At 06:30, Brandon toted his iPad down from the HP deck to join Tom and Carl in the general lab area on Deck One. “We may still need to do a space walk,” he said. “But it should only take an hour or two. I have an idea,” he proceeded to explain his plan.<\/p>\n
Thirty minutes later, Carl and Jackie were off to the staterooms to get back on track with their sleep. They reasoned that a case of sleep deprivation wouldn’t help the situation.<\/p>\n
As Mission Support had assessed the situation and determined that rewiring the panel was the best option, there was natural reluctance to Brandon’s idea, at first. But, once it was thoroughly explained that the necessary spacewalk would be one to two hours instead of ten to twelve hours per day, for several days, the go ahead was given. If this plan ended up failing, the fall back plan would be to have the crew rewire the panel.<\/p>\n
Valerie volunteered to relieve Sally on the monitors after her four-hour stint. Spying Sally’s glazed eyes, she was afraid that Sally might not have blinked at all during that whole time. A near miss with an asteroid could have that effect on just about anyone.<\/p>\n
Tom and Brandon set to work gathering various types of pipe and fittings, collecting tools, finding sheet metal, snatching up more tools and basically grabbing anything else they thought might be needed. One of the largest pieces of the puzzle was a water pump that had been brought along, in hopes of finding an underground reservoir to tap. They then carried the vast collection of parts and equipment up to the HP deck. For the size and complexity of the task they were planning to undertake, Deck Three was the only place on board this project could be done without interfering with vital ship operations.<\/p>\n
The water purification system had to be shut down to prevent unintended consequences. If they had accidently cut into one of the tubular pipes while it was running, the ship’s entire water supply would have been pumped out within a matter of several minutes, flooding the compartment. What was needed for this process was a double bypass. First, they cut into the tubes near the top of the wall, attaching elbows and short pipe segments as they went about their construction. As the pipes ran continuously top to bottom in columns, zigzagging their way around the ship, Tom and Brandon only needed to cut into the pipes near their top end. By doing so, they isolated a section of pipes that became self-contained, now separate from the rest and thus created a by-pass. The two men determined an area of six or eight pipes should hold a sufficient amount of water for their purposes in this location and then they would repeat the procedure on the opposite side of the Hab.<\/p>\n
In the central corridor on Deck Three, Brandon and Tom would then construct a jury-rigged steam powered electric generator. Once the unit is assembled, a spacewalk is needed so someone can gently peel back one or two thin layers of the sprayed-on insulation from the area directly outside of the critical pipes in question. The spacewalk involves some risk as one side of the Hab is constantly bombarded by sunlight while the other is in the shade, with a 500° temperature difference between the two sides.<\/p>\n
If it all works as planned, one set of pipes will transmit steam to the generator. The other set then cools the generator and condenses the steam back into water, to re-circulate it. The real trick will be in not removing too much of the insulation, or the ship will either get too hot or too cold causing the plants on the HP Deck to die. The water on the shaded side must be to replaced with an antifreeze liquid to prevent the pipes from freezing solid and bursting into space.<\/p>\n
The next fundamental questions are: Will the spacewalker be able to rappel down the side, while wearing a suit and hauling a full pack of gear, as the ship is rotating at a full One Gee? Or, will they need to slow the craft’s rotation? The spacewalker would have a difficult time first having to suit up, climb the ladder to the hatch carrying all his gear, and then rappel slowly over the side down to the area needing to be worked on. “A slower rotation is definitely the way to go,” Tom determined. “We’ll keep it moving just enough to prevent things from becoming airborne on the inside, maybe zero-point-three gee.”<\/p>\n
“Good idea,” Brandon agreed. “Then, the one doing the work will only weigh… oh, about 40 kilos or so, including spacesuit and gear. Now, which one of us is going outside?”<\/p>\n
Tom grinned, “I’ll flip you for it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At 06:30, Brandon toted his iPad down from the HP deck to join Tom and Carl in the general lab area on Deck One. “We may still need to do a space walk,” he said. “But it should only take an hour or two. I have an idea,” he proceeded to explain his plan. Thirty minutes later, Carl and Jackie …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":179,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chapter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":354,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions\/354"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}