A is a that prevents an astronaut from dying horribly when they step into airless space. Also known as atmosphere suit, vac suit, pressure suit, space armor, environment(al) suit, e-suit, suit. SF author Sir Arthur C. Clarke said 'We seldom stop to think that we are still creatures of the sea, able to leave it only because, from birth to death, we wear the water-filled space suits of our skins.' SF author said that the specification of a human being is 'a space suit for a fish.'

Current NASA suits look like baggy inflated coveralls with a large back pack and a spherical fishbowl over the head. Often in old illustrations there are accordion bellows at the joints. The accuracy of space suits in science fiction was. The low budget show had ' and the Star Trek Animated series had force-field based ' as a cheapskate way to avoid the special effect expense of renting or drawing an actual space suit. A much more scientifically realistic lady in a space suit.

This page has an overview of the feedback and the individual submissions from the consultation on stage one priority issues of the NZ ETS Review 2015/16.

Artwork by NASA astronaut always put on a transdermal anti-nausea patch when suiting up in a space suit, in case of. The chances of that are slight, but suffocating inside a helmet full of vomit is a nasty way to die. Most space suits are Full (Body) Pressure-suits: they offer pressurization of the entire body in space for extended periods. Partial (Body) Pressure-suits only pressurize certain parts of the body for a limited time. They are only used as a precaution, worn inside the habitat module during times when there is danger of it springing a leak (such as during lift-off). Full-(Body) Pressure-suits can be either Low-Pressure (pure oxygen at 32.4 kPa) or High-Pressure (breathing mix at 101.3 kPa, normal Terran atmospheric pressure).. At least the ones designed after the claimed the lives of three astronauts.

Ever since NASA has avoided using pure oxygen atmosphere wherever possible, which means using high-pressure. The problem is if you go from a high-pressure environment (like a habitat module) into a low-pressure environment (like a low-pressure space suit) you run the risk of the.

To avoid this the astronaut must do pre-breathing for a couple of hours. If you go from a high-pressure habitat module into a high-pressure space suit the bends does not happen. This is why high-pressure space suits are called 'zero-prebreathe' suits. I suppose some space-faring nation could use low-pressure pure-oxygen habitat modules to avoid pre-breathing with low-pressure space suits, but that would be insanely dangerous. It would be the outer-space equivalent of those stubborn elderly hospital patients who insist on smoking cigarettes while wearing oxygen tanks. A disaster just waiting to happen.

NASA tolerates low-pressure pure-oxygen pressurization in their soft space suits because they have no choice. There is not a lot of research, but NASA seems to think that if an astronaut in such a suit got punctured by a micro-meteor and it caught fire, the main hazard is a fire enlarging the diameter of the breach, not an astronaut-shaped ball of flame. For what it is worth, the ', Revision 5, Table 2-I quotes the maximum leak rate of 180 cubic centimeters per minute at 25.5 kPa. Human-breathable mixtures of oxygen and nitrogen as a function of barometric pressure (the blue area). Terra sea level is 21% O 2 at 14.7 psi (101.3 kPa). High Pressure atmo is 20% O 2 at 14.7 psi (101.3 kPa).

Low Pressure atmo is 100% O 2 at 4.7 psi (32.4 kPa). Below inspired partical pressure pO 2 60 mm Hg you suffer, above pO 2 400 mm Hg you suffer, above pN 2 2330 mm Hg From, modifed by me. Suits can be,,. Soft suits have flexible exteriors. This means they cannot be pressurized to the same level as the inside of the habitat module or the space suited person will be forced into a posture like a star-fish and be unable to bend any joints.

Lower pressure means the suit uses pure oxygen unlike the habitat module. And pure oxygen means the astronaut has to do hours pre-breathing before wearing the suit or they will be stricken. Soft suits also take forever to put on, they fight your every movement (making EVA work very fatiguing), and if you tear the suit skin you will die horribly in about 90 seconds. When I say 'fight your every movement' I mean 'raise the energy expenditure to do a task by about 400%'. Currently most of NASA's space suits are soft suits. Hard-shell suits have rigid exteriors. The advantage is they can be fully pressurized so no pre-breathing is required.

They are also much more tear and puncture resistant than soft suits. The drawback of hard-shell suits is that they make the 'forever to put on' and 'fight your every movement' problems much worse. As far as I know there are no hard-shell suits in active use, they are all experimental.

Semi-rigid or Hybrid suits are a cross between soft and hard-shell. For instance, NASA's EMU has a hard-shell upper torso and soft fabric limbs. Current NASA semi-rigid suits are low pressure, but they are working on a high-pressure model. Skintight suits are a radical concept that is so crazy it just might work. They make the astronaut's skin into the spacesuit, using high-tech spandex to supply pressure instead of using atmosphere. They can be quickly put on, fight your every movement only to the point of a +20% increase in energy, and if the suit is torn the astronaut only gets a bruise instead of certain death. The suits are also much inexpensive than a soft or hard-shell suit.

The major draw-back is they require low pressure breathing mix (or the wearer cannot exhale), so astronauts have to pre-breath or face the Bends. 'Planetary suits' are used when there is an atmosphere, but it isn't breathable. They have a from space suits. (ed note: The crew of the Skylark try to use their newly invented space suits, which have never been actually tested in the field) DuQuesne reported briefly to the two girls. All three put on space-suits and crowded into the tiny airlock. The lock was pumped down.

There was a terrific jar as the two ships of space were brought together and held together. Outer valves opened; residual air screamed out into the interstellar void.

Moisture condensed upon glass, rendering sight useless. Seaton's voice came tinnily over the helmet radios. 'I can't see a foot. Can you, DuQuesne?' 'No, and these joints don't move more than a couple of inches.'

'These suits need a lot more work. We'll have to go by feel. Pass 'em along.' DuQuesne grabbed the girl nearest him and shoved her toward the spot where Seaton would have to be. NASA aka 'Pumpkin Suit' (1968). Worn on Space Shuttle only during ascent and entry portions of flight. Partial-(body) soft pressure-suit To recap: Partial Pressure suits only pressurize certain parts of the body for a limited time.

They are only used as a precaution, worn inside the habitat module during times when there is danger of it springing a leak, such as during lift-off or if an enemy spacecraft is shooting at you. Partial pressure suits are a trade-off: they only protect you for a short time but in exchange they do not encumber you anywhere near as much as a total pressure suit. The NASA version is the aka 'pumpkin suit.' It has ten minutes worth of life support internal to the suit, and can be hooked up to the vehicles life support system for longer duration. The image above from First Men to the Moon is a partial pressure suit based on an old school Air Force high-altitude suit. If the pressure drops, the pressure regulating tubes along the suit's seams inflate to put the suit under tension.

The wearer will then put on the oxygen mask attached to the small tank strapped to their leg. The crew of a combat spacecraft in battle probably will not wear a soft, hard-shell, or semi-rigid suit during battle.

This is for the same reasons that the crew of a military submarine do not wear SCUBA gear in battle even though they too are in a craft surrounded by countless miles of unbreathable stuff while being shot. It gets in the way. But they might wear a partial-(body) pressure suit or a skintight pressure suit. Or a skintight partial-(body) hybrid pressure-suit. This might be so unencumbered that it could be used as everday wear.

Then if the habitat module loses pressure all you'd need is an oxygen mask and earplugs to survive for a few hours. Wear it with overalls because such a suit will make you almost as naked as wearing nothing but body paint. So, space folks, a question has been asked of me regarding that old trope of having everyone fully suited up and dumping the air when your space warships go to (GQ). Now, I typically opine (after scribbling some numbers) that there's no point at all to the latter and very little to the former. On the former point, in the unlikely circumstance that you are tapped gently enough by a munition to just hole your compartment, that you have plenty of time to leave the compartment and/or fully don your suit. If, on the other hand, you're fully struck by a munition moving at typical space-intercept velocities, the energies involved are such that it won't matter a damn whether the Charred and Splattered Red Paste Formerly Known As You was suited up or not. And the tiny gap in between these two scenarios is nowhere near wide enough to make it worth giving up the advantages of a shirt-sleeve environment.

On the latter point, the reasons I usually see given for dumping the air include avoiding explosive decompression (about which I think there's no reason to care for the same reasons as above), that it prevents fires, and shockwaves.so far as fires go, the first thing that occurs to me is that most of the particularly dangerous things that might burn on a spacecraft are things that have no business being inside the pressure hull in the first place. The second one is that if you're talking about fire caused by, well, incoming fire, then much of the time you're talking about things in the compartment-wrecking open-to-space scenario anyway, in which case the decompression will happen anyway help from you. And the third one is that if you're only dumping the air at GQ, then you need a perfectly functional suite of fire-suppression systems for the rest of the time anyway, so let them do their job. As for shockwaves — well, again, I would expect that, given the energies involved, whatever damping or transmitting effects the air might have are going to end up lost in the rounding. (High-energy penetrating strikes might include flashover problems from ending up in the air, but given all the other things that will kill you in high-energy penetrating strikes, those aren't going to make you any more dead.). To recap,: • Must have lower pressure than the habitat module or the wearer turns into a starfish and cannot bend their limbs. This means the wearer needs an hour of pre-breathing or they will suffer.

• In case of emergency, when there is no time for pre-breathing, NASA helpfully directs the astronauts to gulp aspirin, so they can work in spite of the agonizing pain • The breathing mix will be close to pure oxygen, with a higher fire risk. • Suit encumbrance increases the energy cost to do various tasks by +400%, with a corresponding increase in wearer fatigue. • If the soft skin of the suit is torn or punctured, the wearer will die in about 90 seconds. • They take forever to put on For a list of the parameters for a NASA spec space suit, go. Dan chuckled, then sobered. 'Like that, eh? Okay, you won't get any favors.

But you'll still stay here today. Look, Jim, when I first came up, there was a guy named Joe with me. The first day he spotted some cargo drifting off and leaped for it. Put out a hand to grab it—and, naturally, when his arm moved one way his body moved the other. His suit hit a sharp edge of metal. A man dies fast out here when the air runs out of his suit, and it's not a pretty thing to see. You stay inside.'

Jim practiced dutifully, gaining some proficiency as he did. He had to learn by experience that the twitch of a foot at the wrong moment could throw him off balance. Astronaut Anna Fisher (Life Magazine, May 1985) In Savage suggests that the helmet will have an outer layer of five millimeters of high density lead crystal. Inside will be two layers of dense borosilicate glass sandwiched between two layers of Lexan.

The middle layer of Lexan will add strength and prevent shattering, the inner will act as a reserve helmet. The outer surface will be gold anodized to block glare, ultraviolet, and infra-red. There may be a nested set of telescoping curved armor plates that can be deployed for further protection. NASA helmets are not quite so grandiose. NASA helmets are spherical domes, which hits the sweet spot between low mass, pressure compensation, and field of view. All current NASA suits have the astronaut's head is held facing forwards, you have to turn your entire body in order to look sideways.

Astronauts call this 'alligator head'. The helmet has to be comfortable to wear, and help in controlling the humidity inside the helmet (so it doesn't fog up). Another important part is the, since the lack of air in space prevents the sound of your voice from reaching anybody.

