seems to me I saw one or two of them on the inter-asteroid runs a few years ago. Her capacity was something like two hundred thousand tons net and she was loaded to the ceil-plates with granular magnesium and sodium for the Sun mirrors of Titan. I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors that circulate around the satellite, making it habitable. You may not know, though, that the girders are all solid mag, because great rigidity isn't needed out there, and mag is cheap. The mirrors are silvered with sodium, which is bright and easy to handle. They have a patrol for each of the mirrors, which patches up meteorite punctures when they occur, squirting liquid sodium around the holes until they fill, then shaving them down with N rays. Well, we were bringing them their stock in trade, and it was interesting cargo to handle. |
| Technovelgy from Completely Automatic,
by Theodore Sturgeon. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1941 Additional resources -
|
Here's another use of this term, from Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith by Mathew Stover (2005):
The artificial daylight spread by the capital's orbital mirrors is sliced by intersecting flames of ion drives and punctuated by starburst explosions...
Compare to the electrono-mirror from The Day We Celebrate, by Nelson S. Bond (1941).
The skies of Coruscant blaze with war.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Completely Automatic
More Ideas
and Technology by Theodore Sturgeon
Tech news articles related to Completely Automatic
Tech news articles related to works by Theodore Sturgeon
Orbital Mirror-related
news articles:
- NYC Heliostats And Star Wars Orbital Mirrors
- Crowdfunded Russian Beacon Satellite Is An Orbital Mirror
| NASA Tests Prototype Europa Lander |
| NASA's Psyche Mission To Metal Asteroid Launches Thursday! |
| Space Weather To Universe Weather |
| That's MOXIE! Terraforming Mars Baby Steps |
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'... he had tightened the chest to gain maximum pumping action from the motion of breathing.'
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'And are all the people willing to be governed by a machine?'
'It's an old model,' Rawlins said. 'I'm not sure what to do.'
'the robot-boss was busy at the lip of the new lode instructing and egging the men on to greater speed...'
'He rode the bike with an intense lack of physical grace...'
