Building Up - jedcline's 2006 NanoWriMo

day 4 of 30 in 2006

day 4 of 30 jedcline

When the tether belt had lowered them to within a few miles of the ocean's surface, Improy pointed out the gleaming shape of the Ownma Corporation's mammoth yacht cruising northward from the tiny floating island which it had dwarfed. When the Armed Services had been privatized, Ownma Corporation had been ceded the U S Navy, and the Corporation promptly had one of the nuclear powered aircraft carriers modified to be a luxury yacht for their management to sport around in, travelling to and from by air. "At least we won't have to endure the "in your face" insults from management this time," he quipped. He had learned the hard way that is a favorite sport of the Big Boys who ran the Corporation, the in-your-face put-downs, putting you back in your place if you had done something unusually well. Even knowing it was just the playout of an inborn psychological quirk of the bullies that compulsively went for the domineering of others that brought them the easy good life, still did not take the sting out of that kind of "reward."

Silent for most of the decent, Catalie replied that they had experienced some wonderful life together in this adventure, surely reward enough in itself. And Ownma Corporation had enabled that to happen, she reminded him. "They only did this to watch us fail in desperate effort, and the best we could do is to deprive them of that goal," he grumped. She shrugged her shoulders, saying "Well, I had fun, and still am having fun. This is one of the greatest rides I have ever had, for instance. Can't you just enjoy this ride?" Improy just stared out the window into the air, then said "I remember long ago working with a man who had a phrase he liked: 'Easy as taking candy out of a baby's mouth' which I think says something about the mind behind the person, it does. Ownma Corp bosses did this project for the same purpose they would put the candy in the baby's mouth in the first place, just to get their kicks out of taking the candy away again, what power they relish" he bitterly muttered. "So what are they going to assign us to do next?"

A month later they found out. The plane carrying them landed at Holloman Airport in Alamagordo, and then they were delivered by van to Ownma's White Sands desert holdings, granted to the Corporation by the government when privatizing the former missile test facility, where American's had gained rocket expertise by test firing German V-2 rockets they had captured at the end of WWII, then learned from test firings of missiles they designed and built on those principles. Now it was a spaceport for the chemical fueled rockets that were a mainstay of the Corporation.

At least the couple got to work in the same facility, so they could have lunch together in the company cafeteria. Munching lunch while looking out the window at the rugged outline of the Organ Pipe Mountains, Catalie chatted that she had been assigned to work in one of the strangest shaped kitchens she had ever seen. The kitchen was one of two that together prepared food for a thousand people, all of whom would exist in a mile-diameter wheel being assembled out in the desert near the launch facility. She was told to contribute to the design evolution of the kitchens, while bearing in mind that each section of the wheel-shaped tubular building, would be reconnected after being twisted around 90 degrees, so that the floor would later be where the outer perimeter is now. Additionally, the tubular sections, which were 10 meters in diameter and 40 meters long each, had a peculiar design that insisted that everything be sealable into the wall areas, keeping the central area clear; and there were strong bulkheads at each end and one internally, although oddly not making equal size sections. "That is because", Improy commented, "each of those tubes will be filled with liquid, one section with combustible fuel and the other with oxidizer, and the whole thing will for awhile become a huge fuel tank for its own launch into Low Earth Orbit." "Lets take a walk over to the hangar, before we go back to work."

