by OMAR FINK
Bill glanced around the room, then kept talking, “Initial life support supplies, meaning air, water, and food, will have to be supplied by cargo shipment, then recycling will help minimize replacement shipments until eventually mining operations will produce air and water from ice that is discovered by prospecting. Food supplies will still need to be shipped in until agricultural infrastructure is established to grow algae and fish on-site. We have not yet addressed waste processing, but don’t expect that to be a problem.”
Bill raised his mug and drank again. Then he resumed, “Once the base is operational, most of the work will be done by robotic machines. Scout vehicles will be prospecting, earth movers will collect loose rocks and dirt, and excavating machines will be digging and drilling to find specific ores. As the materials are returned to the base, they will be separated and sorted, and then go through several processes to disintegrate them and refine them. We have not yet determined how much processing should be done on the Moon versus being done out in space, but that may become clear as the space habitat ring construction team defines their material requirements. In any case, when the processing and any manufacturing is completed, the construction materials will be thrown out into space using a linear accelerator and sled. The accelerator will be powered by solar electric collectors that store their energy in a bank of batteries until needed to drive the payload sled down the line. Launch timing will supply crude adjustments to payload trajectories, but they will need some further guidance, probably supplied using a payload container that has some simple navigational capability. In order to make this a one-way process, the containers should be designed to be re-used in the construction process when they reach their destination.”
Bill sat back down in his chair, and swept his eyes around the table, “Now comes the important part. We don’t yet have timetables from the elevator team and the habitat team, but we expect they will produce them at least in preliminary form by tomorrow morning. We asked both teams to give us a framework of minimum and maximum times and based on that, we have an estimated time envelope for the Moon base. Construction of the machines here on Earth will need to begin as soon as possible. We have allowed three months to get from start to the launch of the first Moon bound rocket.” There was some movement around the table and muted sounds.
Bill surveyed the table again, “I know that’s aggressive, but it has to be. We have allowed six months to get the base operational, then three months of steady production before the first elevator comes on line. Three months plus six months plus three more months adds up to twelve months.” Several hands flew up and some at the table were speaking and shaking their heads.
Bill held his hands up to the group defensively, “I know, I know. Wait, please. This time line is possible. It will be ramped up from a low starting volume to higher volume over time. We don’t know when the start point will come, but we can assume some months of talking and planning before we get there. If that takes six months, and we are allowing the Moon base twelve months to get into some level of production, this give us eighteen months before the first space elevator is completed and working. I can assure you this time line is possible given enough money and resources. In my opinion, it’s much more dicey whether or not the first elevator can completed in that time and habitat construction can begin in space. But remember, we only have ten years to reach the full completion of this project.”
Andy Watson stood up at the head of the table, and interrupted the commotion, “Quiet please. Quiet. Thank you. Bill is correct. We are all operating under the ten-year limitation, and we know this is extreme, but remember that the survival of all humanity may depend on this. It’s not just our lives, but the lives of everybody on this planet.” He stopped and the room remained silent.
Finally Andy spoke again, “Let’s take a short break, then come back here for lunch, and we can continue our discussion before breaking out into the groups for the afternoon.”
+40 days, NORTH SEA OIL PLATFORM “STEADFAST”
Scotty leaned around a corner and called out, “Kaz. Hey Kaz.”
Kaz turned to look toward Scotty but pointed at his ear.
Scotty looked down at his feet and carefully stepped over some red high pressure lines then walked toward Kaz. When he got close enough, he said, “They want you in the office.”
Kaz said, “Who?”
Scotty replied, “The Company Man, the Tool Pusher, and some other guy I’ve never seen before.”
Kaz said, “Okay.” and followed Scotty back toward the office, both men taking care to step carefully over the red lines on the platform deck.
Kaz ducked his 6’6” frame under the top of the bulkhead hatchway and stepped over the bottom threshold into the office, closed the door behind him and took off his blue hard hat exposing ginger hair that matched his thin beard and mustache. He said, “Somebody wants to see me?”
Arie Jansen stood up and said, “Yeah Kaz, pull up a chair and settle in. I’ll start off with brief introductions. You all call me the ‘Company Man’ because I represent the operator of this platform. Albert Hellewege over here is known as the ‘Tool Pusher’ because his job is to supply resources for the crew and operations. He also relays my instructions to Scotty and his crew of drillers. Most of us just call Albert ‘Helly’ for short.” He gestured toward the new guy in the room and continued, “And this is Petter Stegenga, a cyber security specialist under contract with our company.” Finally, he turned to where Kaz was now sitting in a chair, “This is Kaz, I won’t even try to pronounce his name, but he’s our Platform Security Officer and has a background with the Polish special forces unit known as GROM.”