The old tagline to the first ALIEN movie was 'In Space No One Can Hear You Scream'. Well, no one can hear Floyd asking somebody to pass him a socket wrench either. NASA suits use ' caps' to hold the communciation earphones and microphones (in NASA-speak this is called the Communications Carrier Assembly (CCA)). Other items might include windshield wipers (inside for condensation, outside for dust), a build-in set of binoculars, headlights for shadowed areas, a mirrored sun-visor to prevent sunlight from burning out your retinas, a water drink dispenser, and maybe a gadget that can supply various medications (pain relievers, anti-nausea, stimulants). As previously mentioned, NASA astronaut always put on a transdermal anti-nausea patch when suiting up in a space suit, in case of. The chances of that are slight, but suffocating inside a helmet full of vomit is a nasty way to die. Some SF novels have a space helmets equipped with a tiny airlock near the mouth, called a 'chow-lock.'

It is used to allow the astronaut to eat and drink without venting the helmet's air to the vacuum of space. I am uncertain how practical this concept is, or how idiot proof it can be made. It would be a bad thing if trying to get a bite of a candy bar accidentally killed you. The path towards today’s helmet style grew out of a number of converging interests.

Early Spaceflight Initiative helmets required more bulky hardware than modern compact systems, for example, which consumed and obscured much of the rear volume. Later industrial vacuum suits had the disadvantage of holding the wearer’s head in a forward-facing position, due to cushioning and ancillary equipment, restricting the wearer’s field of view. And then, of course, there were the various RFPs from the nascent Imperial Navy, and specifically the requests from the Flight Operations representatives, who were most insistent that while they were willing if reluctant to concede the impracticability of their traditional silk scarves as a vacuum suit accessory, relegating them to the role of dress uniform only, and even to acknowledge the uselessness of their equally traditional aviator goggles, they would not under any circumstances give up their leather-and-fur flight helmets. (They had, after all, been presented upon graduation of every Pilot Officer since the first foundation of the Imperial Flying Corps. One might as well, in their view, expect a legionary to go into battle without his sword – or, as Military Service slang prefers to put it in either case – ‘stark ruddy naked’.) And so we come to the modern bubble helmet, a spherical dome of smartglass sandwiched between high-impact sapphiroid. The outermost layer is gold-anodized, to block glare and harmful radiation (while in theory the smartglass could provide this filtration, the gold anodization is fail-safe, functioning even if suit power or data systems are malfunctioning), and designed to intrinsically shed fluids, dust, and electrical charge.

The smartglass is capable of acting as an infinitely configurable variable-filter and information display surface, with HUD and augmented reality functions including night-vision and optical zoom. The view provided is unobstructed all around – even beyond the typical 100 degree head rotation – with the exception of two coin-sized spots above the eyeline and to each side where the headlight/camera modules are mounted. A third light/camera module, rear-mounted, provides a projectable rear view. These modules also include miniature trigraphic projectors, enabling the projection of status, communicative, and affective symbols over the wearer’s head.

The helmet is pressurized with the normal canned life support blend of oxygen and inert-mix, to standard ship’s pressure. (Since modern skinsuits incorporate MEMS-based respiration assistance, it is no longer necessary to use high-oxygen breathing mixes.) This is controlled by the systems torc at the base of the helmet, which locks onto the attachment ring/neck dam at the neck of the vacuum suit (itself connected to many fibers running throughout the suit fabric to prevent accidental detachment).

Light nanofluid cushioning that surrounds the neck once the helmet is donned provides additional neck protection and stability. The primary purpose of the systems torc, apart from this connection, is the containment of the suit’s data systems and mesh communications suite. (Its location permits it direct interface with its wearer’s back-neck laser-port, although an auxiliary manual keypad can be connected and mounted on an arm of the suit if desired.) It also contains a miniature high-pressure oxygen tank and rebreather/dehumidifier system as a final hour’s emergency life-support supply. The torc also contains the connectors for the PLSS backpack, including those which permit water, other beverages, food pastes, and pharmaceuticals to be dispensed to the wearer through a deployable pipette, or additionally in the case of pharmaceuticals, through an autoinjector into a neck vein. Communications can be provided directly by the torc, either via the laser-port interface or via miniaturized microphones and loudspeakers built into the torc surface.

Alternately, many wearers prefer the use of a simple headset worn under the helmet, which connects to the torc using local mesh radio. – A History of Space Hardware, Orbital Education Initiative. Portable Life Support System from the Apollo A7L suit (internal view) In NASA-speak, the is called the Personal (or Primary or Portable) Life Support System ( PLSS). At a minimum, it provides breathing mix, removes carbon dioxide, and regulates the suit's pressure.

Additionally it may remove humidity, odors, and contaminants from the breathing mix; cools the astronaut's body with oxygen or a liquid cooling garment; provides radio communication; displays and/or does telemetry of suit parameters; displays and/or does telementry of astronaut's health; and/or provides propulsion for EVA. NASA's current design for PLSS is not foolproof, as astronaut Luca Parmitano discovered on July 16, 2013 when. The, and the PLSS designers had a mistaken understanding of how water acts in microgravity (the designers thought it was impossible for the water to back up into the helmet).

As is usually the case, the reason astronaut Parmitano is alive today is because he did not panic. He had to move to the airlock and re-enter from memory, since he could not see with 1.5 liters of water covering his eyes. If you're headed for space, you might rethink that manicure: Astronauts with wider hands are more likely to have their fingernails fall off after working or training in space suit gloves, according to a new study. In fact, fingernail trauma and other hand injuries—no matter your hand size—are collectively the number one nuisance for spacewalkers, said study co-author Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 'The glove in general is just absolutely one of the main engineering challenges,' Newman said. 'After all, you have almost as many degrees of freedom in your hand as in the rest of your whole body.' The trouble is that the gloves, like the entire space suit, need to simulate the pressure of Earth's atmosphere in the chilly, airless environment of space.

The rigid, balloonlike nature of gas-pressurized gloves makes fine motor control a challenge during extravehicular activities (EVAs), aka spacewalks. A previous study of astronaut injuries sustained during spacewalks had found that about 47 percent of 352 reported symptoms between 2002 and 2004 were hand related.

More than half of these hand injuries were due to fingertips and nails making contact with the hard 'thimbles' inside the glove fingertips. In several cases, sustained pressure on the fingertips during EVAs caused intense pain and led to the astronauts' nails detaching from their nailbeds, a condition called fingernail delamination.

While this condition doesn't prevent astronauts from getting their work done, it can become a nuisance if the loose nails gets snagged inside the glove. Also, moisture inside the glove can lead to secondary bacterial or yeast infections in the exposed nailbeds, the study authors say. If the nail falls off completely, it will eventually grow back, although it might be deformed.

For now, the only solutions are to apply protective dressings, keep nails trimmed short—or do some extreme preventative maintenance. 'I have heard of a couple people who've removed their fingernails in advance of an EVA,' Newman said. To recap,: • Can have the same pressure as the habitat module without the wearer turning into a starfish. The Bends are avoided. • The breathing mix will be the same or very close to that of the habitat module. No additional fire risk. • Suit encumbrance increases the energy cost to do various tasks by many times that of a soft suit, with a incredible increase in wearer fatigue.

• The hard shell of the suit is very puncture resistant. • They take longer to put on than a soft suit. Hard-shell suits try to fix the tearing problem at the expense of making the first two problems much worse. True, hard suits do solve the, but at such a cost.

The AX-5 hard suit was developed by Hubert Vykukal at NASA Ames Research center in the 1960's. It was based on deep sea diving suit technology created by Phil Nuytten of Nuytco Research. The rotating joints are angled with respect to a limb, with two halves each comprising a thick wedge section and a thin section.

When a limb is bent, the joint rotate so that the thin sections come together, allowing the suit limb to bend in a correspoinding fashion. For more details, refer to.

NASA (1992) Experimental Full-(body) High-pressure Semi-rigid pressure-suit are sort of a cross between soft suits and hard-shell suits, typically with the chest or torso hard and the limbs soft. The ideal design is to have a hard-shell torso allowing the suit to be high-pressure with zero-prebreathing required, coupled with separately pressurized soft limbs to avoid the encumbrance penalty suffered by full-(body) hard-shell pressure-suits. Which is why NASA's puzzles me, it is a semi-rigid suit that appears to have the disadvantages of both with the advantages of neither.

No doubt there were other considerations that I am unaware of. The company ILC Dover made the suit as a technology demonstrator in 1992. It actually was a zero prebreathe suit.

It is pressurized to 57 kPa, which is close enough to the 101.3 kPa used in NASA habitat modules so that the bends is not an issue. The Mark III had the shell covering the entire torso, not just the chest like the EMU. There is a hard upper torso, a hard lower torso. There are bearings at shoulder, upper arm, hip, waist, and ankles.

There are soft fabric joints at elbow, knee, and ankle. I do not know why there are both types of joints at the ankles. One of its main drawbacks was that the suit could not separate at the waist like other NASA suits, you had to enter the suit from the backpack. As with all hard-shell and semi-rigid suits, it is heavier than a soft suit (59 kilograms). NASA decided against further development of the Mark III, for whatever reasons.

An innovative alternative approach is the Counter (). Instead of trying to hold your body intact with air pressure, it holds it in with spandex. It sounds crazy but it just might be crazy enough to work. To recap, Skintight Suits: • Must have lower pressure than the habitat module or the wearer cannot empty their lungs. This means the wearer needs an hour of pre-breathing or they will suffer. Higher pressure also increases the risk of catastrophic failure of the helmet, i.e., shooting off like a champagne cork and killing the wearer.

• In case of emergency, when there is no time for pre-breathing, NASA helpfully directs the astronauts to gulp aspirin, so they can work in spite of the agonizing pain • The breathing mix will be close to pure oxygen, with a higher fire risk. • Suit encumbrance only increases the energy cost to do various tasks by +20%, compared to the +400% of soft suits and the astronomical increase of hard-shell suits. • Suit punctures result in bruises on the wearer's skin, instead of certain death. • Skintight suits are the most inexpensive of all the space suits, about $60,000 US in 2005 dollars. • It tends to grab male wearers uncomfortably in the crotch. The original concept was created.

It is currently being developed by at MIT, under the name 'Bio-Suit'. A skin-tight suit of high tech cloth exerts pressure over the rocketeer's body to provide pressure. A bubble helmet with oxygen supply allows one to breathe. Open pores in the suit actually allow the body to be cooled by perspiration. Tears will cause bruising to the skin, but are not as lethal as they are on a conventional suit. The suit can be quickly put on.

They do not interfere as much with movement (+20% energy expenditure, compared with +400% for a NASA suit). And you can store them by folding them up and putting them inside the bubble helmet. The back pack is still bulky, though. Professor Dava J. Newman models a mock-up of one of her suits. Image courtesy of the.

They do need some care in design, though. Any concave areas on the body that the suit does not hug will bulge out under internal body pressure until it fills the void (i.e., your armpits will become armhills).

Putty or fluid filled bladders will be needed to prevent this. Care must be taken around those nether regions, the small of the back, and in certain locations of the female chest. Male wearers will need a rather sophisticated cup to cover the genitals. Even with the cup, the suit will tend to grab male wearers uncomfortably in the crotch.

And upon entering vacuum, one will have an instant attack of dire flatulence (aka or HAFE). Don't be polite, let it out right away or you may damage your intestines.

Partial-(body) pressure suit. Artwork by Fred Freeman. Note the tubing along seam of pressure suit. There may be a added along the seams of the arms, legs, and torso. The suit will be relaxed for easy dressing, then the tubing will be pressurized to put tension on the fabric (This was used in the g-suits worn by early jet pilots).

