Building Up - jedcline's 2006 NanoWriMo

Day 17 of 30 2006 JEDCline

Day 17 of 30 2006 JEDCline

Improy was quick to get outside to inspect his catch, having saved a bit of the unfortunate Space Elevator, as soon as the telescope observations confirmed that the tether ends were not flailing around dangerously anymore, having used the initial differential velocity between it and the space station to wrap around the "pulley" like a tetherball wraps around its maypole. Measuring the overall thickness and estimating its packing density on the 10 meter diameter pulley-spool, that they had saved about 1,500 kilometers of the ribbon. "Just what do you plan to do with the stuff, now that you have got it?" Catalie asked him. He answered that he had hoped for retrieving some of the station, but would take what he got. "I have not figured out exactly what to do with it, but material resources up here are hard to acquire." He went on, "One thing I have thought of, is to use it to lower one of our manned return vehicles down to about graze the upper atmosphere a small but noticeable amount. At that position, our overall angular velocity around the planet ought to be same as it is now, but the station here will be slightly higher. The tethered vehicle will have significant "weight" felt in it since they would be going far slower than orbital velocity at that altitude, constrained to our angular velocity. Then they disconnect from the tether, drop into the atmosphere, and begin their skip around the planet awhile, until their velocity has slowed enough for a safe decent through the lower atmosphere. If they are willing to have an entirely unpowered glide return, flown only by their airfoil control surfaces by the pilot, the whole thing could be done without any expenditure of propellant for de-orbit. And the station here will be simultaneously boosted to a slightly higher energy orbit, same energy as if we had launched the return vehicle backward along our orbital path the amount to de-orbit, and the reaction shoving the station forward a bit into a higher orbit in the process." Catalie reflected that it would then solve the problem of lack of propellant for de-orbiting the returning vehicles. "Neat." she responded.

Minor re-design of the first several return vehicles was made to utilize this technique for de-orbiting. A nose clamp was installed that was releasable by either the pilot or the orbiting station control center by radio link. Hoping to avoid the need to build gyros for changing the vehicle's attitude in space, they prepared an empty area where a crewperson could deliberately spin around a certain number of times, then stop. While he was spinning himself, having pushed away from the structure of the vehicle, the vehicle would rotate in the opposite direction until he stopped spinning. Each change in the design prototype, they would go verify that it would work, but safely up here. And they tested out the idea of a person doing spins instead of using a gyro, which required both physical agility, endurance, and body mass.

It became a bit of a combination of testing, physical exercise, and a bit of adventurousness each time a volunteer would go practice the spacecraft attitude control that way. The effect was small, as the spacecraft mass was far greater than the person, but it did have an effect. Tubby people definitely had the advantage in that freefall environment sport.

Little by little during each test they lowered the tethered spacecraft further, practiced unlatching the tether while being secured by a safety line. Further down, they added testing to determine the minimum RF power needed for a directional antenna link, not wanting to have their signals picked up by Ownma staff on the ground. Finally they did a full length lowering test, so as to test how well the craft oriented in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Due to the slow solar-powered winch lift backup to the station, it took a whole week to do; and so air, food and water could support only a few people for the round trip. All of them volunteered for the test, and some hoped to be on the first real decent test to the ground later. Each of them had trained to be both pilot and gyro.

Exactly how far the distance would be to the effective beginnings of the atmosphere from where they were, was unknown, nor could they accurately measure the length of tether payed out. So the first data produced by the test was that they needed a way to tell if they had arrived or not. They did reach a distance down that their spacecraft seemed to be getting well oriented nose toward the path they were taking over the planet. Enough for one day, pull us up, they asked. The tether spool was marked so at least they could later repeat that distance, and they reversed the winch direction, and the return trip up was on its way.

A test data evaluation meeting with the returned adventurers produced some interesting suggestions. A drogue vehicle would help determine atmospheric density, say with a wind driven propellor rotation rate providing the data. That was expanded to become a propellor driven air compressor, storing air in a tank that would then get pulled up after the deployment of the return vehicle, and that way they could do some replenishment of their air supply. The release of the lowered vehicle would give energy to the station anyway, so some of that added energy could be used to scoop up some air.