Arie looked around at the men, “Okay, now we get down to business. Petter will tell us why we’re here.”
Petter Stegenga rose from his chair, “Thanks Arie. Everybody just calls me ‘Steg’ and I’m fine with that. We’re here because we have a cyber security need to fill. There are two components to address. The most obvious one is the security of our network of computers and process controllers. Does anybody know why that’s important?”
Kaz said, “At least two rigs have been infected with Stuxnet. Is that it?”
Steg looked sharply at Kaz, “I’m impressed that you know that. Your resume shows you have some background in cyber security, but it’s not clear to me why, in light of your military experience. Did you do security in special forces?”
Kaz smiled, “Just a little. We started to realize that conflict arenas were changing and being able to do some simple hacking was a big plus in some operations. Instead of trying to train a hacker to make them safe to take along with a strike team, it made more sense to train one of us to do some of their job.”
Steg said, “So was that your primary job?”
Kaz smiled, “No, my primary role was sniper. But we worked in teams and everybody had to be cross trained in several other areas, so we could pick up when somebody else went down.”
Petter said, “I see. Can you give us a real brief rundown of what you learned?”
Kaz said, “We learned to do slow scans of networks to evade intrusion detection. We used standard exploit packages to penetrate targeted systems. We learned to set up pivot points to take other targets, create stealthy command and control channels, and ex-filtrate key information.”
Steg said, “Wow. Again I’m impressed Kaz. You should do just fine in this role then. In fact, you are the only one on all of our rigs with any cyber background, so there wasn’t much choice. But, you’ll do well.” He looked around the room.
Steg resumed talking, “Kaz was correct when he said two rigs have been infected with Stuxnet. That’s the famous worm that was designed to penetrate and slow down the Iranian nuclear facilities. They were using large arrays of centrifuges to enrich Uranium to create nuclear weapons. The flow of hexaflouride gas through the centrifuge arrays was controlled by industrial systems using microchip based programmable logic controllers or PLCs. We use some of these same controllers here on
our rigs for similar purposes related to drilling and the flow of mud and eventually the extraction of the oil or gas. As Kaz said, some rigs have been infected. Two went public, but only because they were forced to, and you can bet there were others that kept it quiet.”
Steg looked around the room again, then folded his arms and continued, “The second reason we’re here is that our rigs are steadily moving toward more automated control systems and processes. And we need to train somebody to monitor those processes. We’re also putting into place more security cameras and that means somebody needs to sit here in the office and monitor the screens, not just patrol the deck.”
Arie interrupted, “Kaz, we talked over some of this before you came in. As Steg mentioned, we think you are the perfect candidate for this job, and we have no alternatives at this point anyway. You’ll still need to patrol the deck periodically, but much less often. You can actually monitor more of what’s going on from here anyway. You’ll need to learn more about how the platform processes work. Scotty will be a big help with that. And you’ll be working closely with Helly, but you guys already know each other and interact some now. And Steg will be teaching you how to monitor and read the cyber security software he’s installing for us.”
Steg jumped back in, “This whole area is changing rapidly. The platforms are becoming more connected to onshore systems and even to each other. Remote operations are being used more frequently every day. Our workers are all carrying mobile systems. The biggest problem is simply that everything here is becoming rapidly more connected but there is no commensurate increase in cyber security protections.”
Helly asked, “What are we most worried about? I mean, we don’t normally think about an offshore platform as a target for hackers do we?”
Arie answered, “Our threat profiles include terrorist activity, piracy, kidnapping, blackmail, intellectual property, environmental activists, internal sabotage, and more.”
Helly shrugged, “Yeah, I guess that’s enough.”
+41 days, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
Ed Grigorian stood at the far end of the conference room table, opposite to Andy Watson. He addressed the group, “Before we get started, please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Edward Grigorian. Everybody just calls me Ed. I work for Tethers R Us, a company that has been doing research on ribbon cables for space elevators for several years now. As far as we know, we are the only company that has a production design in process, and we certainly are the leading company in this area and employ most of the tether specialists in the world at the moment.”
Ed paused, then continued, “For several days now, all of us here have been working nearly around the clock on this problem. A short description of the problem is how to evacuate eight billion people from the planet in less than ten years. We already know that the only way we can hope to accomplish this is by building enough space elevators to do the job. But up to this point we haven’t had an exact number of what that is and frankly, we still don’t. But we do now know how big the number is. We will need at least several hundred elevators, probably as many as a thousand.” Murmurs ran around the table, but nobody spoke clearly.