The tubing will automatically pressurize when the helmet is put on and pressured up. This used to be a standard feature of partial-(body) pressure suits. A more advanced design uses a strip of 'shape metal alloy'. An applied voltage can toggle the metal strip between expanded and contracted. Unlike other types of space suits, the helmets for skintight suits require something called a 'neck dam.' This goes around the neck, and tries to keep an air-tight seal. Otherwise the helmet shoots off like a champagne cork and all the air in the helmet will spray out.

I'm sure the neck dam will be the part of the suit that will cause designers the most headaches. I personally would be in favor of straps that go from the neck dam and loop around ones arm around the armpits, but I'm no expert. In Savage suggests that light tungsten armor plates be worn over the suit to give some anti-radiation protection (this would only be needed in high radiation areas, like the Van Allen belts).

A minimal version of the skintight suit can be developed for everyday wear inside a spacecraft, i.e., a Partial-(body) Skintight pressure-suit. In cases of emergency air pressure loss, all you'd need is an oxygen mask and earplugs to survive for hours (This was used in Jerry Pournelle's 'Tinker'. The suit was worn like long johns under a coverall. The coverall is due to the fact that the suit is about as modest as wearing a coat of paint.).

Amusingly, the skintight suit made an appearance in a 1995 novel and television series called. Maybe not so surprisingly, Japanese media in general is noted for its high standards of scientific accuracy. In this case the anime series had JAXA (the Japanese Aerospace eXploration Agency) and real-life Japanese astronaut Naoko Yamazaki as technical advisors. The fictitious Solomon Space Association is developing the low-mass suits since their anemic one-lung LS-5 rocket can barely lift itself off the launch pad, let alone any payload. In a further desperate attempt to save on mass, they are reduce to using 16 year old girls as astronauts (which is a predictable development for a Japanese anime).

They only weigh 38 kilograms, instead of the sixty-odd kilograms of the adult male astronauts. They take up less room in the control cabin as well. There has even been some serious discussion given to suits more like those worn by the girls on the covers of magazines. We cannot really wear nothing but bathing suits in space, even with a bubble on our heads to supply oxygen to our lungs. (Pressure from the oxygen on the inside of the lungs must be balanced by pressure outside to make breathing possible for any length of time.) For a very short period, the bathing-suit affair might be enough — or even a normal suit of clothes, with an oxygen helmet.

This type, though, would be used only as an emergency affair, and might prove very painful in even a few minutes, if not fatal. Still, it appears that a suit could be designed which would not require that most of it be inflated at all. The development of the simpler spacesuit almost certainly is not something that will be accomplished on the first trips into space. That type of suit might never work, but it is worth thinking about. Suppose we keep the plastic helmet and air supply.

Let the section around the lungs be the usual inflated tube, puffed out just a trifle beyond the skin, so that air pressure surrounds the lungs. We are still dealing with only 3 pounds pressure of oxygen. Now taper the inflated tube down at the shoulders and waist and change to an elastic fabric that will be skintight over legs, arms and hips. This fabric can be woven or formed so that it will have almost exactly 3 pounds pressure against the skin for every square inch.

Yet when we move, there is no change of air pressure at the joints, because the fabric fits against our skin snugly. We can still cover the material with reflective paint and weave tiny heating wires through it to take care of the temperature. We can even make it just a bit porous, so that perspiration can work through and evaporate into space — as it will do at once. Our bodies naturally cool themselves and maintain an even temperature by controlling the amount of perspiration. The same thing might happen while wearing our spacesuit.

If the body became too warm, we would perspire more, and so increase the cooling. Or if we grew too cold, the perspiration would lessen, reducing the cooling. By using some kind of porous underclothing, the perspiration from even the sections inside the pressurized and inflated part of the suit might reach the cooling sections. There would be some loss of oxygen this way, but it could be kept to a level that would not matter for short periods of time. Perhaps even the part of the suit over the lungs could be devised of similar elastic material, so that there would be oxygen only in the helmet. In that case, instead of huge, bulky suits, we might have something that looked like the tights male ballet dancers wear.

The pressure suit went on like a diver's wet suit, and looked like one only not so thick. It fit very closely; he had to use talcum power to get into it. Gloves dogged onto the ends of the sleeves, and a seal set firmly around his neck.

He slipped into the boots, hung the small equipment bag over his shoulder, and reported back to the technicians. They pulled and pinched, looking for loose spots.

They didn't find any in Kevin's, but the next to come up was the girl he'd seen before, and after a moment they handed her a lump of what looked like clay. 'Shove that under your breasts,' the technician said. 'Yeah, right there. Don't leave any gaps.' 'But — ' She was obviously embarrassed. 'Lady, you're going into vacuum,' the man explained. 'Your innards will be pressurized to about seven pounds by the air in your helmet.

Outside is nothing. Your skin won't hold that. The suit will, but you've got to be flat against the suit, otherwise you'll swell up to fit any empty spaces. It won't do a lot of good for your figure.' Thank you,' she said. She turned away and used the clay as she'd been told. 'Hullo, laddie.

All right in there?' Aeneas grabbed for the microphone and pressed the talk switch. 'That was one hell of a ride.'

He fought for control of his voice. 'I think I'm all right now.' 'Except that you feel like letting the world's record fart, right?' The voice said. You'll feel better.'

(one of the drawbacks of a skintight space suit) He tried it. 'Hang on there, mate. Be alongside in a minute,' the voice said.

It took less than that. There were clunks and thuds, and the capsule jarred with some impact. You're new in this game, they tell me.' 'Yes, very,' Aeneas replied. So we'll start by testing your suit. I've got a bottle attached to the outlet, crack the atmosphere evac valve a half turn, there's a good chap.' A short moment of panic.

The capsule held half an atmosphere. When the capsule was evacuated, only his helmet above the neckseal would contain pressure. The tight garment he wore was supposed to reinforce his own skin so that it would be able to hold the pressure differences, and it had worked in the ground training chamber; but there had been physicians waiting there. Aeneas did as he was told. As the air hissed out, the pressure in his guts returned, but worse.

'Fart again, lad. How's the breathing?' He carried out the instruction. Again it helped. It was hard work to breathe out, but there didn't seem to be any problems. Open the valve the rest of the way and let's get you out of there.' Pumps whirred, and he felt more sensations of internal pressure.

The wetsuit was very tight around every part of his body. His heart pounded loudly, and he felt dizzy. 'Now unstrap and open the hatch.'

A blaring horn hammered at his ears and the red emergency light blinked madly. An amplified recording thundered out, replacing the sound of the horn. ‘SPACE EMERGENCY!! THE HULL OF THIS SHIP HAS BEEN HOLED. THE SHIP IS LOSING AIR. THE AUTOMATIC DOORS ARE NOW CLOSING BETWEEN COMPARTMENTS. FOLLOW SPACE SURVIVAL DRILL.’ At the moment the horn had been sounded, the emergency locker across the room had crashed open, activated by the same alarms that had sounded the warning.

‘Strip and dress,’ Don called out, repeating the drill as he had been taught. At the time it had just been one more thing to learn. He had never thought that he might some day use it. His one-piece shipsuit zipped open down the front, and he hopped along on one foot as he tore it off. He kicked off his lightweight sandals at the same time and jumped for the locker.

The emergency spacesuit was still rocking on the end of the arm that had snapped it out of the storage locker. It was a one-piece suit, almost skintight, cut to an exact fit for him. The helmet dangled forward, away from him, while the entire suit was open down the back. ‘Head, right leg, left leg. Right arm, left arm, close,’ he mumbled to himself, repeating the drill.

Grabbing the handles on the supporting rack, Don bent forward and put his head into the helmet. At the same instant he kicked his right leg into the suit. Automatic valves blew compressed air into the leg so it puffed out like a balloon. As soon as his leg was all the way in, his toes tripped a switch and the air stopped. The suit leg collapsed firmly about his own. Then the other leg and his arms, pushing in behind the expanding blast of air. He wriggled his fingers into the glove-like extensions of the arms and, as soon as they were all the way in, he reached out and punched the red knob with the white letters SEAL large upon it.

The closing device sat on the suit at the base of his spine. It began to suddenly wriggle upwards, like a great insect, pulling the open edges of the suit together and sealing them.

When it reached the helmet it dropped off and he was free. And his spacesuit was airtight. The entire process, from beginning to end, had taken less than twelve seconds. Don’s helmet looked like a round fishbowl with a hole in front of his nose and mouth.

A metal cover for this stood open, ready to snap shut if the air pressure fell below five pounds to the square inch. His suit contained only a limited supply of oxygen and this had to be saved until really needed. On the big screen forward, two men —clad only in T-shirts and tights —are shown in the cramped air lock, struggling with their bright-colored leotard-like space suits, one red and one yellow. The material of the suits is lightweight, strong, flexible —but not very elastic. Of necessity, it must be tight fitting; it is a second skin. Two sour-looking crewmen are helping them with the sleeves and leggings.

A fifth man is cramped against one wall, adjusting the helmets. He snaps a camera onto the left side of one —whatever the man is looking at will be relayed back to the bridge. When the men are at last secure in their suits, their helmets are lowered over their heads.

The 'valets' complete the connections to the mobility and life-support backpack units and check them out. That done, and the units activated, the men snap their face-plates shut, check the helmet seals for security, and lower the appropriate filters into place. They are now bright-colored golems, each with a great dark eye for a face. 'Radio working?' The other touches his device-studded 'chastity belt,' a plastic frame around his waist and genitals. A wall panel flashes red —the other crewmen disappear through a hatch which slides impatiently shut after them.

A hiss signals that the air is rapidly being drained from the chamber. The suits do not puff out; only an occasional bubble of air, trapped under their second skins, reveals that the pressure is quickly decreasing.

And then even these too evaporate away. 'Bridge, we're ready to go.' : Yep, these (‘skinsuits’, as opposed to ‘hardsuits’) are in common use – by the civilian spacer, anyway, who has no use for, for example, vacuum-sealed hardshell combat armor – although without the ridiculous semi- elements (Sheer, you say? That fabric may contain pores, but it also contains, computer mesh, wound gel vacuoles) a lot of media justifies them with, and have been in said use right from the earliest days when the Spaceflight Initiative conducted its feasibility studies for Project Phoenix. They actually look pretty similar to the prototype of such a spacesuit that Dr. Dava Newman is developing at MIT (illustrated at right), although having smartglass around to provide an infinitely configurable variable filter plus display surface lets them use somethng much more like the classic “clear bubble helmet” *there*.

Add a small support/systems backpack, and you’ve got it. Further information on this general type of spacesuit is, of course, available at Atomic Rocket. In the Imperials’ version, though, I should note further that: • Skillful use of smart-fabric (a long way from literal latex) and MEMS for mechanical assistance has got the prebreathing/breathing mix problems down to an irreducible minimum, in modern suits at least.

• Integrated and self-motile nanofluids have replaced the awkward necessity of into relevant places, at least once you overcome any squeamishness at the way the stuff crawls over you to get there. Janty Yates, the costume designer for 'The Martian,' originally looked for inspiration to NASA's prototype Z1 and Z2 spacesuits. She worked with NASA officials and engineers, whom she described as 'bend-over-backwards helpful.' But in the end, she and her team came up with something new for the main spacesuit in 'The Martian'.