So they got diverted to the task of building this scoop drogue, and testing it out by itself. Its tank would be significant mass and would have to be hauled up along with test airframe vehicles, slowing the winch up process, already days long.

Actually starting to believe that they might be able to return to the Earth's surface, planning as to where to go became an issue. Their monitoring of their receive-only internet link told of an increasingly powerful worldwide corporate takeover of most nations, in their various economies disrupted by the terrible epidemic. Ownma Corporation was foremost in this takeover, and appeared just as ruthless and arrogant as ever, as if they had won the world in a poker game and were raking in the chips. No compassion for the "chips" whatsoever. The need for survival of the masses was all that sustained the system, and the big corporations just sapped that life energy from the masses, easy. So where could they land? The physical requirements were one factor, the situation they would find there was another. Landing where Ownma found them would just land them in some prison down there again; and if the returning vehicle were found, they would realize what was happening and likely send up a rocket with a warhead to end the space station for sure. And the space wheel station had no way to duck.

Another issue they found was the determination of who to go first, and who second, and so forth. What they found was that there were plenty of brave volunteers, but none who actually wanted to go. As tough as life was up here, it was a far better life than any of them had experienced ever, and their self-determination form of corporation, their Emplos Corporation, was working for them, and nothing like it existed down there. So what happened was that there were endless design reviews, tweaking of the design, modifications to the return vehicles, ever making it more likely to succeed; but more importantly it was buying them all time to be together.

Occasionally they would send down the air scoopship drogue vehicle, gathering up air for the station, while conducting various tests of the tether system. They polished up the return vehicles, building more of them than very wise for an incompletely tested design, but they considered that once they starting leaving that maybe a lot of them would have to leave in a short time for some reason. They used the telescope to inspect potential landing areas, on and on.

They were also making a lot of progress on making the dual space wheel a long term livable place. The turkeys and goats were providing meat in lager quantities than the original quail and their tiny eggs, cockroach protein was still a staple addition to breakfast cereal; the goats also were starting to provide goat milk and goat cheese. The endless abundant sunlight provided luxurious grains and vegetables. Some otherwise decorative plants provided cleanup of the airborne toxins.

Solar power was their only energy source, but it was widely diverse in its ways of usage. It powered the growth of the plants, of course. It provided final distillation of their drinking water. Through solar panels it provided electrical energy. In many industrial processes, its heat input provided processing temperatures of whatever was desired. It provided laser excitation for some industrial applications.

Yet another workhorse application of solar energy was in its developmental stage, that which promised total recycling of any material, which would be extremely useful in their tiny closed ecosystem. It started with intense focus of solar energy onto the input waste material, several stages of heating resulted in the material in a plasma form. Gating into puffs into the hard vacuum produced a fairly consistent velocity of the material as it shot past a strong magnetic field, bending the trajectory of each particle according to its mass/charge ratio. Containers put at the location of each mass/charge ratio intersection with a perimeter, gathered just the material that had a specific mass for its charge. Too hot to be chemically combined with each other, the various elements headed into their respective catchers. When a catcher would become full, it would be harvested and a fresh empty one put in its place. The harvested materials were pure elements, ready for direct materials processing.

From such resources as these, a semiconductor facility was supplied, and gradually began to produce ever more complex integrated circuits, at first for sensors, then communications equipment, then computers, finally getting built. This had been one of their milestone goals, which enabled the next goals.

One of these was an education system distributed to everyone, wherever they were at at any time, per their desire. At their workstation, it provided data links recording their progress on each task they did during their workday; and in between when it was doing that, it provided simulation so as to teach the person new skills. Education was oriented to doing specific tasks which needed to be done; the rapid shift of kind of simulation enabled education on a huge variety of skills, often including "pure" science that was plug-able into many kinds of uses when combined with specifics of some ongoing task. The original input of each person's knowledge and skill base was thus sharable to all who needed it to perform some task right before them at the moment. This original knowledge base was then incremented by the results of each person at their workstations.

posted by Unknown @ 3:39 PM