"David Brin - Tank Farm Dynamo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

2.
In the beginning there was the space shuttle. Never mind what came earlier. Before
version two of the shuttle, space was a place for robots and daredevils.
With tight budgets and all, the Space Transportation System has stayed fundamentally
the same. A big, complex manned orbiter is launched from Canaveral or Vandenberg, strapped
to two solid rocket boosters and one huge fuel tank carrying 770 tons of cryogenic propellants
for the shuttle main engines. The engines are part of the orbiter, so they can be brought
home and reused. The solid boosters drop off minutes after liftoff and are recovered for
refurbishment. Even the unmanned heavy-lift cargo launchers use the same basic system.
But until our group came along, the huge external tanks were simply dumped, after fueling
the shuttle to almost orbital velocity.
Once upon a time people thought we were on the verge of colonizing space. But then
tight budgets and disasters cut the size of the STS fleet, and the cost of a pound sent into
orbit remained in four figures. Visions of big O'Neill colonies and grand cities on the moon
foundered without the bootstrap mass needed to build the dreams.
The lock passed me through. I stowed my hardsuit in a restorer locker whose nameplate
simply read "Bossman." While I racked my equipment, I recalled all the times I had explained
the Tank Farm to audiences on Earth: to congressmen, housewives, investors -- to anyone
who would listen.
Back in the early eighties it was shown that the thirty-five-ton external tank can be
carried all the way into orbit at zero cost to the orbiter's thirty-ton cargo capacity.
Thirty-five tons of aluminum and polymers, already shaped into vacuum-tight cylinders,
delivered free!
And that wasn't all. On arrival the tanks would contain another five to thirty-five tons of
leftover liquid hydrogen and oxygen, usable in upper stage engines, or to run fuel cells, or to
be converted to precious water.
At a time when the grand hopes for space seemed about to fall apart, the ET was like
manna from Earth to Heaven. When the government didn't seem eager to seize the
opportunity -- when they built their cramped, delicate, little "space stations" from expensive
modules in the old-fashioned way -- the Colombo-Carroll Foundation, a consortium of U.S. and
Italian interests, offered to buy the tanks.
We would save them, until the world wised up, then sell them back. Meanwhile, the Tank
Farm would provide orbit boosts via the tether-sling effect, saving customers fuel and time
and paying our way until other investments matured.
For ten years the Farm had been on course, but it seems we'd omitted a few lines of fine
print in our contract. The Feds had to let us buy the tanks at a fixed price, but nothing in the
contract said they had to give us the residual hydrogen and oxygen, too.
It never occurred to us they'd not want to give us all the water we needed! Who in the
world would have thought they'd ever want to take the Tank Farm away from us?

3.
Imagine six very long parallel wires, hanging in space, always aimed toward the surface of
the Earth 500 kilometers below.
At both ends the wires are anchored to flat rows of giant cylinders -- forty in the upper
layer, A Deck; and sixteen in the lower, B Deck. An elevator, consisting of two welded tanks,
moves between the two ends, carrying people and supplies both ways.
I've lost count of the number of times I've explained the curious structure to visitors. I've
compared it to a double-ended child's swing, or a bolo turning exactly once always high. It's
been called a skyhook, and even a bean-stalk, though the idea's nowhere near as ambitious
as the ground-to-geosynchronous space-elevators of science fiction fame.