Boston's Commuter Comeback
More than 30 years after its abandonment, the Old Colony Railroad in Massachusetts is being revived through a �480 million rehabilitation project to serve residents southeast of Boston....
Depressing Traffic Top-Down
Top down construction will permit the City and County of Denver to maintain traffic at two congested intersections while a tunnel is driven below them. The project, which will carry Speer...
Doubling A Pipeline
The 36 in. natural gas pipeline built 32 years ago by Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) its subsidiary Pacific Gas Transmission (PGT) from Canadian fields to central California has...
Human Extender: A Material Handling System
A human's ability to perform physical tasks is limited by physical strength, not by intelligence. `Extenders' are a class of robot manipulators worn by humans to augment human mechanical...
Developing Plans for Robotic Excavators
We would like a robot excavator that is able to excavate a volume of soil according to specification. To this end we have developed a general method that can be used to provide prescriptions...
Advancement of Material Handling Technologies for In-Place Asphalt Pavement Recycling
New technologies for asphalt pavement resurfacing are improving dramatically with the advancements being made to related equipment technologies. This paper focuses on the recent developments...
Demands and Satisfiers for Automation and Robotics in Construction: Differences Between Japan and the United States
The construction industries in Japan and the United States face problems of productivity, quality, safety, and skilled labor shortages. Automation and robotics are often proposed as solutions...
A Conceptual Study of A Solar Power Satellite Using Centrifugal Force
We studied the self deployable Solar Power Satellite (SPS) using centrifugal force in order to explore ways in reducing construction costs. We designed a 340 kW SPS, and studied the unfolding...
Large Deformation Theory Using Truncated Rotations
Today's aerospace industry has advanced to the point of using optimum design techniques in virtually all applications. In structural elements, orthotropic fiber composite materials have...
A Membrane Structure for a Lunar Assembly Building
This paper describes potential design options and construction approaches for the development of an inflatable membrane structure of non-circular cross section. This structure could be...
Analysis of Inflating Habitable Space Structures with neomass (near-Earth-object mass)
The discovery of near Earth objects (NEOs), during August 1992, and that one of them is a dormant comet, dramatically changed the potential availability of near-Earth resources. NEOs provide...
Development, Testing and Modeling of Ceramic Composites for Lunar Applications
The procedure referred to as thermal liquefaction allows production of Intermediate Ceramic Composites (ICC) from lunar simulants with various admixtures. For their use as structural materials...
Zero-Gravity Sports Centers
One of the uses that has been proposed for fully reusable launch vehicles is `space tourism', the making of short visits to low Earth orbit by fare-paying passengers. This seems to offer...
Update of the Implications of Recent Space Resource Discovery
Immense resources have been discovered in the space near Earth during the last decade. Last August, 1992, one of the resource objects was discovered to contain a key ingredient that might...
Resource Recovery Facilities for Earth Approaching Comets
Mankind's next large resource location may be off the planet. The facilities required for mining and material processing offer interesting concepts for the development of mankind's first...
Potential demand for passenger travel to orbit
In recent years the possibility of `space tourism', that is individual passenger travel to space on a commercial basis, has received increasing attention. The possibility of such an activity...
A Comparison of Propulsion Systems for Space Exploration
There are three promising propulsion systems that might be used for space missions: chemical, direct nuclear, and nuclear electric. Selecting the best system for a mission involves comparing...
Mars Terraformation Revisited
This report is a look into the future; not only that of the solar system, but of humans. With the goal of changing Mars into a living planet, we also have to face the change of the human...
A Space Station of Mars
While we are putting stations on the moon and in orbit in this fast changing world of growing scientific knowledge we must look past the step we are currently on to the steps beyond. The...
Construction of a Lunar Base
The United States' space program has the capabilities to build a lunar base, but must build an infrastructure which allows the easy transportation of the construction materials. Once this...
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