Thursday, November 30, 2006

Day 30 of 30 2006 Building Up

Day 30 of 30 2006: "Building Up" by James E D Cline

When the signal was received from the SPS construction site, indicating completion of the local fabrication of the require solar cells for the larger solar power array, Improy and Catalie again made the lift up the partially built KESTS structure, from the Cayambe tunnel in Ecuador, around the Earth upward to GEO above the opposite side of the Earth, where the Solar Power Station was being built, mostly automatically, but occasionally needed on-site human versatility for some specific tasks.

Assembling their space worksuits around themselves, they left their winged spacecraft and moved the huge batch of solar cells into the assembly hopper of the solar panels, for automated placement and electrical connection and testing of each one as installed. The microwave generator and directing array was already in place, all it needed was electrical energy, and lots of it. As the solar cells were hooked into the solar panels by the robotic assembler, the electrical energy of each one would be added to the energy available to the microwave generator and its control circuitry. They setup the manufacturing and transportation monitor equipment, which would continually evaluate the performance of all the systems up here in GEO and also of the KESTS electrodynamic transportation structure itself. THey put in known transients into each system and watched for the monitor's evaluation that resulted.

The systems were growing up here not just in size and complexity, but also in their multiplicity of functions, often interrelated. the Emplos corporation and the Three Musketeers Corporation had very limited resources, which limited what they could do even with their interlinked education-workstations which was still proving extremely powerful in raising the competency of people and their enjoyment of being part of the larger process. Catalie and Improy had a way they hoped would bring significant new resources to the system, so as their endurance time ran out up here unshielded in GEO, they returned to their captive winged spacecraft, rode the KESTS structure down to the fringes of the atmosphere, and set their winged spacecraft free.

They had to drop awhile in order to build up speed, then their large foamed aluminum glider wings rode the relative wind, and they once again did the bounce around the planet, losing altitude and speed slowly enough as to not get uncomfortably hot along the way. But this time their landing destination was neither Cayanbe nor White Sands; they were going to the long-abandoned remains of the space command center in the ghost town of Houston. They landed at the runway of the abandoned airport, skidding to their usual halt. They had to leave their space worksuits there in their glider spacecraft, too bulky for their long hike to the space command center remains.

Historical data was sketchy, as to what happened to the once proud Houston Space Command of NASA. When the mega-corporations arranged to fix the elections, and then have the country turned into a gigantic business instead of a country of people, everything was privatized, including NASA facilities. It was given by the new government to a giant toy manufacturer, the mega-corporations seeing no quick profit in any space ventures, so they got rid of NASA and gave its facilities away. The toy manufacturer saw the Houston space command center, with all its computer monitors, as being most nearly an arcade. So they sent a team in to make the consoles to run computer games for teenagers. The government-super-corporation gave each of its subsidiaries 3 months to streamline their takeover operation, and another 3 months to show a profit. By the end of the second quarter, the Houston space command arcade was not showing a profit, so it was abandoned, its doors closed, and walked away from.

The understandably frustrated kids had gave up trying to play their favorite computer games on the imperfectly modified consoles of the former space command center, and they had gotten in a fight with each other, throwing handy objects, some of which had hit the consoles. The place was then abandoned, decades ago. The world had been a state of collapse from even before that, little of high technological sophistication got built afterward. So Improy and Catalie considered the remains of the former space command a gold mine of parts they could use. The remote eyes and ears of the worldwide communications system was no longer working, of course. But hey did have some big dishes locally, and they manually set one up to aim at a relay link that they had positioned on the KESTS where line of sight existed both to the GEO assembly station above the equatorial ocean, and also to Houston, Cayambe, and to White Sands. Improy set up one of the education-workstations which they had brought along, and connected it through the KESTS repeater transceiver, and was immediately locked into both the home base at White Sands and the GEO assembly site. Indulging in only the briefest welcoming chats with the people at White Sands, Catalie went through the checklist of monitor functions and data output from the GEO site. Based on that data, she made some changes in the timing and sequense of the manufacturing process, and left the manufacturing assembly automation to run some more.

She then turned her attention to the monitoring of the KESTS transportation structure. There were two particular concerns she had tight now, involving the structure's ability to servo-position adequately in response to transients. One kind of possible transient was that of the seismic wave of an earthquake; one such had been recorded long ago on the opposite side of Cayambe peak from the village of Cayambe, so it was possible to happen again. The other transient type was from winds causing shifting lateral loads on the KESTS structure in the atmosphere. Such lateral loads were compensated for by unbalancing the distribution of armature segment velocities around the perimeter of the cross-section of the KESTS, the lateral stresses produced intended to balance the stresses produced by wind loads. But the energy distribution amount the armature segments was set when they left the Cayanmbe tunnel accelerator site, and little was possible after that to change their pattern of sideway push against the structure from within it. Sudden and sustained wind shifts that had not been predicted adequately, was the big worry and so was being monitored and relayed to the ground for human evaluation, getting data for the computers that would do it automatically thereafter, mimicking the human's responses. The KESTS structure was essentially horizontal out across Brazil in one direction and the Pacific Ocean in the other, for a long way before the curvature of the earth surface was dropping away out from under the KESTS lesser curvature. If the winds broadsided the structure across a large distance, it could put quite a lateral wind load on the KESTS structure. And if the winds shifted to rapidly, it could cause possibly insufficiently unbalanced forces within the KESTS internal trackways. They were doing reality testing a bit more than she liked. So far, things seemed to be well within the limits of compensation.

Meanwhile, Improy was taking stock of the abandoned equipment that might still be useful. The electronics technology utilized in the consoles had become obsoleted with advances in technology for awhile, but then with the implosion of civilization, its technology became irreproducible. Some of the circuit boards population of integrated circuits would be best used as models, when put into the new manufacturing system used for making the education-workstations. Their imprint could be copied into the knowledge base, perhaps new things would result.

Whatever, Improy and Catalie were stranded here in Houston, no way to fly their spacecraft out of there.

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