'We basically had to start from scratch,' Yates told Space.com. 'We would've loved to use NASA's designs, but in the end, we just couldn't do it. 'The Martian' director Ridley Scott needed great visuals of Watney's face (as well as the faces of his crewmates) from a variety of angles, and the Z1 and Z2 — which both feature helmets that meld into the shoulder region of the suit — could not meet that requirement, Yates said. 'Ridley needed to see his actors in profile; he needed to see them moving their heads; he needed close-ups on the eyes,' said Yates Aesthetics were also an issue; Scott didn't find the Z-2 spacesuit visually striking enough, Yates said. Yates worked with concept artists to draw up a variety of basic designs for the suit worn by Watney and his crewmates on the Martian surface, then presented them to Scott for approval. The body-hugging, black-white-and-orange suit showcased in the film emerged by process of elimination. (Interestingly, the movie's suit superficially resembles the Biosuit, a real space garment being developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.) So, while NASA didn't come up with the surface suit featured in 'The Martian,' agency officials did approve the astronaut apparel.

'As we went along, we had to submit the designs for their approval,' Yates said. 'And they approved along the way, as did the [film's] art department.' 'The Martian' features one other spacesuit in addition to the surface suit — a bulky white extravehicular activity (EVA) suit the astronauts wear in space.

The film's EVA suit is modeled closely on the one NASA astronauts wear on spacewalks outside the International Space Station, Yates said. 'We kept that very much to NASA style, but we made it a lot more streamlined,' she said. • The planetary suits from the movie The Martian of Dr.

Newman's biosuits. Click for larger image. At least there was no smoke on the bridge.

The ventilation system had cleared it. Death by smoke inhalation was almost as bad as death by vacuum. Sandoval fancied she could hear the vacuum on the other side of the hatch scratching to get in and kill them all. The Captain and Luch were going over the readings and checking the view on the rest of the deck. Finally the Captain looked up and rubbed his eyes. We have a direct hit on this deck which, aside from letting the air out and messing our quarters up did not real harm. But we took that hit right before we went to FTL.

Good job on that Sandy. Now we gotta get to the main damage control locker and the space suits there and get them back in here. Then we can see about patching that hole before it lets FTL space in. That isn't good. And there's ten meters or so of indoor vacuum between us and that locker.' Sandoval shuddered a bit.

FTL entering STL space was never good. As a navigator she knew enough of the theory of FTL to know that. Non-biological entities, jump trauma, flash fever.

The list went on. The bridge damage control locker had compressor masks that could be hooked up to a small air tank or air line. No space suits though. In a perfect world they'd be suited up already and at their stations for a hazardous operation. The bridge was too cramped for a locker to hold their suits. It was only designed to keep them alive when things were killing them slowly.

Using a breathing mask in a vacuum was a good way to your lungs. Absently Sandoval began rooting through the locker, digging through the various odds and ends accumulated over the years. Power bars, lanyards, vacc tape spilled out. What was she looking for? A new hyperdrive to get them to port and a rescue ship? 'Well I was told this sort of freighter was designed to explode on a direct hit killing us all cleanly,' Luch said in mock anger.

'I get out of this I'm suing the f*ck*ng shipyard.' The Captain administered a dopeslap that forced Luchador to adjust the mask he never removed, for no one knew what reason. Sandoval never thought it was polite to ask. 'Not the time Luch,' the Captain reproved. A little gallows humor. On the bright side we could hide in the electronics hole and prolong life a few more hours.

None of these doors are completely airtight but we could get by.' 'How long till we break out, Sandy?' The Captain asked. 'At least six days,' the small woman answered toying with the materials she'd pulled from the locker. They all knew the air was going to leak out before then. Even with the last refuge of the computer and sensor service crawspace they had maybe a day of air.

Air tight doors everywhere was too expensive. It wasn't fair. She'd plotted that jump perfectly and in half the time. The ship had ducked missiles and beams like a courier on uppers. They had all performed so well in the face of an invasion and an enemy determined to kill them.

It just wasn't good enough. But to die knowing there was a locker full of air tanks not ten meters away was galling. Luch grabbed a roll of tape.

'We can seal the hatch with this. Buy us a few more hours. We could just say screw it, hit the overrides and open the hatch now. At least it'd be fast. Why do we have so many damn rolls of vacc tape anyway?

Your previous quartermaster was a tool, Captain! And this damn ship. You do everything on the cheap! We're going to die because you didn't spring for some extra spacesuits!' The Captain grabbed Luch by the arm and hauled him as far from Sandoval as he could. It wasn't very far. Urgent and harsh whispering followed.

The Captain finally ordered the Steward/Mechanic to take a seat and eat a power bar. Sandoval toyed with an old wallet someone had constructed out of tape. Probably an attempt to stave off boredom on a watch during FTL, much like this but without a hole in the hull dooming them all. Adhesive tape was invented in 1845 by Dr. Clear adhesive or tape was made by Richard Drew in 1922 and the Holy Grail: duct tape appeared in 1942. By TL 8 in the year 20-mumblety-rhubarb we have Vacc Tape! The salient feature of vacc tape is it works in vacuum.

More primitive tapes use adhesives that boil off in vacuum or are destroyed in extreme temperatures. Vacc tape works in extreme temperatures and vacuum. By TL 10 synthetic adhesives are able to keep a bond and even strengthen under temperatures extremes to rock hard consistency. The other feature of vacc tape is not obvious at first.

It changes color in vacuum. A roll of red tape turns a bright blue.

Exposure to oxygen turns it red again. Seal a hole with it and air leaking out will turn the tape red making it easy to judge the worth of your damage control. Air bubbles can be spotted and reinforced before they burst. Savvy spacers in an unstable situation or hull will lay strips around the door to the living section. A blue strip around the door indicates vacuum on the other side. Some spacers put a strip around the wrist of their space suit as a final check that an airlock that says it is pressurizing is pressurizing. Needless to say the stuff also spawns its own craft industry.

Spacers make all manner of things, wallets, bags even clothing, slippers and more. 'The breathing mask is not. Optimal,' Sandoval said. The Captain's voice rattled in her earbud.

'It's fogging like a sonuvabitch. Also the soft helmet part is inflating. I'm dizzy,' she said walking down the corridor. To compound matters, her tape slippers were slippery: a small etymological irony and she was dragging an air line behind her. The journey of ten meters seemed very long.

She was sure she was starting to feel the bends despite the Captain lowering the bridge's air pressure and switching to a pure oxygen mix. It was only logical they use her for a subject. She was the smallest, letting them layer the tape the thickest over her. She was female and needed less oxygen. She thought up the crazy plan. She knew her mask was filling with carbon dioxide, or was it monoxide?

She always confused the two. The mask's exhausts were puttied shut. To make maters worse the tape covering every inch of her below the neck constricted like a. Constricting animal thing. That monoxide dioxide was really messing with her.

Applying the stuff was the most undignified ordeal of her young life. The Captain and Luch applied the tape in rings around her torso and extremities. Luchs made sure the strip ends overlapped a lot.

Then they reinforced the rings in the first layer with a layer of vertical strips. That was bad enough. But Luchs wanted to make sure the tape wouldn't peel up from curvy places and had puttied them up but good. It didn't help that Luchs was asexual. She'd blushed down to her toes. It didn't help when Luchs said there were establishments that would pay a few hundred credits to people submitting to such treatment. The Captain's dopeslap was perfectly timed and thump on Luch's head was most satisfying.

They actually all managed a laugh. To make matters worse her nose was itchy.

Her nose was itchy. She was having all manner of trouble breathing and now had the figure of a twelve year old boy and her neck felt like it measured 70 centimeters because that pulchtritude had to go somewhere. Her goddam nose itched. Was an itchy nose a symptom of suffocation/asphyxiation? She was at the damage control locker! The door opened to her frenzied yanking and curses.

Cursing helped all manner of things. She grabbed a spacesuit and turned to scramble back to the bridge. The door was open and looked inviting even though the vacuum was as hard on the other side of it. The Captain and Luchs were waiting in the electronics hole and were pretty screwed if she messed up.

Lugging the suit and the air hose she slipped and slid back to the bridge. At least they still had gravity. That alone indicated the hull couldn't be that badly holed. Sandoval threw the suit into the pilot seat. Her vision was blurring and not from a fogged mask as she reached for the hot key they'd set up. She hit it before she reeled and crashed to the deck. She woke up in the deluxe stateroom's master's bed.

Usually the captain took the cabin over when he couldn't fill it. Luchs was sitting on the bed shaking her foot. 'How are ya?' Sandoval stretched and saw tape still covered her arms. She moved her feet and realized it still covered most of her. She saw a very careful slit was made down her sternum letting her breathe. 'I have the best vat steak in the galley cooking for you with your favorite sides.

The Captain is still working on damage control but we're holding air. The beam went through the hull at stateroom three. There's a big hole on the outer hull and a nasty on on the hatch. He slapped patches on them and is welding the cabin's hatch shut.' 'Sounds good.

Can I get up?' Sandoval said. She really was enjoying the bed though. Much better than a bunk.

But here's the bad news: that tape has to come off you before it cuts off circulation.' He yanked the first strip off on 'one'. The Captain heard her scream through one deck and his helmet. I had an awful time getting into it - dressing in an upper berth is a cinch by comparison. The photographer said, 'Just a minute, kid. I've seen 'em do it at Wright Field. Mind some advice?'

I mean, yes, tell me.' 'You slide in like an Eskimo climbing into a kayak. Then wiggle your right arm in-' It was fairly easy that way, opening front gaskets wide and sitting down in it, though I almost dislocated a shoulder.

There were straps to adjust for size but we didn't bother; he stuffed me into it, zippered the gaskets, helped me to my feet and shut the helmet.... But I didn't get tired of it; a space suit is a marvelous piece of machinery - a little space station with everything miniaturized. Mine was a chrome-plated helmet and shoulder yoke which merged into a body of silicone, asbestos, and glass-fibre cloth. This hide was stiff except at the joints. They were the same rugged material but were 'constant volume' - when you bent a knee a bellows arrangement increased the volume over the knee cap as much as the space back of the knee was squeezed.

Without this a man wouldn't be able to move; the pressure inside, which can add up to several tons, would hold him rigid as a statue. These volume compensators were covered with dural armor; even the finger joints had little dural plates over the knuckles. It had a heavy glass-fibre belt with clips for tools, and there were the straps to adjust for height and weight. There was a back pack, now empty, for air bottles, and zippered pockets inside and out, for batteries and such. The helmet swung back, taking a bib out of the yoke with it, and the front opened with two gasketed zippers; this left a door you could wiggle into. With helmet clamped and zippers closed it was impossible to open the suit with pressure inside. Switches were mounted on the shoulder yoke and on the helmet; the helmet was monstrous.

It contained a drinking tank, pill dispensers six on each side, a chin plate on the right to switch radio from 'receive' to 'send,' another on the left to increase or decrease flow of air, an automatic polarizer for the face lens, microphone and earphones, space for radio circuits in a bulge back of the head, and an instrument board arched over the head. The instrument dials read backwards because they were reflected in an inside mirror in front of the wearer's forehead at an effective fourteen inches from the eyes. Above the lens or window there were twin headlights. On top were two antennas, a spike for broadcast and a horn that squirted microwaves like a gun-you aimed it by facing the receiving station. The horn antenna was armored except for its open end.

This sounds as crowded as a lady's purse but everything was beautifully compact; your head didn't touch anything when you looked out the lens. But you could tip your head back and see reflected instruments, or tilt it down and turn it to work chin controls, or simply turn your neck for water nipple or pills.

