Things to come?
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The British Interplanetary Society— presumably without doing a detailed cost/ benefit study — reckons it is possible to supplement the earth's increasingly scarce raw materials from the moon and it calls for international collaboration to set up an industrial research base there.
Always on the look-out for new transport technology, I was interested to see what type of vehicle would be used to convey materials to earth. Guess what? An electromagnetic catapult.
More down to earth is the Austrian low-loader rail truck which conveys a lorry and load less than 20cm from the track by virtue of wagon wheels little more than a foot in diameter. When this was shown on the BBC TV's Tomorrow's World it was stressed that the British Rail gauge is lower than the Continental, so no miraculous road to rail transfer was likely on a large scale here. But the idea may give a jolt to Kangaroo developments in Europe. (The Austrian wagon was said to run for 100,000 km without major maintenance.)