Ed waited until the room quieted, then said, “Some members of our team think this will be extremely difficult or even impossible, but the majority of the team believe it can be done. Here’s the deal. Nobody has fabricated a ribbon cable long enough to be used as a space elevator, so we don’t yet know how strong it will be or how much weight it can hold. The strength of the cable will determine how many people can be moved up the cable each day. The number of people that each cable can move will determine how many cables we must build to move eight billion people in about eight years. We used eight years for our calculations instead of ten years, because we estimate it will take about two years to get the planning done and build the first cable and test and refine it and then begin building more cables en masse.”
Ed swept his eyes around the room and found everybody looking at him. He spoke again, “Let me go back and add in the background. The idea of space elevators has been around for many years, but it was literally impossible to make one because even the strongest steel or any other material known to us was not capable of supporting its own weight when you make a cable long enough to be a space elevator. We’re not talking about a cable a hundred miles long or even a thousand miles long. Our cable needs to be tens of thousands of miles long. A few years ago, when carbon nanotubes were discovered, this became possible for the first time. For several decades single crystal fibers have been used to reinforce composites because of their unusual strength. A single crystal is composed entirely of atom to atom bonds, whereas normal multi-crystal fibers have weak points where the crystals are joined. When a fiber breaks, it’s always where crystals join and never in the middle of a crystal. And the surrounding substrate that is being reinforced by the fiber is always weaker than the single crystal. We all know that carbon atoms can join in different forms. When they combine in a lattice of tetrahedrons, we call it diamond. When they combine in a lattice of hexagons, we call it graphite. When they combine in spheres or tubes, we call them fullerenes. One specific form of a fullerene is the carbon nanotube, a tubular arrangement of carbon atoms that is thin and long. Because of the unusual length of a single nanotube with entirely atom to atom bonds, these structures are also extremely strong.”
Ed looked around the table and asked, “Are you still awake? Okay, good. Carbon nanotubes are thin and long and strong. But there are limits to how long we can make them. So far, we are mostly working in the range of centimeters, but we think we’ll soon be able to fabricate them in the range of meters. This is critical because even though we can weave the centimeter fibers into a longer fiber, the longer the starting length, the more strength we can expect. With more attention and resources put on this subject, we should be able to produce an elevator length ribbon cable in less than one year.”
Ed continued talking, “Here’s where it gets interesting. The thickness of our ribbon cable will vary across a range of a few hundred microns which compares to a sheet of paper. The width will be about 1 meter and the ribbon will be curved across the width to minimize damage from micro particle impacts. A small, fast moving particle may be able to punch a hole in the ribbon, but because of the curvature, it won’t be able to completely sever the cable by shearing across the entire width. We’ve already stated that it may be as long as one hundred thousand kilometers or about sixty-two thousand miles. We believe the best form of deployment is to use rockets to lift materials to a geo-synchronous platform and weave the nanotubes into the ribbon cable at that location, with it being extended in both directions at once. That means one end of the ribbon will be pulled out toward space, while the other end is drawn by gravity down toward the Earth. We suspect we’ll find it’s best to fabricate a very thin ribbon at first, held in place by ballast weights, then use climbers to augment the existing ribbon and gradually make it thicker.”
Several hands shot up in the air, and several questions were asked at once. Ed held up a hand, “Wait. I heard several questions. I heard what about storms. I heard what about satellites. I heard what about safety issues. We addressed all of these in our committee. Here’s a synopsis. Storms only have an impact on the lowest part of the cable which is inside the atmosphere. This is a small slice of the altitude range but a serious concern nonetheless. The ground anchor points for elevators need to be placed as close to the equator as possible. This is primarily because of tension equilibrium issues, but also this area is where the fierce circular storms known as hurricanes and typhoons don’t exist because of the lack of Coriolis force. And by the way, I forgot to mention we are assuming it will be best to use water based stations on floating platforms. That way we can actually move the bottom end of the cable if that is needed. We could even use ships.”
Ed thought for a second then continued, “The threat of impact from micro-particles and collisions with satellites is real but addressable. The curvature of th
e ribbon is to prevent a single strike from being able to sever the entire cable at once. Small damage spots will need to be repaired, probably by repair climbers that go up the ribbon in between payload climbers. Larger particles and satellites can be tracked by radar, allowing defensive measures including moving the cable out of the way and laser strikes against incoming objects. The general worry about safety also involves fears of climbers or pieces of cable dropping back to the ground. The ribbon cable will be so thin and light that it poses no more threat to the ground than falling leaves. Climbers can be equipped with emergency parachutes or glider wings for low altitude failures. All the threat profiles can be addressed. Some may require more effort than others. If we need to build hundreds of elevators at the equator, it makes sense to re-route or destroy all existing satellites because their orbits cross the equator. Most of their functions can be transferred to the elevator platforms at geo-synch orbits. This will become a political problem, but it’s not a serious engineering problem.”