In all remaining space sponge-rubber padding kept you from banging your head no matter what. My suit was like a fine car, its helmet like a Swiss watch. But its air bottles were missing; so was radio gear except for built-in antennas; radar beacon and emergency radar target were gone, pockets inside and out were empty, and there were no tools on the belt. The manual told what it ought to have - it was like a stripped car. Carry steel bottles on your back; they hold 'air' (oxygen and helium) at a hundred and fifty atmospheres, over 2000 pounds per square inch; you draw from them through a reduction valve down to 150 p.s.i.

And through still another reduction valve, a 'demand' type which keeps pressure in your helmet at three to five pounds per square inch-two pounds of it oxygen. Put a silicone-rubber collar around your neck and put tiny holes in it, so that the pressure in the body of your suit is less, the air movement still faster; then evaporation and cooling will be increased while the effort of bending is decreased. Add exhaust valves, one at each wrist and ankle-these have to pass water as well as gas because you may be ankle deep in sweat. The bottles are big and clumsy, weighing around sixty pounds apiece, and each holds only about five mass pounds of air even at that enormous pressure; instead of a month's supply you will have only a few hours - my suit was rated at eight hours for the bottles it used to have....

To make darn sure that you're getting enough (your nose can't tell) you clip a little photoelectric cell to your ear and let it see the color of your blood; the redness of the blood measures the oxygen it carries. Hook this to a galvanometer.

If its needle gets into the danger zone, start saying your prayers. Note: in Heinlein's other novels, instead of a galvanometer they use an 'anoxia warning light')... Air sighed softly into the helmet, its flow through the demand valve regulated by the rise and fall of my chest - I could reset it to speed up or slow down by the chin control.... I didn't bother with a radar target or beacon; the first is childishly simple, the second is fiendishly expensive.

But I did want radio for the space-operations band of the spectrum - the antennas suited only those wavelengths.... The only thing that complicated the rest of the electrical gear was that everything had to be either 'fail-safe' or 'no-fail'; a man in a space suit can't pull into the next garage if something goes wrong - the stuff has to keep on working or he becomes a vital statistic. That was why the helmet had twin headlights; the second cut in if the first failed - even the peanut lights for the dials over my head were twins. I didn't take short cuts; every duplicate circuit I kept duplicate and tested to make sure that automatic changeover always worked. Charton insisted on filling the manual's list on those items a drugstore stocks - maltose and dextrose and amino tablets, vitamins, dexedrine, dramamine, aspirin, antibiotics, antihistamines, codeine, almost any pill a man can take to help him past a hump that might kill him.... I made it a dress rehearsal - water in the drinking tank, pill dispensers loaded, first-aid kit inside, vacuum-proof duplicate (I hoped it was vacuum-proof) in an outside pocket.

All tools on belt, all lanyards tied so that tools wouldn't float away in free fall.... I ran into a snag. The spare bottles I had filched from those ghouls had screw-thread fittings like mine - but Peewee's bottles had bayonet-and-snap joints. Okay, I guess, for tourists, chaperoned and nursed and who might get panicky while bottles were changed unless it was done fast - but not so good for serious work. (ed note: this is a bit dated since it was written in 1939, but still surprisingly good) 'This is a standard service type, general issue, Mark IV, Modification 2.' He grasped the suit by the shoulders and shook it out so that it hung like a suit of long winter underwear with the helmet lolling helplessly between the shoulders of the garment.

'It's self-sustaining for eight hours, having an oxygen supply for that period. It also has a nitrogen trim tank and a carbon dioxide water-vapor cartridge filter.' He droned on, repeating practically verbatim the description and instructions given in training regulations. McCoy knew these suits like his tongue knew the roof of his mouth; the knowledge had meant his life on more than one occasion. 'The suit is woven from glass fibre laminated with nonvolatile asbesto-cellutite. The resulting fabric is flexible, very durable; and will turn all rays normal to solar space outside the orbit of Mercury. It is worn over your regular clothing, but notice the wire-braced accordion pleats at the major joints.

They are so designed as to keep the internal volume of the suit nearly constant when the arms or legs are bent. Otherwise the gas pressure inside would tend to keep the suit blown up in an erect position and movement while wearing the suit would be very fatiguing.

'The helmet is moulded from a transparent silicone, leaded and polarized against too great ray penetration. It may be equipped with external visors of any needed type. Orders are to wear not less than a number-two amber on this body. In addition, a lead plate covers the cranium and extends on down the back of the suit, completely covering the spinal column.

'The suit is equipped with two-way telephony. If your radio quits, as these have a habit of doing, you can talk by putting your helmets in contact. Any questions?' 'How do you eat and drink during the eight hours?' 'You don't stay in 'em any eight hours. You can carry sugar balls in a gadget in the helmet, but you boys will always eat at the base. As for water, there's a nipple in the helmet near your mouth which you can reach by turning your head to the left.

It's hooked to a built-in canteen. But don't drink any more water when you're wearing a suit than you have to. These suits ain't got any plumbing.' Suits were passed out to each lad, and McCoy illustrated how to don one.

A suit was spread supine on the deck, the front zipper that stretched from neck to crotch was spread wide and one sat down inside this opening, whereupon the lower part was drawn on like long stockings. Then a wiggle into each sleeve and the heavy flexible gauntlets were smoothed and patted into place. Calvino Les Villes Invisibles Pdf Converter. Finally an awkward backward stretch of the neck with shoulders hunched enabled the helmet to be placed over the head. Libby followed the motions of McCoy and stood up in his suit. He examined the zipper which controlled the suit's only opening. It was backed by two soft gaskets which would be pressed together by the zipper and sealed by internal air pressure.

Inside the helmet a composition mouthpiece for exhalation led to the filter. (ed note: The people are using powered-armor spacesuits on planets where the temperature hovers around -270°C, 8 K) 'Now, you didn't get much in-suit training Earthside. We didn't want you to get used to using the thing in a friendly environment. The fighting suit is the deadliest personal weapon ever built, and with no weapon is it easier for the user to kill himself through carelessness. Turn around, Sergeant. 'Case in point.'

He tapped a large square protuberance between the shoulders. 'Exhaust fins. As you know, the suit tries to keep you at a comfortable temperature no matter what the weather's like outside.

The material of the suit is as near to a perfect insulator as we could get, consistent with mechanical demands. Therefore, these fins get hot especially hot, compared to darkside temperatures—as they bleed off the body's heat. 'All you have to do is lean up against a boulder of frozen gas; there's lots of it around.

The gas will sublime off faster than it can escape from the fins; in escaping, it will push against the surrounding ice, and fracture it and in about one-hundredth of a second, you have the equivalent of a hand grenade going off right below your neck. You'll never feel a thing. 'Variations on this theme have killed eleven people in the past two months.

And they were just building a bunch of huts. (imagine how dangerous it will be when the enemy is shooting at you) 'Now everybody pay close attention. I'm going out to that blue slab of ice'—it was a big one, about twenty meters away—'and show you something that you'd better know if you want to stay alive.' He walked out in a dozen confident steps.

'First I have to heat up a rock—filters down.' I squeezed the stud under my armpit and the filter slid into place over my image converter. The captain pointed his finger at a black rock the size of a basketball, and gave it a short burst. The glare rolled a long shadow of the captain over us and beyond. The rock shattered into a pile of hazy splinters.

'It doesn't take long for these to cool down.' He stopped and picked up a piece. 'This one is probably twenty or twenty-five degrees (Kelvin, -248°C). He tossed the 'warm' rock onto the ice slab. It skittered around in a crazy pattern and shot off the side.

He tossed another one, and it did the same. 'As you know, you are not quite perfectly insulated. These rocks are about the temperature of the soles of your boots. If you try to stand on a slab of hydrogen, the same thing will happen to you. Except that the rock is already dead.

'The reason for this behavior is that the rock makes a slick interface with the ice—a little puddle of liquid hydrogen—and rides a few molecules above the liquid on a cushion of hydrogen vapor. This makes the rock or you a frictionless bearing as far as the ice is concerned, and you can't stand up without any friction under your boots. 'After you have lived in your suit for a month or so you should be able to survive falling down, but right now you just don't know enough. The captain flexed and hopped up onto the slab. His feet shot out from under him and he twisted around in midair, landing on hands and knees.

He slipped off and stood on the ground. 'The idea is to keep your exhaust fins from making contact with the frozen gas. Compared to the ice they are as hot as a blast furnace, and contact with any weight behind it will result in an explosion.' [Steve and Nadia] donned the heavily-insulated, heated suits, and Stevens snapped into their sockets the locking plugs of the drag line. 'Sound-disks all x?'

'On the radio-all x?' 'I tested your tanks and heaters-they're all x. But you'll have to test.' 'I know the ritual by heart, Steve. It's been in every show in the country for the last year, but I didn't know you had to go through it every time you went out-of-doors! Valves, number one all x, two all x, three all x.'

'You aren't testing those valves! That check-up is no joke, guy. These suits are complicated affairs, and some parts are apt to get out of order.

You see, a thing to give you fresh air at normal pressure and to keep you warm in absolute space can't be either simple or foolproof. They've worked on them for years, but they're pretty crude yet.

They're tricky, and if one goes sour on you out in space it's just too bad-you're lucky to get back alive. A lot of men are out there somewhere yet because of sloppy check-ups.' ' 'Scuse it, please-I'll be good,' and the careful checking and testing of every vital part of the space-suits went on. The instructor ordered his group to 'Suit upl' without preliminary, as it was assumed that they had studied the instruction spool.

The last of the ship's spin had been removed some days before. Matt curled himself into a ball, floating free, and spread open the front of his suit. It was an unhandy process; he found shortly that he was trying to get both legs down one leg of the suit. He backed out and tried again. This time the big fishbowl flopped forward into the opening. Most of the section were already in their suits.

The instructor swam over to Matt and looked at him sharply. 'You've passed your free-fall basic?' 'Yes,' Matt answered miserably. 'It's hard to believe. You handle yourself like a turtle on its back. The instructor helped Matt to tuck in, much as if he were dressing a baby in a snow suit. Matt blushed.

The instructor ran through the check-off list -- tank pressure, suit pressure, rocket fuel charge, suit oxygen, blood oxygen (measured by a photoelectric gadget clipped to the earlobe) and finally each suit's walky-talky unit. Then he herded them into the airlock. In spite of the fail-safe design of the P-suits— so loss of pressure in one part of the suit won't result in a total loss of suit pressure—we lost a rigger yesterday for a stupid reason. Riggers working in P-suits are required to use the Buddy System—checking each other's gear before cycling to vacuum. But this crew was in a hurry to get on the job. So the buddy didn't check both of the helmet pressurizing lines where the fittings go into the helmet. From what Pratt determined by studying the P-suit later, neither line was inserted in the fitting past the detent.

I've got to admit, it's difficult to tell when you've twisted the fitting past the detent, especially if you're already wearing P-suit gloves. Out in vacuum, the guy snagged one of the lines and pulled it out of the helmet fitting. The check valve closed when the line left the fitting, just as it's supposed to do. But when he heard the line come out of the fitting, he turned, caught the other line on the same beam element, and pulled the second line far enough out of the fitting so it blew most of his back-pack oxygen supply out into space... And at the same time failed to come out of the fitting far enough to activate the check valve. He lost helmet pressure in a few seconds.

By the time his buddy got to him, he died from what Fred termed 'traumatic abaryia,' or rapid and terminal loss of pressurization. Another case was perhaps worse from our point of view because, although the man was alive when we got him, he was too far gone to save. Writers often talk about the 'primordial cold of outer space.' But we lost this man to hyperpyrexia—overheating. P-suit backpacks are designed to get rid of the metabolic heat generated by the individual, plus the environmental heat load from outside.

