Deviation Actions
Description
Artwork Courtesy NASA
Source: David S.F. Portree's Spaceflight History Blog Electricity from Space: The 1970s DOE/NASA Solar Power Satellite Studies.
Note: Beambuilders were mobile robotic beam fabrication and assembly vehicles tended and piloted by human crews. The basic "beambuilder" depicted above is shown in cutaway, the outer hull of the vehicle, rendered transparent, is indicated by the light outline around it, so its inner workings can be viewed. The Beambuilder would turn tight rolls of thin aluminum sheeting into sturdy single trusses.
Bio, David S.F. Portree: From 1992 to 1995, David Portree served as Senior Technical Writer and Historian at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. He has written several histories for NASA, including Thirty Years Together: A Chronology of U.S./Soviet Space Cooperation (1993), Mir Hardware Heritage (1995), Walking to Olympus: an EVA Chronology (1997), Orbital Debris: A Chronology (1999), and Humans to Mars: Fifty Years of Mission Planning. Astronomy Magazine, Air & Space Smithsonian, and other popular-audience magazines have carried his byline, and he has contributed more than 200 spaceflight and planetary science articles to encyclopedias. The International Academy of Astronautics gave Walking to Olympus its Napolitano Book Award in 1998. Most of David’s history writing at present is published on his Spaceflight History blog.
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