In the hangar, he pointed out there were two kinds of vehicles in there. One was a sleek pilotless aircraft with huge airbreather jet engines. The other was a short stumpy lifting body winged shape that was mostly three huge engines with wings, which clearly had inspiration from the old Space Shuttle re-entry vehicle, but without much of a fuselage, and also no place for a pilot. "What is to happen, is that the kitchen you are helping debug now, will be one of the individual modules that will be set upon one of those short stumpy vehicles with the huge engines, the nose fairing will be transferred over to the top of the module for the trip up." Pointing over at one of the sleek aircraft with the two big engines on its wings, he continued "And one of those airbreathing boosters will be strapped onto the module too. The insides of your kitchen, or whatever habitat module being launched in the moment, will be filled with fuel and oxidizer, each in its own section, separated by that inner bulkhead you mentioned." Taking off vertically from the launch pad over there, the airbreathing booster will use up nearly all of its fuel by the time it reaches 30 km altitude, then it will disconnect in the upper atmosphere, and fly back to land on the airstrip here, while the stubby engine tug module will continue to burn the fuel coming from within your kitchen module or whatever. Put that way into Low Earth Orbit, each of the modules will be teleoperated precision docked to the previous habitat module already up there, gradually assembling a spoked wheel a mile in diameter. The connection up there, however, will have rotated the kitchen module so that its floor is now on the outside rim of the big wheel." The engine tug module will disconnect from the habitat module, accept the nose cone which had been disconected from the module before it was docked, re-attaches to the engine tug flyback module, which then de-orbits and returns back here to White Sands airstrip. They expect to launch three modules a day, on average, this way. Ninety modules a month. And when there are vehicular losses as inevitably will happen, there are spare modules and boosters to take their place." Catalie did the math in her head ... 1 mile diameter ... 125 feet per module ... 150 flights including for spokes ... 90 modules per month ...."So we are going back into space in two months when this thing is finished put back together in a circle up there?" she asked. He nodded a yes.

In reality they were another two months debugging the wheel-shaped space habitat as it sat on the ground. Its solar panels received only a tenth of what they would have in space, so the energy to run air conditioning inside was marginal, during the hot summer days of New Mexico. Debugging the far too many interactive systems, both machine systems and living systems, all of which had to operate within certain ranges of the parameters, had some wild swings in some values that had to be stabilized adequately before it would be ready to be put into space. And the first test launch of a basic module failed, the coupling between the engine tug module and the module wobbled when the extra thrust from the airbreather was suddenly stopped, causing fracture of the coupling and requiring destruction of the vehicle by the range safety officer. Reprogramming the airbreather thrust profile so that it tapered off gradually before disconnecting solved the problem, and the second test launch achieved the orbiting of the habitat module used for the test, an essentially minimally equipped module to be used as a recreational facility. Yet there it was, in Low Earth Orbit, with an orbital path that would take many years before risking collision with the tether of the Space Elevator.

Two months later, Improy and Catalie were approaching the torus space station in a Rutan passenger space shuttle, both equipped with space worksuits like the one he had used at the GEO faclity. Their first task was to attach one end of a fiberglass cable to the outer perimeter of the wheel, then she sent her worksuited module along verifying that the cable correctly slipped into a channel along the outer perimeter, while Improy guided the cable bobbin despooling around the 5,000 meter circumference of the wheel. When the full length had been roughly laid, they went along and secured a pair of u-clamps at each place where modules had docked together.

With that emergency ring in place, they then similarly put a pair of aluminum ribbon cables around the perimeter, made of the same material as the module shells were made of, for thermal matching. With a small space scooter he used its rocket thrust to work the plane of the wheel so that its axis of rotation would be normal to the direction of the Sun when spun up, making it a giant gyroscope. Then they both moved off to a safe distance while Improy activated the rocket engine mounted on the outside of the huge wheel, and it began to rotate. They only brought it up to a 5 minute rotational period, which temporarily would provide a usable artificial gravity inside, while they began the internal setup of the facility.

Approaching the hub where the spokes joined in the center of the giant wheel, they pulled the first of some 400 bulkheads that would need to be removed, off of the end of the hub module, exposing the airlock built in there. The bulkheads would have to be secured along the outside of the hub one at a time as they were removed from the interior, brought through the interior and out through the other end of the hub module. They verified that this could be done, clearing the path from the hub down to one of the modules of the torus wheel itself, the winch operating easy in the small artificial gravity.

At that point, they sealed the airlocks at one half of the hub, filled it with air, opened their space worksuits in which they had now toiled for days, and breathed new air inside the module. Lights on powered by the solar panels outside, air conditioning stabilizing internal temperature, they activated the computer terminals linking the station with Houston by radio link, and was greeted with the fanfare blare and video clip from Clarke's "2001 Space Oddysey" movie, showing the rotating wheel envisioned so long ago.

posted by Unknown @ 1:32 PM