A Storage Unit

A Storage Unit

Outside the airlock, she backed herself into a storage unit and ran a quick check of its propulsion and guidance systems. Finding everything inn proper order, she undocked and jetted off on a path that looped around the raft of modules at a safe distance.

The brilliant wash of sunlight and earthglow exhilarated her, and she found herself thinking of Daniel. For reasons she could not fully understand, she sensed that their relationship was about to change. Everything that had happened before – the early days of their stint on the station, the blood-pressure testing, her fling with Ben Pogue and Bill Bova – slowly diminished into irrelevance. She did not know exactly what lay ahead for them, but she felt certain that a new relationship between them was beginning. It almost made her smile.

What did he expect to accomplish by traveling to the observatory ? Image : Megan Jorgenson (Elena)

Her thoughts turned to Daniel. What did he expect to accomplish by traveling to the observatory? Would Daniel have any answers, any clues about what the hell was happening to the Solar System? She snapped her helmet into place and called Audry over channel C, the secured comm link she had designated for their chatter.

“I’m all gassed up and ready for egress”, she said. “Any of my crew showed themselves?”

(Trikon Deception, by Ben Bova)

Trikon Station

Trikon Station

When placed in orbit, a long skinny object exhibits a peculiar property due to the basic physics of orbital mechanics. Once aligned so that its long axis points towards the center of the Earth, it tends to maintain this attitude. The bottom end (nadir) remains at the bottom and the top end (zenith) remains at the top as the object orbits around the Earth. The forces that cause this phenomenon are called gravity-gradient torques and the object is said to be gravity-gradient stabilized.

As applied to a space station, this means that the modules will always be oriented so that the Earth is « below » or « down » the station in relation to its internal structure. When a space station orbits about 480 kilometers (300 miles) above the Earth’s surface, space is not entirely a vacuum at this altitude. In fact, there is a faint, thin atmosphere composed principally of atomic oxygen. This highly reactive gas can erode the station’s components.

Dark Deep Space Reflective. Credit image © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

To minimize this erosion and the orbital decay resulting from the slight but real aerodynamic drag, the station’s normal orbital orientation is to fly “edge on”. However, the station’s natural tendency to remain gravity gradient stabilized is not enough to keep it properly functioning. The solar panels must always be oriented toward the sun to collect energy. The radiators must be aimed away from the Sun to discharge waste heat. As the station orbits the Earth, the positions of the solar panels and radiators must be constantly adjusted for the most efficient orientations. Although the station carries gas jet thrusters to make gross changes in its position and to reboost itself to higher orbit when necessary, thrusters are an imprecise and costly method of “fine turning” attitude.

Trikon Station therefore employs a sophisticated system of control moment gyroscopes or CMGs to correct and maintain proper orientation. These gyroscopes are mounted in the external truss of the station’s skeleton.

Trikon Space Station Orientation Manual by Ben Bova and Bill Pogue, The Trikon Deception.

Energy for a Space Station

Energy for a Space Station

Under normal conditions, a space station gathers its energy with huge sails of solar cells while it flows on the sun side of the planet. Part of the energy is delivered to the power distribution system for immediate use and the rest is stored in nickel-cadmium batteries (nicad batteries) to support the station when it slipped into the Earth’s shadow.

The auxiliary power configuration may cause the undesired effect of disengaging the station’s utilities from the solar arrays. The nicad batteries are capable of providing full power for one complete orbit. The emergency configuration lowers the demand.

E for Energy. Image : © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Viewed from the space, the module are identical except for the markings painted on their white skins. As the modules are situated adjacent to each other and their internal designs and color schemes are adapted to suit the tastes of the individual nationalities.

The station’s computerized inertial measurement unit (IMU) constantly monitors orientation and the attitude control system (ACS) automatically corrects andy instability.

(Ben Bova and Bill Pogue, the Trikon Deception).

Pre-existing Life

Pre-existing Life

When Geppeto is just finishing the construction of Pinocchio, he turns his back on the puppet and is promptly sent flying by a well-placed kick. At that instant the carpenter’s friend arrives and asks him what he is doing sprawled on the floor.

“I am teaching,” Gepetto replies with dignity, “the alphabet to the ants”.

This seemed to Ellie extremely witty, and she delighted in recounting it to her friends. But each time she quoted it there was an unspoken question lingering at the edge of her consciousness: Could you teach the alphabet to the ants? And would you want to? Down there with hundreds of scurrying insects who might crawl all over your skin, or even sting you? What could ants know, anyway?

Leeuwenhoek’s microscope evolved from the magnifying glasses employed by drapers to examine the quality of cloth. With it the scientist discovered a universe in a drop of water: the microbes, which he described as “animalcules” and thought “cute”.

Could you teach the alphabet to the ants? (Quotations from Megan Jorgensen). Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Huygens had contributed to the design of the first microscopes and himself made many discoveries with them.

Leeuwenhoek and Huygens were among the first people ever to see human sperm cells, a prerequisite for understanding human reproduction. To explain how microorganisms slowly develop in water previously sterilized by boiling, Huygens proposed that they were small enough to float through the air and reproduced on alighting in water. Thus he established an alternative to spontaneous generation – the notion that life could rise, in fermenting grape juice or rotting meat, entirely independent of pre-existing life. It was not until the time of Louis Pasteur, two centuries later, that Huygens’ speculation was proved correct. The Viking search for life on Mars can be traced in more ways than one back to Leeuwenhoek and Huygens. They are also the grandfathers of the germ theory of disease, and therefore of much of modern medicine. But they had no practical motives in mind. They were merely tinkering in a technological society.

Encrypting Machine

Encrypting Machine

Ellie built an encrypting machine. In was rudimentary, but it worked. It could take and English-language message and transform it by a simple substitution cipher into something that looked like gibberish. Building a machine that would do the reverse – converting an encrypted message into clear when you didn’t know the substitution convention – that was much harder.

You could have the machine run through all the possible substitutions (A stands for B, A stands for C, A stands for D…), or you could remember that some letters in English were used more often than others. You could get some idea of the frequency of letters by looking at the sizes of the bins for each letter of type in the print shop next door.

The war still has to be fought even though we are behind barbed wire. (Quotations from M. Jorgensen). Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

ETAOIN SHRDLU, the boys in print shop would say, giving pretty closely the order of the twelve most frequently used letters in English. In decoding a long message, the letter that was most common probably stood for an E. The most common three-letter word in the language was “the”. If within a word there was a letter standing between a T and an E, it was almost certainly H. If not, you could bet on R or a vowel.

Ellie deduced other rules and spent long hours counting up the frequency of letters in various schoolbooks before she discovered that such frequency tables had already been compiled and published. Her decrypting machine was only for her own enjoyment. She did not use it to convey secret messages to friends. She was unsure to whom she might safely confide these electronic and cryptographic interests, the boys became jittery or boisterous, and the girls looked at her strangely.