There's a limit to the backpack's capability. Everybody's trained to recognize the symptoms of potential overload—a rise in P-suit temperature, hyperventilation, headache, et cetera. When it starts to happen, you slow down, rest, relax— or you're dead very quickly. This poor guy never had a chance, and it was a genuine industrial accident thai finished him. While a photovoltaic power module's brought up from LEO Base, where it's assembled, it converts sunlight to electricity, which is used to power the electric thrusters which propel it to GEO Base. The structure isn't metal; it's a carbon-reinforced composite plastic.

The riggers had docked the new module to the main array, and Lucky's crew moved in to make the electrical switchover. Supposedly, it's impossible to create an electric arc in a vacuum, but GEO Base is surrounded by a halo of escaped life-support-system gases, outgas-sing products from materials, and other things that make the vacuum less than perfect. This is a construction site, and I've never seen a clean construction site anywhere. During one of the switchover sequences, part of an insulator failed and an arc jumped across the rest of the insulator to the structure.

It vaporized the carbon-composite plastic, which in turn vapor-deposited on everything within fifty feet, including the P-suit of the man who was nearby. It blackened his P-suit within a fraction of a second. He was in full sunlight at the time. Within ten seconds his suit and backpack were too hot for the backpack system to handle. He practically fried in less than thirty seconds.

'Med Unit, Central!' The intercom rasped. 'Accident in vacuum! Reported P-suit fire!

Location Array Subassembly Module One Zero Seven. Repeat: One Zero Seven!' One of the P-suited individuals was obviously unconscious. Tom surmised this from the limp, rag-doll posture and random small movements of the limbs of the P-suit. He looked at the faceplate and discovered that the inside surface was covered with a brownish-black deposit, The injured man was no longer being supported by his own backpack. It had been disconnected, and he had been buddy-coupled to another individual's pack. 'What happened?'

'Fire in the backpack,' somebody announced on the radio. 'Jed hollered that's what happened before he choked,' another voice cut in. 'Pete got him hooked up buddy-style (cross-connect) in about twenty seconds.' It didn't take more than thirty seconds to repressurize the Pumpkin (ambulance). Then Tom opened the faceplate of the injured man's P-suit helmet. The man had had a beard that had been singed off. There were first- and second-degree burns on his face.

The most severe burns were in the vicinity of the oxygen inlet couplings from the backpack to the helmet. Tom had no way of knowing the nature or extent of possible burns in the lungs or airways. It didn't take long to determine the source of the fire.

Each backpack contains two high-pressure-oxygen storage bottles. A pressure switch valves a full bottle into the system when it senses the on-line bottle's pressure has dropped below a preset limit. The high-pressure oxygen then flows through a regulator that drops the pressure to about five psi absolute. The plastic O-ring that seals the upstream side of the regulator may have had a trace of contamination on it; the culprit seems to be aluminum shaved off the fitting when a maintenance tech over-tightened it. When the pressure sensor switched tanks, a shock wave of high-pressure oxygen hit the upstream side of the regulator fitting and was heated by shock compression.

This action ignited whatever was on the O-ring. The aluminum of the regulator body then began to burn in the hot, oxygen-rich atmosphere, and, in turn, sent an oxygen-rich flame right down the breathing pressure lines to the interior of Hobart's helmet.

A fifty-cent O-ring and an uncalibrated torque wrench killed a man. It could also call a halt to a multibillion-dollar project. Pratt says it's a simple fix. He's got his maintenance techs replacing O-rings and installing a diffuser upstream of the regulator as each backpack comes in from vacuum for refurbishment at the end of each shift. From SPACE DOCTOR by Lee Correy (G.

Harry Stine) 1981 • Partial-(body) pressure suit worn inside spacecraft. In case of a hull breech, the pressure regulating tubes in the seam will inflate to put the suit under tension, and the astronaut will put on the emergency oxygen mask. Von Braun spacesuit design from (1958).

Artwork by Fred Freeman. Click for larger image • The full blown space suit for exploring the moon.

This is worn over the partial-(body) pressure suit. Von Braun spacesuit design from (1958). Artwork by Fred Freeman. Click for larger image •. Ed note: Kip (a college student) and Peewee (a little girl) are wearing spacesuits and are engaged in a forced march across the surface of Luna.

Unfortunately the spare oxygen bottles the are carrying have connections incompatible with Peewee's suit. Kip uses surgical tape as an adapter to recharge Peewee's bottle. Peewee has tied the spare bottles to Kip's front. Oh, and Kip named his spacesuit 'Oscar') We were about halfway down the outer slope when Peewee slowed and stopped—sank to the ground and sat still. I hurried to her. “Peewee!” “Kip,” she said faintly, “could you go get somebody? You know the way now.

I’ll wait here. Please, Kip?” “Peewee!” I said sharply.

You’ve got to keep moving.” “I c-c- can’t!” She began to cry. “I’m so thirsty and my legs—” She passed out. “Peewee!” I shook her shoulder. “You can’t quit now!

Mother Thing! —you tell her!” Her eyelids fluttered. “Keep telling her, Mother Thing!” I flopped Peewee over and got to work. Hypoxia hits as fast as a jab on the button. I didn’t need to see her blood-color index to know it read DANGER; the gauges on her bottles told me. The oxygen bottles showed empty, the oxy-helium tank was practically so.

I closed her exhaust valves, overrode her chin valve with the outside valve and let what was left in the oxy-helium bottle flow into her suit. When it started to swell I cut back the flow and barely cracked one exhaust valve. Not until then did I close stop valves and remove the empty bottle. I found myself balked by a ridiculous thing. Peewee had tied me too well; I couldn’t reach the knot! I could feel it with my left hand but couldn’t get my right hand around; the bottle on my front was in the way—and I couldn’t work the knot loose with one hand.

I made myself stop panicking. My knife—of course, my knife! It was an old scout knife with a loop to hang it from a belt, which was where it was. But the map hooks on Oscar’s belt were large for it and I had had to force it on. I twisted it until the loop broke. Then I couldn’t get the little blade open.

Space-suit gauntlets don’t have thumb nails. I said to myself: Kip, quit running in circles. This is easy. All you have to do is open a knife—and you’ve got to because Peewee is suffocating. I looked around for a sliver of rock, anything that could pinch-hit for a thumb nail. Then I checked my belt. The prospector’s hammer did it, the chisel end of the head was sharp enough to open the blade.

I cut the clothesline away. I was still blocked. I wanted very badly to get at a bottle on my back.

When I had thrown away that empty and put the last fresh one on my back, I had started feeding from it and saved the almost half-charge in the other one. I meant to save it for a rainy day and split it with Peewee. Now was the time—she was out of air, I was practically so in one bottle but still had that half-charge in the other—plus an eighth of a charge or less in the bottle that contained straight oxygen (the best I could hope for in equalizing pressures), I had planned to surprise her with a one-quarter charge of oxy-helium, which would last longer and give more cooling. A real knight-errant plan, I thought.

I didn’t waste two seconds discarding it. I couldn’t get that bottle off my back!

Maybe if I hadn’t modified the backpack for nonregulation bottles I could have done it. The manual says: “Reach over your shoulder with the opposite arm, close stop valves at bottle and helmet, disconnect the shackle—” My pack didn’t have shackles; I had substituted straps. But I still don’t think you can reach over your shoulder in a pressurized suit and do anything effective. I think that was written by a man at a desk.

Maybe he had seen it done under favorable conditions. Maybe he had done it, but was one of those freaks who can dislocate both shoulders.

But I’ll bet a full charge of oxygen that the riggers around Space Station Two did it for each other as Peewee and I had, or went inside and deflated. If I ever get a chance, I’ll change that. Everything you have to do in a space suit should be arranged to do in front — valves, shackles, everything, even if it is to affect something in back. We aren’t like Wormface, with eyes all around and arms that bend in a dozen places; we’re built to work in front of us — that goes triple in a space suit. You need a chin window to let you see what you’re doing, too! A thing can look fine on paper and be utterly crumby in the field.

Maximum Absorbency Garment When you gotta go, you gotta go. A sudden urgent need to urinate or defecate when you are in a space suit during an EVA is a major problem. NASA became aware of the need for space diapers on May 5, 1961. Freedom 7 was about to launch with astronaut Alan Shepard.

NASA figured there was no need for a potty break, er, ah, 'bladder evac' since the flight was only going to take 15 minutes. Alas there were several delays so poor Alan was on the pad for eight hours., which was granted. Shorted out some of his medical sensors, though. For the Gemini and Apollo programs they had a system for urination only. It was functionally equivalent to a condom (a 'cuff') attached to a tube. The tube drained into a containment bag through a one-way valve.

The cuff fit had to be snug or there would be dangerous leakage. The cuffs came in three sizes. The space suit designers demonstrated a stunning ignorance of macho astronauts when they labeled the sizes 'small', 'medium', and 'large'. Predictably, when asked which size they needed, all the testosterone-poisoned Right Stuff astronauts answered 'Large, of course.'

After a few nasty incidents of space suits filling up with urine due to poorly fitting sheaths, the technicians re-named the sizes 'large', 'gigantic', and 'humongous.' Unfortunately the best technology NASA currently has to offer is the ' (MAG). Which is basically a high-tech diaper. The MAG is full of sodium polyacrylate, which can absorb 300 times its weight in water. The MAG can hold about two liters of urine, blood, and/or feces.

It was a challenge since conventional incontinence pants require gravity in order to operate. Astronauts in free fall tend to have lots of urine to void when they finally feel the urge to go. Under normal gravity urine collects at the bottom of the bladder, triggering the urge when the bladder is one-third full.. The urge only comes when the bladder is almost totally full, causing pressure on the sides. Which is a problem since that much urine can press the urethra shut, making it hard to urinate.

Astronauts are advised to schedule regualar pee breaks even if they do not feel the need. Or the doc will have to open the first aid kit and break out the. That is not a threat, it is a promise. The first time the condom and bag device was used in space was in John Glenn's 1962 orbital flight.

He voided a full 27 ounces of urine in one go, which is about seven ounces more than the capacity of the average human bladder. Schweickart: Yeah, it's not that much. But it's a fairly critical time, you know. When you're in there you don't have much choice, so you've got to design for it. So in the suit, for urine you use like a motorman's bag, which is basically composed of a bladder that holds about — boy, my numbers are really slipping Peter — but something between a liter and two liters, if I remember.

A rubber bladder type of thing that sort of fits around your hips, and a rollon cuff which is essentially a condom with the end cut out that's rolled over a flapper-type valve, you know, just a rubber flapper valve. It forms a one-way check valve. Warshall: Oh, I see, so you don't have to do anything. Schweickart: No, you don't do anything. You just roll it on as part of the suit-donning procedure, and then urinate into it through the one-way valve. There are lots of little cute problems and uncertainties Unless you're an extremely unusual person, since the time you were about a year and a half old or so, you probably have not taken a leak laying flat on your back. And if you think that's easy, let me tell you, you've got some built-in psychological or survival programs, or something which you've got to overcome.

So that's a tricky little thing. And then there's always the possibility that in maneuvering around in a suit you can end up pulling off the condom, and there's always — we have three sizes you know, small, medium and large — in diameter, and there's always this little ego thing about which one you do pick. Of course the smart guy picks the right size, because it's very important. But what happens is, if you get too small a size it effectively pinches off the flow and you just turn yellow because you can't go; and if, on the other hand you've got an ego problem and you decide on a large when you should have a medium, what happens is you take your first leak and you end up with half of the urine outside the bag on you. And that's the last time you make that mistake.

