Preparing for spin-up

The big news on the lifeboats is that Sasha was pardoned. We pulled her in on a last-minute jam session to get the relay up to power and she was invaluable. So, after a brief meeting, the decision to release her from confinement was unanimous. She’s in good spirits overall and has dived headfirst back into life aboard the ‘boats to reunite with her fellow merczers (merciers?). MRCZ culture is spreading across the station as our old way of doing things falls by the wayside. The new ad-hoc structure is maddening to get used to but it’s so nice to get my hands dirty again, mathematically-speaking. I don’t think large amounts of experience and technical knowledge are the best qualifiers for managing people with large amounts of experience and technical knowledge. I’m a great engineer. I’m not stellar with people. Go figure.

That said, I’m acting as in concordance with Gregor, Jürgen, Sam (from Ops) and Andre (from Comm) to manage my projects (which, thanks to this new structure, have doubled). I provided the engineering background and they assist with shepherding the projects. We’ve finished the Big Mirror and will maneuver it into position once the station begins its rotation to avoid any threat of collision. The days until spin-up can now be counted on both hands and some toes. Greg’s extraction team is processing megatons of regolith and the massive moon-crete plates are locking into the outer ring. As the shield is immobile, it’s not necessary to complete it by spin-up but his team is going for broke so they can begin processing and fabricating of structural materials for inside the superstructure. I

Speaking of fabrication, the materials team have figured out a hack for the heat problem that was plaguing our prototype fabricators. The initial plan was for a relatively small machine to output carbon and oxygen from waste CO2. Oxygen would output into collection tanks while the carbon would be assembled into nanotubes and used for materials production. Unfortunately, this required incredibly large and complex “shells” to cool down the fabricators. Tens of thousands of mechanical parts moving every second was creating terrific amounts of waste heat. Rather than use a traditional molecular method of assembly, we’re now using controlled electro-chemical reactions to shuttle parts to various parts of the assembler. We’re getting results, slowly but surely. Within the year we hope to be producing extruding simple objects (beams, struts, etc.) from base matter leftover from the mining operations on Titan, Tethys and Mimas.

Our monthly town hall meeting is in a few hours. I need to prepare my notes and finish some reading before it starts up. Take care, everyone.

– Hersh