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"...in fifty years, do you believe that people will be recognizably human?"
- Greg Bear
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| Lunar Mining | ||
| Very early (first?) reference to mining operations on the moon. |
Who knew that the moon - Earth's moon - contains deposits of that rare - yet indispensable material, radiactum? And what if someone (perhaps someone on Mars) was already on the moon, stealing this precious ore?
| The third building seemed a lean-to banked against the cliff wall, a slanting shed-wall of glassite fifty feet high and two hundred in length. Under it, for months Grantline bores had dug into the cliff. Braced tunels were hewn penetrating back and downward into the vein of rock.
The work was over. The borers had been dismantled and packed away. At one end of the cliff the mining equipment lay piled in a ltter. There was a heap of discarded ore where Grantline had carted and dumped it after his crude refining process had yielded it as waste. The ore slag lay like gray powder flakes strewn down the cliff. |
| Technovelgy from Brigands of the Moon,
by Ray Cummings. Published by Astounding Stories of Super Science in 1930 Additional resources -
|
Moon mining has been a popular topic in the last few years. After President Bush announced plans to return to the Moon, arguments for doing so have come thick and fast from moon enthusiasts.
One of the best reasons for going back was found in (among others) sample 75501, collected by astronaut Harrison Schmitt on December 13, 1972 during the Apollo 17 mission. It turns out that University of Wisconsin engineers found - not gold - but helium-3.
It turns out that hydrogen fusion takes place at very high temperatures, requiring a magnetic containment field. Hoever, maintaining a deuterium-deuterium fusion reaction for long periods exceeded the limits of the magnetic containment technology. Substituting helium-3 for tritium allows the use of electrostatic confinement and reduces the complexity of fusion reactors. As a bonus - no high-level radioactive waste is produced, either. Helium-3 will likely mean practical hydrogen fusion.
One fly in the ointment is that mining enough helium-3 to power a city like Detroit for a year, about 220 pounds, would require digging up a 3/4 square mile piece of moonscape to a depth of nine feet.
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More Ideas
and Technology from Brigands of the Moon
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and Technology by Ray Cummings
Tech news articles related to Brigands of the Moon
Tech news articles related to works by Ray Cummings
Lunar Mining-related
news articles:
- Russian Moon Base Mining Camp
- Miners! NASA Wants To License RASSOR Excavator
- NASA Competition To Design A Bucket Drum For Moon Mining
| Lava Tubes On Moon And Mars |
| SpaceX EVA Spacesuit Tested By Polaris Dawn Crew |
| ESA To Build Moon Bases Brick By Printed LEGO Brick |
| FLOAT Levitating Train On The Moon ala Clarke |
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'Deveet unhooked his catch and laid it on the bank beside him. It was a metal fish.'
'...waldoes in the screen followed in exact, simultaneous parallelism.'
'Seen close it was not completely flexible, but made instead of pivoted and smoothly finished segments.'
'...great rectangular slabs of muscle, slung into a rectangular frame.'
'If the biological robots were not living creatures, they were certainly very good imitations.'
"Everybody and his dog, it seemed, wanted to live out in the country; transportation and communication were no longer isolating factors."
