long cross section between Modules A and B, contained a wide-open hatch, the main construction bay. The shack hovered above the powersat, tethered in place by cables, with the hatch over the unfinished end of the powersat’s structure.
The beam builders were contained in the main bay. They were like the ones designed by Grumman and NASA in the 70’s: big rectangular machines each weighing nearly a hundred tons on Earth. Their mass alone was formidable in space, when it meant lowering and raising the fat bastards in and out of the bay. Three large rolls of aluminum sheet, made on the Moon, were loaded on rollers on the outside of a beam builder, one on each of the machine’s three sides. The sheets were fed in and molded into spars and joined with cross-spars with laser welders. What came out was a perfect tetrahedral beam, a hundred feet long, which could be joined with other beams to form one of the main spars.
To join the beams together, beamjacks in MMU backpacks and in pods would glide between and under them, inserting trusses and reinforcing seams. It was long, slow work, because guidance lasers in Vulcan were focused down the length of the satellite. With them, Command could tell whether the giant structure was being built straight. If it wasn’t—a common occurrence—then beamjacks would have to get it straight. Imagine trying to build something several miles long as straight and even as a laser beam, and you can see one of the reasons building the thing was such a heartache.
On the end of Module A was a ramp where more guys worked at assembling the two microwave transmitting dishes which would eventually be fixed to rotary joints at each end of the completed powersat.
The construction pods were housed within Module B, near one of the two freighter loading bays on the upper half of the shack, just across from the main airlock leading to the hotdogs. During changes in the work shifts, which occurred three times daily, this area was always the most crowded. One shift coming in, one shift going out, pods maneuvering in through their bay adjacent to the main construction deck for refueling and taking on relief pilots, sometimes with the added confusion of a freighter from the Moon or Earth unloading materials. Every eight hours it looked like a Chinese fire drill performed in zero-g.
The focus of all the activity—when there was a focus—was the massive structure floating underneath Vulcan. When the White House and Skycorp and NASA announced its inception, they called it Project Franklin, after old Ben who allegedly discovered electricity by flying a kite with a key on the end into a thunderstorm. This name was almost as pretentious as if they had called it Project Prometheus, and so most people forgot about it as one of those names a Republican administration in the White House would devise.
SPS-1, or the powersat as it was more conveniently called, was planned to be about 13.3 miles long and 3.3 miles wide. It resembled a vast flat gridwork, with the construction shack hovering over one end, men and work pods skirting around it like tiny white insects. Eventually it would be covered with sheets of protovoltaic cells manufactured on the Moon, transforming it into a massive, rectangular mirror.
You know the rest. The cells capture sunlight, transform it into electricity which in turn is transmitted through microwave beams to rectennas in the Southwest, supplying five gigawatts of electricity to the U.S., the cost of which shows up on your electric bill each month. Frankly, I don’t think it’s my place to say whether that cost is high or low, except to say that the forests in the northeastern states and Canada look much prettier since the acid rain problem has been obviated and school kids in Pennsylvania history classes have to struggle to remember what the fuss in the 70’s over Three Mile Island was all about.
Since grabbing the sun’s energy was what all of the expense and R&D and manpower had been
The beam builders were contained in the main bay. They were like the ones designed by Grumman and NASA in the 70’s: big rectangular machines each weighing nearly a hundred tons on Earth. Their mass alone was formidable in space, when it meant lowering and raising the fat bastards in and out of the bay. Three large rolls of aluminum sheet, made on the Moon, were loaded on rollers on the outside of a beam builder, one on each of the machine’s three sides. The sheets were fed in and molded into spars and joined with cross-spars with laser welders. What came out was a perfect tetrahedral beam, a hundred feet long, which could be joined with other beams to form one of the main spars.
To join the beams together, beamjacks in MMU backpacks and in pods would glide between and under them, inserting trusses and reinforcing seams. It was long, slow work, because guidance lasers in Vulcan were focused down the length of the satellite. With them, Command could tell whether the giant structure was being built straight. If it wasn’t—a common occurrence—then beamjacks would have to get it straight. Imagine trying to build something several miles long as straight and even as a laser beam, and you can see one of the reasons building the thing was such a heartache.
On the end of Module A was a ramp where more guys worked at assembling the two microwave transmitting dishes which would eventually be fixed to rotary joints at each end of the completed powersat.
The construction pods were housed within Module B, near one of the two freighter loading bays on the upper half of the shack, just across from the main airlock leading to the hotdogs. During changes in the work shifts, which occurred three times daily, this area was always the most crowded. One shift coming in, one shift going out, pods maneuvering in through their bay adjacent to the main construction deck for refueling and taking on relief pilots, sometimes with the added confusion of a freighter from the Moon or Earth unloading materials. Every eight hours it looked like a Chinese fire drill performed in zero-g.
The focus of all the activity—when there was a focus—was the massive structure floating underneath Vulcan. When the White House and Skycorp and NASA announced its inception, they called it Project Franklin, after old Ben who allegedly discovered electricity by flying a kite with a key on the end into a thunderstorm. This name was almost as pretentious as if they had called it Project Prometheus, and so most people forgot about it as one of those names a Republican administration in the White House would devise.
SPS-1, or the powersat as it was more conveniently called, was planned to be about 13.3 miles long and 3.3 miles wide. It resembled a vast flat gridwork, with the construction shack hovering over one end, men and work pods skirting around it like tiny white insects. Eventually it would be covered with sheets of protovoltaic cells manufactured on the Moon, transforming it into a massive, rectangular mirror.
You know the rest. The cells capture sunlight, transform it into electricity which in turn is transmitted through microwave beams to rectennas in the Southwest, supplying five gigawatts of electricity to the U.S., the cost of which shows up on your electric bill each month. Frankly, I don’t think it’s my place to say whether that cost is high or low, except to say that the forests in the northeastern states and Canada look much prettier since the acid rain problem has been obviated and school kids in Pennsylvania history classes have to struggle to remember what the fuss in the 70’s over Three Mile Island was all about.
Since grabbing the sun’s energy was what all of the expense and R&D and manpower had been
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