So it's a cute little trick there. In terms of defecation inside the suit, there ain't no graceful way to do it.

So what we do is, we wear what's affectionately called a fecal containment system. The good old FCS is essentially like a pair of bermuda shorts with a hole for your penis to stick out of to roll on this other thing, but fairly well sealed around there.

It's a tight fitting elastic type garment, and it fits especially tight around the thighs and around the waist. And it's just like a pair of diapers is what it is. Made of material which obviously is non-permeable but still breathes and all it does is contain it. Now, to my knowledge, nobody's ever had to use that. But you wear it, because if you don't wear it, the consequences are rather drastic. So that sort of takes care of the in-the-suit situation. On Wednesday morning, NASA rewarded five members of the public — two doctors, a dentist, an engineer and a product designer — for their creative ideas for how to poop in a spacesuit.

Yes, it sounds a little bit funny. But unmet toilet needs could have life or death consequences for an astronaut in an emergency situation. That's why thousands of people spent tens of thousands of hours on the 'Space Poop Challenge,' brainstorming, modeling, prototyping and number-crunching to come up with a crowd-sourced solution to the problem of human waste in a spacesuit. Currently, astronauts on spacewalks rely on diapers, which is a feasible solution for only a few hours at a time. As we, NASA is imagining a situation where an astronaut is stuck in a spacesuit for days — like during an emergency on future Orion missions, which could take astronauts far from Earth. The super-portable-bathroom solution has to work quickly, easily, in micro-gravity, without impeding movement, for both men and women, for solid and liquid waste.

It can either store waste in the suit or expel it. And it has to be comfortable. For up to six continuous days. Since the project launched on the in October, nearly 20,000 people, from all over the world, submitted more than 5,000 ideas. They were competing for a total of $30,000 in prizes. The winning solution came from Thatcher Cardon, an Air Force officer, family practice physician and flight surgeon.

He says his design was inspired by minimally invasive surgical techniques — and a strong desire not to store the poop. 'I never thought that keeping the waste in the suit would be any good,' he told NPR. 'So I thought, 'How can we get in and out of the suit easily?' ' 'I thought about what I know regarding less invasive surgeries like laparoscopy or arthroscopy or even endovascular techniques they use in cardiology — they can do some amazing things in very small openings. 'I mean, they can even replace heart valves now through catheters in an artery.

So it should be able to handle a little bit of poop!' He designed a small airlock at the crotch of the suit, with a variety of items — including — that could be passed through the small opening and then expanded. His design even allows an astronaut to change underwear while inside the spacesuit, through the same small opening. Cardon used an old flight suit to try some physical prototyping, and his kids helped gather supplies. They were 'totally excited,' he says.

'They lost their minds when I told them I won.' Second place went to a trio from Houston (the SPUDs team) — a physician, an engineering professor and a dentist (who also served as the team's illustrator). All three had studied chemical engineering in college. Stacey Louie, the environmental engineer on the team, said the different areas of expertise on the team were central to their solution.

But before they fine-tuned their design, they had to discard a lot of ideas. For instance, doctor and team leader Jose Gonzales says that he immediately thought of some medicine-inspired strategies that would be effective — but not at all comfortable.

'You have to take into consideration, 'Is the astronaut going to be OK with this design?' ' Katherine Kin, the dentist and artist, notes. 'You have to have something that's psychologically comfortable.' So internal catheters were out. Instead, Gonzales says, they used an air-powered system to push waste away from the body to store it elsewhere in the suit.

'More specifically, that air is created by passive and active normal body movements of the astronaut,' Gonzales says. A product designer from the U.K., Hugo Shelley, placed third.

He usually works with electronics and tech products, but he says for this contest, he went in the other direction — and tried to build a solution with as few electronic parts as possible. 'I think we're all aware of the dangers of things going wrong in space,' he says. A simple design seemed safer, he says. 'My mother's a textile designer so I think I started off really thinking about materials,' he says. 'Making something as comfortable as possible I thought was fairly important.

A lot of your mechanism really has to be in, effectively, the first few millimeters away from the skin.' His solution, the 'SWIMSuit — Zero Gravity Underwear,' disinfects and stores waste inside the suit, like the second-place design does. Cardon won $15,000, while the trio from Houston took home $10,000 and Shelley netted $5,000.

The next step is for NASA to start prototyping the ideas, and get working versions of a waste-management system up to the International Space Station for testing. Dustin Gohmert, the Orion crew survival system project manager at NASA, explains that NASA will combine existing ideas with elements of the winning designs to create a solution that will, indeed, go into space. 'Optimistically this will never be used, because it is a contingency scenario that something catastrophic has happened,' he said. 'But this will be on Orion and should something happen, and should it be called on to save the crew, this will be there and at their disposal.'

Shelley, the product designer, notes that research on how to improve waste management inside a spacesuit could also be useful in 'earth-bound applications' — for people with incontinence or in high-pressure, critical job situations. And while it was 'kind of odd' to think about poop in space for weeks at a time, he says the project was 'quite exciting.' 'Yes, it's an amusing thing to think about, but still it's a part of a spacesuit — and there's something incredibly thrilling about the space missions,' he says. And, he notes, 'you can't fully appreciate being an interplanetary explorer if you've constantly got to use the bathroom and you can't.'

On Earth, Andrew Lear's habits would have been no more than a character trait. In a hurry, he might choose mismatched socks. He might put off using the dishwasher for a day or two if he were involved in something interesting. He would prefer a house that looked 'lived in.' God help the maid who tried to clean up his study.

He'd never be able to find anything afterward. He was a brilliant but one-sided man. Backpacking or skin diving might have changed his habits — in such pursuits you learn not to forget any least trivial thing — but they would never have tempted him. An expedition to Mars was something he simply could not turn down.

A pity, because neatness is worth your life in space. You don't leave your fly open in a pressure suit.

A month after the landing, Childrey caught Lear doing just that. The 'fly' on a pressure suit is a soft rubber tube over your male member.

It leads to a bladder, and there's a spring clamp on it. You open the clamp to use it. Then you close the clamp and open an outside spigot to evacuate the bladder into vacuum. Similar designs for women involve a catheter, which is hideously uncomfortable. I presume the designers will keep trying. It seems wrong to bar half the human race from our ultimate destiny. Lear was addicted to long walks.

He was coming back from a walk, and he met Childrey coming out. Childrey noticed that the waste spigot on Lear's suit was open, the spring broken. Lear had been out for hours. If he'd had to go, he might have bled to death through flesh ruptured by vacuum. Once I had one arm out it was pretty easy; I just crawled forward, putting my feet on the suit’s shoulders, and pulled on his free arm. He (the unconscious man) slid out of the suit like an oyster slipping out of its shell.

I popped the spare suit and after a lot of pulling and pushing, managed to get his legs in. Hooked up the biosensors and the front relief tube.

He’d have to do the other one himself; it’s too complicated. For the nth time I was glad not to have been born female; they have to have two of those damned plumber’s friends, instead of just one and a simple hose.

I left his arms out of the sleeves. The suit would be useless for any kind of work, anyhow; waldos have to be tailored to the individual. Many people have written in to ask, “What is that silvery, liquescent lining inside the pants of spacesuits we occasionally see on your broadcasts?” Well, viewers, that’s the sanitary nanopaste. You see, back in what we might call the pointy-stick era of spaceflight, the problem of the crew having to take a ‘fresher break while stuck in their vacuum suits for hours on end was handled by catheterization – it was necessary for astronauts to insert catheters into their urethra, rectum, cloaca, and/or any other excretory or partially-excretory orifices they might have in order to convey waste products to reservoirs for later disposal, and prevent them from contaminating the interior of the suit.

Apart from the occasional technical problems this had with leakage and providing pathways for infection, it was not a solution that was comfortable for anyone, or that anyone was comfortable with. Fortunately, modern nanotechnology has provided the answer. Sanitary nanopaste selectively infiltrates one’s excretory orifices in a much more gentle manner than gross apparati (the sensation, I am told, being akin to mild tickling that rapidly becomes imperceptible), interfacing with the body’s own systems, and breaking down and compressing the body’s wastes in situ and conveying them directly and continuously, by molecular pass-the-parcel, to the vacuum suit’s recycling apparatus. In short: now, you simply never feel the need to excrete as long as you’re in your suit.

This is a much more elegant solution, obviously, and has satisfied virtually everyone – or at least everyone who isn’t overcome with squeamishness at the thought of microscopic robots roaming around in their bowels. – Ixril Valenarius, Spaceflight Initiative Public Relations, “This Week in Orbit”. Once people are suited up, it does become hard to tell who is who. In Destination Moon, there were four spacemen, and each had a uniquely colored suit. Kind of like colored tooth-brushes. But this won't work if you have more than a few spacemen, er, spacepeople. The person's name stenciled in large letter across the front and back is a possibility.

In Piers Anthony's The Kirlian Quest, he notes that this problem has occurred before: knights in armor are similarly anonymous. The solution is coat of arms and. The knights wear their coats of arms on their shields, tabards, and horse barding, to identify themselves. In other words, heraldry was a medieval form of an.

When a proposed heraldic 'device' (coat of arms) is submitted to the college of heralds, it is compared with all existing devices. The new device must have at least one major and one minor point of visual difference from those already registered. Otherwise it would be too easy to confuse the two devices in the heat of battle.

Mistaking a foe for a friend could be fatal. It is also a good idea if the device can be recognized at a distance. As an amusing side note, a heraldic device has a '. This is a verbal description of the heraldic device done in heraldic terminology.

If you give a herald a blazon, they can reproduce the original device even if they had never seen it before. Just remember that the 'blazon' is the verbal description and 'to emblazon' means to draw, paint or otherwise make a graphic representation of the device (called an 'emblazonment').

Heraldry developed as a way to be seen and identified across a battlefield, in the clash of war. This requires high-contrast designs whose elements are clearly recognizable. The first step in recognizability is to use the stylized heraldic forms of things. The second is to make your charges as big and bold as possible in the space you have available. Modern corporate logos usually follow the same rules that heraldic artists used, because they want their product logo to stand out, to be identifiable even at a distance, and to be recognizable. Consider the logos of Shell, Diamond Shamrock, BMW, Dodge, Purina, CBS — all of these follow the styles and rules of heraldry.

Note Madona of Port Lligat on chest of spacesuit. Bookcover of Protector by Larry Niven. Artwork by Donato Giancola. In Larry Niven's Protector, the Belters of the asteroid belt spend most of their lives inside their space suit. They have a tendency to paint their suits in extravagant colors.

One of the characters had Salvador Dali's Madonna of Port Lligat on the front of their suit. In an interesting psychological quirk, Belters also tend to be nudists when in a pressurized environment. And if you find any illustrations of the game, you will quickly see that the Space Marines are big fans of heraldry.

Even though you can generally idenifty the bad Marines by the tentacles, weeping open sores, and other Marks of Chaos. Otherwise, if the opponents look like skeletons they are Necrons; if they are tall, skinny, and distainful they are Eldar; if they are green with tusks they are Orks; and if they look like Giger's Alien xenomorph on bad LSD and are eating everything they are Tyranids. They are all enemies, so the basic rule is if it does not look like a Space Marine, shoot it with your bolter. Most Belters decorated their suits.

The interior of his suit was the only place many a Belter could call home, and the one possession he had to keep in perfect condition. But even in the Belt, Nick Sohl's suit was unique.

