In his novel _Red Planet_, copyright 1949, Robert Heinlein describes a
monolithic plastic hemisphere used for dwellings and other purposes on
Mars, and a method for constructing same. I would be interested in any
earlier citations for these concepts, either from fiction or from
engineering or architectural literature.
From page 15 of the 1977 Ballantine edition (without a credit for the
cover painting; is it possibly Wayne Barlowe?):
"Save for three moon huts erected when the colony was founded and
since abandoned, all the buildings were shaped alike. Each was a
hemispherical bubble of silicone plastic, processed from the soil of
Mars and blown on the spot. Each was a double bubble, in fact; first
one large bubble would be blown, say thirty or forty feet across; when
it had hardened, the new building would be entered through the tunnel
and an inner bubble, slightly smaller than the first, would be blown.
The outer bubble "polymerized"-that is to say, cured and hardened,
under the rays of the sun; a battery of ultra-violet and heat lamps
cured the inner. The walls were separated by a foot of dead air space,
which provided insulation against the bitter sub-zero nights of Mars.
When a new building had hardened, a door would be cut to the outside
and a pressure lock installed; the colonials maintained about two-
thirds Earth-normal pressure indoors for comfort and the pressure on
Mars is never as much as half of that."
Is this the first reference in print to a housing bubble?
Thank you,
Peter Wezeman
anti-social Darwinist
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