Building Up - jedcline's 2006 NanoWriMo

Day 6 of 30 2006

day 6 of 30 jedc 2006

That first space bus load of brave people took up occupancy of the 60 degree segment of the wheel, as versatile a bunch as they were courageous. Each had been trained to do three job functions, including the initial setup of the prefab habitat's related inbuilt mechanisms which had been built into the two meter deep walls, floors and ceiling. A two meter transportation corridor went completely around the wheel. That left over a 4 meter space for each special function facility, such as the kitchen restaurant and commercial shop areas, which were included in this first habitable area. The 838 meter long 60 degree arc, 4 meters wide, made for 3,300 square meters of working floor space. The residences were sprinkled all through the facilities, in amongst the shops and light industrial sections. Only the two areas intended for agriculture were lacking in residences, because it was less shielded from incoming solar energies. Normally there would be living space for 250 people maximum in this first habitable section, each person had personal space 2 meters wide along the corridor, was 4 meters deep and 4 meters high, so each was built as a loft-augumented living space. Couples had adjoining areas and were able to remove much of the adjoining wall, creating a room 4 meters by 4 meters.

Improy and Catalie had taken up one such double room, the residence nearest the airlock into the area in which they continued their work of removing bulkheads and de-gassing habitat segments. The 33 new people had their pick, at least temporarily, of the remaining 248 living quarters. Most of them clustered near each other, an unconscious reaction to the really unnatural world they were now in, a small fragment of the teeming population for which it was designed and built. All of them had participated in the debugging of this area when the wheel of habitats was assembled on the New Mexico desert floor before launches, so it was not that strange in some ways; but that the gravity was so small compared to what had been there during the test habitation, it was a weird change to the otherwise familiar. And, there was some coriolis curvature of the path of falling objects and poured liquids. That curvature would become more apparent when the wheel was spun up to full speed to simulate Earth surface gravity.

For now the rotation rate only provided 1/5 g, to make the job of hauling bulkheads out much easier. Yet, work was still dangerous. Just as Improy had gotten one of the bulkheads to the hub end of a spoke shaft, the attachment point of the winch cable, overworked during its emergency earlier use during the rescue of the space bus module, gave out, and down the bulkhead went through the shaft, building up speed, bouncing against the inner channel of the spoke as it went. risk of that happening was why Catalie always took a different path to the hub to meet her partner for the placement of the bulkhead outside the hub. There was a bottom, of course, and the heavy bulkhead had spun to an edge on orientation when it hit the floor, slicing through the flooring, service channels under the floor, through the module's outer shell, and out into space, gone. The two aluminum circumferential bands were undamaged, but the central glass one had been severed. The work area was still exposed to hard vacuum inside, so there was no venting of atmosphere.

But, there was this big hole.

Some of their propellant allocated for the full spinup had to be spent instead to de-spin the huge wheel, for there was no way to do work of this magnitude on the outer shell while it was spinning. Their choices were to pull the whole habitat module, replacing it with another launched up to replace it from the ground; or to patch the damaged one. Since it was one of the six which were built for attachment of a spoke to it, there were no spares on the ground, so one would have to be built from scratch and launched up; it would take months to do. Neither option looked desirable. A patch job was looking better all the time to them, despite the need to fix all the service tubing in floor and ceiling, and splice the fiberglass cable around the outside. And to seal the hole itself, at least as strong as new.

Since the damaged site was not in the one which was equipped for light industrial use, they decided to extend the habitable area to include it, since the machine shop area was adjacent to the 60 degree section now occupied. That would make it a lot easier to make the pieces needed to do the repair, although the facility was designed for use in artificial gravity. They gathered the new staff members who had any machine shop or even hand tool aptitude, moved them into the newly activated section of the wheel's interior. The accountant was pressed into service there, to keep track of all the spares that were used from the original launched storage cabinet areas, were recorded and sent to ground for sending up a stash in the next space bus launch.

But there was not going to be such a launch for awhile, as they had not found a way to prevent the problem that happened with the docking of the original one. How do you convert people into rigid objects anchored to the spacecraft? That meant that instead, the steering thrusters for the docking had to be modified to enable a mode of much smaller thrust. That would take a longer time to dock, but ought to work. Meanwhile there was a sudden scarcity of people volunteering for the next ride up, having watched while the first bus load almost was doomed to a fiery re-entry, and they did not have confidence that Ownma Corporation considered the workers much differently than the launch vehicle: expendable, easily replaceable property.

Since they had to send up a replacement fiberglass circumferential cable anyway, the severed one not being repairable with sufficient strength using the facilities on hand up there, the decision was made to modify the docking thrusters to have half the original thrust per pulse, and to send up a dozen agricultural section workers, along with small livestock consisting of breeding pairs of quail and fish, and feed enough to last until locally grown feed would be expected available. This would give the agricultural workers something to practice on, and would provide some real home grown food, besides grain and vegetables, for the personnel there if all went as planned. Shipping food up there was quite inefficient. The Corporation paid for huge insurance policies for the benefit of the agricultural workers, and gave bonuses on the spot.

The standard configuration vehicle was set up on the launch pad, tug booster flyback module on the bottom, the habitat module as modified to be a space bus on top of that, and a sleek airbreather booster strapped on the module, and up it went.

In the Embarcadero as they called it, the airlock dock facility, Improv and Catalie waited, already partly in their space environment worksuits. The space bus module hove into view, began to nuzzle up to the docking ring, the slower steering thrusters and modified feedback loop worked. Soon there were a dozen more relieved-looking members of their population, along with crates of seed and fish and quail, all needing homes soon.

posted by Unknown @ 2:43 PM