Donald Kingsbury by The Moon Goddess

Author:The Moon Goddess
Format: epub
Published: 2013-07-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 32

The man who drives the wedge, splits the wood.

New England saying

With his usual single-mindedness Byron McDougall readied himself to lead an American return to the moon. Nobody was paying any attention, all raised eyes were focused on space stations and low Earth orbit factories and leoports and an ICBM defense—but that didn't matter. Byron had taken lessons from Sam Brontz on how to plan in advance.

He used his frequent commuting flights from Houston to New Hampshire to schedule detours around the country. His favorite ploy was to give talks to undergraduates at engineering schools. Then he would have dinner with a few of the more aggressive engineering professors who were into teaching and convince them to use the moon base as a design problem for their students.

Where would your power come from for the 340 hours of night? One team researched a small atomic reactor. A Stanford class looked at the feasibility of beaming microwaves to the lunar surface. A Cal Tech professor gave his thermodynamics class the problem of a steam turbine powered by hot sodium which had been solar-heated during the day. Three boys in Utah tackled the storing of energy in the magnetic field of a giant superconducting toroid.

One time during a lecture to a physics class in the new Texas Technical High School the kids smuggled up a lunch of cafeteria bean sandwiches. Later, while making jokes to explain away a loud fart, Byron recalled the lack of hydrogen on the moon. Would the fuel needed to land upon and leave the moon's surface have to be brought in from Earth?

This challenged a tiny slip of a girl hiding at the back of the physics lab. She asked if hydrogen fuel could be replaced somehow by solar electricity. An energy source was an energy source, she insisted stubbornly—after apologizing for being stubborn. She was razzed by the boys because electricity can't be turned into hydrogen. The joker in the class said she was probably dumb enough to think that electricity could be used to atom-smash oxygen into protons.

"It could!" she retorted hotly.

Byron disagreed on the economics of that, but he defended the besieged girl. Electricity might not be able to provide the colony with hydrogen but electrical shuttles could certainly replace rockets and thus obviate the major need for hydrogen.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Mary," she said meekly.

"Mary was quite correct," he told the class. "It's the energy that is basic and not the rocket fuel itself."

He connected up an old electric motor and showed them that when they sweated to turn the crank, they were pumping electricity through the machine—flicking the needle on the galvanometer. The machine was converting mechanical energy into electricity, like the generators at the local power plant. But if, instead, they connected the machine across a voltage, the induced flow of electricity reversed the action and forced the crank to turn. The machine was then converting electricity into mechanical motion like a motor.

He told the class about the electromagnetic landing track concept.

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