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Chapter 16: Crisis on First KESTS

The sound of heavy winds and lashing rain battering on the windows and wall of the prefab structure high in the Andes Mountains in Ecuador woke Techerson a little, snuggled closer to his wife, thankful for this warm cozy place, sleepily. The metal walls rumbled with a particularly hard gust against it, and suddenly the comm link sounded urgently for attention. There has been a system failure, his boss said, control central in Houston reported the system’s safeties had shut down all but operations necessary for its own survival. It had been lifting a series of cargo spacecraft carrying hot-weld components in an ongoing construction task; the spacecraft were stopped, locked in place hanging on the outside of the KESTS, far below GEO, and the buffer supply of hot-melt components being used in assembly would run out in 3 hours, and that system would have to shut down too if no resupply by then, and it would take weeks to get it going again if that happened. The project did not have weeks to spare; they had to get the first Satellite Solar Power Station online in GEO before the last of the quota of petrochemical fuel was alloted for the project had been fully consumed. That SSPS could then power the KESTS independent of earthsurface failing energy supplies, and could be the start of recovery of the civilization built on easy cheap energy, now starving to death for lack of adequate energy.

Kissing his wife goodby quickly, he put on his maintenance environmental jumpsuit, went out the double door lock into the storm. It was so beautiful here normally when he went outside to go to work, but now barely recognizable in the darkness and rain being hurled against his environmental suit, splotches of wet splaying on his faceplate erratically. His hand guided by the cable set in posts along the rough-hewn pathway along the cliff face, soon he got to the edge of the tunnel aperture in the side of the mountain, and looked at the horizontal tube extending out from the tunnel horizontally as far as one could see, even in daylight. The KESTS tube was already over a meter in diameter, yet much smaller than fully operational size, its construction halted to prematurely start building a solar electric power station in GEO with material lifted by this first KESTS to GEO, due to political turmoil as nations made the final power grabs for the remaining fuel oil reserves. If it did not manage to get its own solar energy derived electric power going before the oil for energy allocation ran out, the project would be shut down, and mankind would be forever chained by gravity to the earth’s surface, not even fuel for one manned rocket launch thereafter.

But something had gone wrong, the KESTS’s fault monitor system alarm had been sent, the system had shut its transportation of cargo spacecraft down. The wind boomed resonantly into the tunnel’s cavern face, as if challenging the right to this intruder KESTS to take root here in its domain. He turned the tunnel service lights on, and stepped into the tunnel tram, went to the maintenance control room. Glancing wistfully at the unfinished holosystem control station, he went over to the tall dark racks of electronic control racks, built of old technology scrounged for the task, the economy already shutting down on development funds. Its glowing lights and numeric displays by the thousands, the failure probably causing failure indications far down the line from where it actually was. Intently looking at the computer display screen graphic of the overall system, it showed a small circle symbolizing the earth's equator, which was encircled by a large circle symbolizing geostationary earth orbit, about seven earth radii out from center of the earth, and the KESTS structure which was symbolized by an ellipse around the earth, touching the equator at one point and touching GEO above the opposite side of the earth. It showed a red splotch on the ellipse that symbolized the KESTS transportation structure very close to where it touch ground. Tis was confirmed by the earliest indication on the alarm lights pointing to a section of the KESTS about 35 kilometers out from the tunnel, still deep in the atmosphere, storm still battering the structure even there. A layer of the KESTS tubes was ruptured, probably by the lateral servo control exceeding its capacity in compensating for lateral wind forces with the rain as hurled battering mass, and the high velocity armature segments had hit the wall and blown out the tubing.

Techerson looked at the pattern of failure lights, guessed the deepest mass stream tube had blown and took out the 14 of them above it to the outside edge of the KESTS as built so far of many layers of armature mass stream tubes, scaling up bootstrap toward full capacity size. He checked to see that the safeties had indeed automatically switched the incoming armatures of the 15 tubes as they were incoming back from their run to GEO, so the only armatures lost were the 35 miles of them still past the accelerator in the tunnel. It would take about 5 more hours to finish the dump of the armature segments from the damaged tubes, the fate would be decided long before that. He climbed into the emergency maintenance gondola, its battery and traction motor would last for several hundred miles and he preferred not to start up the KESTS vehicle lift coupling yet. The gondola moved down through the long Andean tunnel, then exited into the darkness into the storm’s fury, vibrating the gondola as it swept out over the Pacific Ocean along the equator. He would rather have waited until daylight and storm abatement, but neither sun nor storm would change much in the few hours available to get the KESTS going again.

The maintenance spotlights of the gondola glared upon the patch of torn up tubing at 2 o’clock on the KESTS girth. Sealing the hatchway to the KESTS surface was easy even in the storm, a hatchway seal that would work in the hard vacuum of space far above the planet. Cutting into the tubes identified by the monitor system, he pulled the outer ones up, followed back to where the tubing was still undamaged, made clean cuts, and spliced in new sections of tubing, using the splicer aligned the maglev trackways to tolerances invisible to the eye. First the deepest tubes, sealed down into precise alignment within the KESTS structure, then one by one the ones outside until the outer layer was patched. He climbed back out of the hatchway into the gondola and activated the hatchway release, the electrically switched chemical bonding adhesive suddenly switched to their slippery mode, and pulled back into the gondola. Reversing his path, the gondola cruised back toward the mountain tunnel, he was dimly aware of the unseen dark ocean a couple of miles below in the stormy darkness.

An hour and a half had passed, about that time yet to go at max. As the gondola slid along the KESTS into the mountain tunnel again and docked to the maintenance control room, Techerson stepped out toward the bank of antiquated equipment make-do control panels, equipment which had done their automatic job well so far. He selected one of the outer tubes, directed it to stop the dump of sliding armature segments, and instead to allow them to continue on through the tunnel toward the area he had patched. At 30 Km/s it was but one breath’s time until the repair site was passed by the high velocity armature mass stream segments; he breathed a sigh of relief when no new alarm light lit. He then picked the innermost repaired tube, it too passed successfully. One by one the remaining tubes were re-activated. He began the rev up sequence for the full dozen of armature maintenance storage rings adjacent to the tunnel, to bring replacement armature segments up to speed for injection into the KESTS mass stream when the gaps began to appear, which would start soon, so the gap in the armature segments would be re-filled when that part of the mass stream had gone around the loop to GEO and entered the tunnel.

He carefully looked over the pattern of LED indicators and numeric displays, compared values with those before the break happened, they seemed within acceptable ranges below the failure point loads. Moving over to the spacecraft lift local control panel, he got on the comm and told his boss it was time to re-start the lift, turn on the upward drag inductive lift for the spacecraft which was highest first, go slow and minimum spacecraft lift energy consumed while its internal stored energy was needed to cope with the severe lateral wind loads of the rainstorm. Too much energy was being consumed to compensate for the high lateral storm loads on the KESTS, so just get the lead cargo up to GEO in time before the 3 hour storage glass melt hopper was emptied, then limp subsequent cargo spacecraft upward so they would arrive just in time, until the storm had abated, and full transportation capacity could be restored. Before leaving the facility, he entered the data which had real values now, of how much load the KESTS could take, a combination of being put into service long before up to design capacity girth, four spacecraft on the structure anyway between ground and GEO, and severe rain lateral loads from rainstorm across a hundred kilometers of KESTS atmospheric tubing. Signing the facility log, he then stepped onto the tunnel tramway and headed for the tunnel entrance, and out into the storm along the rocky path to home.

posted by Unknown @ 7:24 PM