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"Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen."
- Larry Niven
 |
| Tether Space Station | ||
| A station in two parts, separated by a one hundred mile tether. |
| The tank was the next to last in a row of forty of the great cylinders, nestled side by side. A parallel deck of sixteen huge tanks lay about sixty kilometers "overhead" linked to this collection by six strong cables. Twenty meters away from where I stood, one of the half-inch polymer tethers rose from its anchor point, a mirror-bright streak toward the planet overhead. Sometimes a careful observer could make out B Deck without aid -- a tiny rectangle about an eighth the apparent diameter of the moon -- against the bright bulk of the Earth. When we crossed the terminator, the tanks in Group B sparkled like gems in Terra's sunset tiara. |
| Technovelgy from Tank Farm Dynamo,
by David Brin. Published by Analog in 1983 Additional resources -
|
As a space station, compare to the brick moon from The Brick Moon (1869) by Edward Everett Hale, the city of space from The Prince of Space (1931) by Jack Williamson, the New Moon Casino from One Against the Legion (1939) by Jack Williamson, the asteroid space station from Misfit (1939) by Robert Heinlein, the Venus Equilateral Relay Station from QRM - Interplanetary (1942) by George O. Smith, Wheelchair from Waldo (1942) by Robert Heinlein, the space transfer station from Between Planets (1951) by Robert Heinlein, the Sargasso Asteroid from The Stars My Destination (1956) by Alfred Bester and the high orbit archipelago from Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) by William Gibson.
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Tech news articles related to Tank Farm Dynamo
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Tether Space Station-related
news articles:
- Electrodynamic Tethers: Clean Up Debris - Power or Boost Spacecraft
- NanoRacks Space Station Module Concept Validated
| 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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'Nemourlon armor of reasonable weight resists penetration by most fragments and any bullet that is not both reasonably heavy and fairly high-velocity.'
'Several thousand of them formed the positioning grid on the rubble pile.'
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'Norman... had never ridden any motorized device that lacked onboard steering and balance systems.'
You will note that HG Wells also figured out the aspect ratio of the future!
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'... he realized that the moving thing inside was - of course - a robot.'
