“How do you figure?”
Levsky paused and looked around the table. “To put it as gently as possible, the prototype starship is huge and rather less than nimble,” he said. “Simulated computer landings on either Diomedes or Automeden have had problems, not so much due to their high gravity or rapid spin, but because of the prototype’s enormous mass and awkward drive mechanism.”
Turi John nodded. The H-bomb drive was not the most flexible of instruments, and at 100,000 tons, there was no room to incorporate a chemical rocket system into the basic design. “How would Cowflop be any improvement, then?”
“It isn’t spinning, for one thing. We have worked up a computer simulation which suggests that a close approach to Cowflop may be feasible.”
“How close?” asked Tosca.
“Eventually we got down in the range of 2.0 to 0.2 kilometers, all short of collision, much better than what we started off doing. At 2.0 kilometers we can send a small craft over to Cowflop, run a line from prototype to planifitesimal, and winch them together.”
“Don’t you mean planetesimal?”
“For Cowflop?” Levsky laughed. “We combined planetesimal, meaning little planet, with infinitesimal, and it still sounds pretentious!”
“That addresses the docking problem, at any rate,” said Wysinski’s staffer, making a note. “Then what?”
“Well, then the crew unfolds the ship and sets it to rotating,” said Turi John. “The, what did you call it, the AHB, gets established, and then everybody comes home.”
“Incorrect, Doctor Ramos,” said Levsky. “The prototype must be converted to space station mode, yes, I agree. That is, after all, the way it will travel once it is coasting at 3 percent the speed of light, and such a demonstration is an integral part of the feasibility study. But the crew must do more.”
A sigh. “What else remains to be done, Colonel?”
“They must build something, Professor Tosca. First, they must set up a DSM,” Levsky glanced at Turi John, and spelled it out. “A Dust Sorting Mill, Doctor Ramos. The initial use will be to separate out volatiles, water mostly, to enhance and support the AHB on the ship. Later, it will provide raw materials for the…” He paused. “The words ‘conquest of space’ are on the tip of my tongue, but they are the wrong words.”
“What do you have in mind to do, then?” askedTuri John.
“Enclosure of a biosphere,” replied Levsky. “Our cosmonauts must build an envelope and fill it with air. Air, water, soil, sunlight and life.”
“That seems a rather excessive requirement, don’t you think, Colonel Levsky?”
“At the end of this crazy, heroic star journey we are contemplating, if our cosmonauts find only dead, sterile planetary debris, they must be able to quicken it to life, mixing the dust with water and illuminating the mud with sunlight so that life, as we know it, can thrive. What tools will they need? What machines? What seeds? These are things we should try to find out.”
Turi John looked up doubtfully. “Are you sure this won’t kill the whole project?”
“Relax, Doctor Ramos,” said Wysinski’s staffer. “This is what the project is supposed to be doing, right? Suppose I pass Colonel Levsky’s idea on up to Stan, and let our people check it out?”
“An excellent idea,” said Levsky. “Excellent. Listen, if Representative Wysinski is interested, my office has been working on the details of such an ISB station. If he should be even a tiny bit interested, give me a call.”
The staffer made a note, then looked up. “I will be asked,” he said. “What’s an ISB station?”
“ISB stands for In Situ Built, of course.” He removed a card case from his pocket. “Here.Ask for Colonel Pavel Ivanovitch Levsky at either of these numbers.”
“The problem, Pavel Ivanovitch,” said Winslow, watching Lunar Three slowly turning as the shuttle approached, “is that labor is so infernally expensive up here.”
“Ridiculous, I say. Why not just assign the people that are needed and get the job done?”
Winslow smiled. “Breathing is not a problem, theoretically. Theoretically, we have the power to rip the oxygen from the so-abundant silicate rock, and we can remove the carbon dioxide any number of ways. But. If you want men to work, you have to feed them, do you not?”
Colonel Levsky shrugged. “Perhaps, though this would not be the first time that large numbers of workers starved carrying out heroic projects.”
“You have to feed them,” said Winslow. “One hectare of land will support 12 people, on the average. We have…” he rubbed his chin and stared absently out the window, “about 23 hectares altogether, not counting a few potted plants mainly useful for decoration. That area would support about 276 people; when we arrive, the total will be up to 319.”
“That is not nearly enough, we should have 1,000 construction workers alone.”
“No, no, no. The trick is to work smarter, not harder.
“What do you mean? Work is work.” Levsky shook his head in irritation. “Why not send up the 1,000 workers and get the job done?”
“You aren’t listening. Cis-lunar space has 23 hectares struggling to support 300 people. Add 1,000 workers, you’ll need another, oh, 80 hectares to support them?
“So dig more tunnels. The Moon has a world of room.”
Winslow sighed and pulled a sad face. “The Moon has a world of room and not enough water to drown a gnat. Figure that you have to schlepp up one ton of water for each of those 1,000 temporary workers you want to bring up, and you can see why we’re working smarter, instead.”
“That would be what, a half billion dollar charge for the water?”
“And that’s for just the water. Probably you want to put most of those 80 hectares we need in orbit, where the work will be done. How much did Lunar Three cost?”
“Too much,” conceded Levsky at last. “Way too much. But working ‘smart’ as you call it is an invitation to catastrophe.”
“No,” Winslow shook his head. “It used to be that the hardest thing was to make the plan. Now, with the latest version of UltraSuperHyperCAD, we can make changes on the fly, and retrofit where needed. We don’t even have to get the approval of the central planners; the people doing the work are their own experts.”
“Luna hasn’t got room for a bureaucracy,” Levsky agreed. “In the past, I, myself have put my hand to gardening, and kitchen police besides.” He hesitated, thinking of his protracted efforts to make the BBC give milk. “Give me an example of something that was solved on the fly. Give me a for instance.”
“Well, being a metallurgist, I’ll give a metallurgical example-1 helped work out the aluminum slurry technique, for instance.” The original plans had called for fabricating steel pipe in orbit, which proved to be impossible to do on the scale needed. The aluminum slurry technique used lasers, a fly’s-eye lens, and an electric field to grow sapphire whiskers from molten aluminum under oxygen. Periodically, the aluminum was stirred, and fresh whiskers were grown. The viscosity of the slurry provided the cue to when the batch was done, and when the ratio was 2:1 aluminum to aluminum oxide whiskers, the batch was cast into a billet. Luna Base then shot up the billet to Lunar Three, which remelted it and fabricated the slurry.
“You mean the machine that slip-casts the pipe for the big rocket cham-ber?” The “big rocket chamber” was a geodesic hemisphere 2,000 meters in diameter.
“No, no, no. The machine that feeds that machine.”