On an orange background was the painting of a girl. She was short; her head barely reached Nick's neck ring. Her skin was a softly glowing green. Only her lovely back showed across the front of the suit. Her hair was streaming bonfire flames, flickering orange with touches of yellow and white, darkening into red-black smoke as it swept across the girl's left shoulder. She was nude.

Her arms were wrapped around the suit's torso, her hands touching the air pac on its back; her legs embraced the suit's thighs, so that her heels touched the backs of the flexible metal knee joints. It was a very beautiful painting, so beautiful that it almost wasn't vulgar. A pity the suit's sanitary outlet wasn't somewhere else. (ed note: In the Cluster novels, the quotation mark symbols denote which species-language is being used. ' is for humans, * is for Asts (looks like a mass of coils), / is for Slashes (looks like a living disk harrow, shooting laser beams), and:: is for Quadpointers (looks like a slug with four chisles on its nose). The protagonist Herald the Healer is a Slash.) Whorl twined to another section of his convolute residence, and Herald followed.

Here in the living rock bordering a corkscrew chamber was emblazoned in relief a creature-sized Shield of Arms. It was beautiful. The outer shield was in the shape of an ellipse set at an angle, representing Galaxy Andromeda, bordered inside by a wreath of intertwining serpents to designate Sphere Ast. Within that were the Family Arms of Precipice, resembling an ornate overhanging cliff. Herald moved his loops across it, savoring its aspects.

It had superior form, texture, and color, and was, in its fashion, a genuine work of art. The King of Arms of Ast was certainly a master! *What do you find? * The query was urgent. /I find an excellent and flawless emblazon. / *Did you not say 'blazon' before?

* The tedious questions of amateurs! But Herald repressed his annoyance, for courtesy was vital to his profession.

/I did, Whorl. The 'blazon' of a Shield of Arms is the precise linguistic specification of its elements. To 'emblazon' is to render this description into physical actuality. / *I comprehend. The one is the description, the other is the carving.

I feared for a moment there was something wrong with it. * /No, your Achievement is quite in order. Azurine, a cliff of thirty-seven rocks and forty-two rills, alternately thirteen, twelve, thirteen, seven, eleven, twenty-three, pearline, all within a bordure of the Serpents Rampant. / Herald winced inwardly as he communicated, for the old-style heraldic term 'rampant' was restricted to certain quadrupedal beasts of prey, standing erect on the left foot raising the right foot in stride, balancing with the left forefoot outthrust, the right raised to strike. It was technically impossible for a legless serpent to be 'rampant.' But the broadening of the system to include diverse Cluster cultures had forced the fudging of some terms.

However, as he had informed Whorl, the local Colleges of Arms defined legitimacy. So he had to accept it, nonsensical as it was in derivation. Regardless, this remained an excellent Shield of Arms, in concept and execution. In a moment she was back on the subject.::How did heraldry start?:: /Many species, in their pretechnical phases, wore special apparel to protect them from the attacks of physical weapons.

This apparel was called 'armor,' and it was so encompassing that it became impossible to recognize the individual entity within it, the 'knight,' which figure is also represented in the Tarot deck. Therefore it became necessary to decorate his shield with some characteristic design, typical of his household and affiliation, so that friend could be distinguished from enemy. This eliminated the awkwardness of a knight lining up behind the formation of his enemy, supposing he was among friends. Or even attacking his friends, thinking they were enemies. The markings on the shield made everything instantly clear, even when the knights were not personally known to each other. This was the origin of heraldry. Today, all great families of all species in the Cluster have their registered Shields of Arms, even though they may never engage in combat./::My family has a Shield!

I never knew what it meant.:: /Come, I will explain what it means. / Following her directions, Herald located the Metamorphic Shield and placed it against the wall where both could view it. /Note that the shape of this Shield is elliptical, a kind of angled oval that signifies Galaxy Andromeda. /::But Andromeda is a spiral!:: /So it is. But from Milky Way it appears elliptical. (Since Andromeda lost the Wars of Energy, we suffer the additional humiliation of the ellipse. The Milky Way Shield is the fundamental shape, flat across the top, round or partly pointed across the bottom.

Other Galaxies have other shapes.) Within this is the band of prints, the little four-point patterns, signifying Sphere Quadpoint. In Milky Way there are two bands, since that Galaxy is organized into segments and Spheres, but it is the same idea.

Then the main design, the symbol of Family Metamorphic: a lump of edible rock superimposed on the geologic flowchart of its derivation. A distinctive Achievement—that is what the complete affair is called—recognizable anywhere in the Cluster. /::Can you recognize any Shield of Arms in the whole Cluster?:: she asked, a bit awed.

/Within certain broad categories, yes. It is my business. And this is true generally.

Two completely alien sapients could meet on a barren planetoid, perhaps shipwrecked from different vessels, possessing no common language, form or status, and they could recognize each other by their Shields of Arms. That would provide their common experience. Each would know the other was sapient and civilized, and where he was from, and that he honored Cluster conventions of behavior.

The tiger stripes on Jim's mask, the war paint on Frank's, and a rainbow motif on Phyllis's made the young people easy to identify. The adults could be told apart only by size, shape, and manner; there were two extras, Doctor MacRae and Father Cleary. He poked his head inside, seemed about to leave, then came inside.

He pointed to their outdoor suits, hanging on hooks by the clothes locker. 'Why haven't you removed those barbaric decorations from your masks?' The boys looked startled; Howe went on, 'Haven't you looked at the bulletin board this morning?'

NOTICE TO STUDENTS 1. The practice of painting respirator masks with so-called identification patterns will cease. Masks will be plain and each student will letter his name neatly in letters one inch high across the chest and across the shoulders of his outdoors suit. (ed note: headmaster Howe is a stupid little power-mad bureaucrat who does not understand the realities of life out on the frontier). For strict safely, static lines or safety lines are mandatory. The line will have to be made of special materials, since most terrestrial ropes and cables will turn glass-like and shatter in vacuum.

The spacecraft should have plenty of small steel rings bolted at regular intervals over the hull for spacemen to attach their safety lines to. Without a static line, an astronaut who manages to get both magnetic boots separated from the hull will suddenly find themself on a slow impromptu tour of the solar system.

If their spouses are real lucky the bodies might actually be eventually recovered for burial. In the real world NASA generally always insisted that astronauts performing a spacewalk be tethered to the spacecraft or station. The first NASA untethered spacewalk was Bruce McCandless II's with NASA in Challenger mission. Another useful item is a 'line throwing gun'. This allows one to shoot a safety line from one spacecraft to another. There was an impressive use of tethers in episode #4 of.

Our heroes are in the hangar bay of the Martian battleship. The ship has been boarded by hostiles, the captain is poised to, and our heroes had better get into the escape ship fast unless they want to die in the scuttling. The Donnager is under 1 g acceleration so there is artficial gravity. Our heroes have been instructed to turn off their boot magnets and run as fast as they can across the gantry into the escape ship, while dodging gunfire. Alas our heroes Naomi and Holden are only half way across the gantry when the Donnager is forced to turn off its engines.

They are suddenly in free fall, and float helpessly away from the gantry. But Holden is a seasoned, cool-thinking, spaceman. He grabs Namoi, attaches a tether connecting the two, then kicks Naomi upwards away from the gantry.

To the rescue! Holden recoils to the gantry, his magnetic boots latch on, then he uses the tether to haul Naomi down to the gantry. Brilliant use of a tether, and a.

Holden grabbed for Naomi. He struggled to orient himself as the two of them spun across the bay with nothing to push off of and nothing to arrest their flight. They were in the middle of the room with no cover. The blast had hurled Kelly five meters through the air and into the side of a packing crate, where he was floating now, one magnetic boot connected to the side of the container, the other struggling to connect with the deck. Amos had been blown down, and lay flat on the floor, his lower leg stuck out at an impossible angle. Alex crouched at his side. Holden craned his neck, looking toward the attackers.

There was the boarder with the grenade launcher who had blasted Kelly, lining up on them for the killing shot. We 're dead, Holden thought. Naomi made an obscene gesture. The man with the grenade launcher shuddered and dissolved in a spray of blood and small detonations. 'Get to the ship!' Gomez screamed from the radio.

His voice was grating and high, half shrieking pain and half battle ecstasy. Holden pulled the tether line off Naomi's suit. 'What are you.?' 'Trust me,' he said, then put his feet into her stomach and shoved off.

He hit the deck while she spun toward the ceiling. He kicked on his boot mags and then yanked the tether to pull her down to him. The room strobed with sustained machine gun fire — Holden said, 'Stay low,' and ran as quickly as his magnetic boots would allow toward Alex and Amos.

The mechanic moved his limbs feebly, so he was still alive. Holden realized he still had the end of Naomi's tether in his hand, so he clipped it on to a loop on his suit. No more getting separated. Fred braced himself in the open hatch and fired the line-throwing gun. The foam plastic projectile sailed slowly across the void, trailing the line it pulled from the container on the gun. A P-suited figure reached out and caught the slow-moving plastic blob as it sailed past.

Fred snubbed the line on a cleat inside the hatch as the other person whipped it through and around a beam of the array. Torn had his running safety line snapped around the main line as quickly as it was secured at both ends.

He pushed off and sailed down the line. Fred was behind him. I knew exactly where Mac had gone, but I had a hard time seeing him. The rock slide had carried with it a mixture of small and large fragments, from gravel and pebbles to substantial boulders. His struggles to climb the slope had only managed to embed him deeper in loose materials. Now his suit was three-quarters hidden. His efforts also seemed to have carried him backwards, so with a thirty degree gradient facing him I didn't think he'd ever be able to get out alone.

And further down the slope lay a broad fissure in the surface, of indeterminate depth. He was facing my way, and he had seen me too.

'Jeanie, don't come any closer. You'll slither right down here, the same as I did.

There's nothing firm past the ledge you're standing on.' 'Don't worry. This is as far as I'm coming.' I backed up a step, nearer to a huge rock that must have weighed many tons, and turned my head so the chest of Mac's suit sat on the crosshairs at the exact center of my display. 'Don't move a muscle now. I'm going to use the Walton, and we don't have time for second tries.' I lifted the crosshairs just a little to allow for the effects of gravity, then intoned the Walton release sequence.

The ejection solenoid fired, and the thin filament with its terminal electromagnet shot out from the chest panel on my suit and flashed down towards McAndrew. The laser at the tip measured the distance of the target, and the magnet went on a fraction of a second before contact. Mac and I were joined by a hair-thin bond. I braced myself behind the big rock. I'm going to haul you in.'

'Aye, I'm ready. But why didn't I think of using the Walton? Damnation, I didn't need to get you back here, I could have done it for myself.'

I began to reel in the line, slowly so that Mac could help by freeing himself from the stones and gravel. The Izaak Walton has been used for many years, ever since the first big space construction jobs pointed out the need for a way to move around in vacuum without wasting a suit's reaction mass. If all you want is a little linear momentum, the argument went, why not take it from the massive structures around you? That's all that the Waltons do. I'd used them hundreds of times in free fall, shooting the line out to a girder where I wanted to be, connecting, then reeling myself over there. So had Mac, and that's why he was disgusted with himself. But it occurred to me that this was the first time I'd ever heard of a Walton being used on a planetary surface.

'I don't think you could have done it, Mac,' I said. 'This big rock's the only solid one you could see from down there, and it doesn't look as though it has a high metal content. You'd have nothing for the magnet to grab hold of up here.' 'But I should have had the sense to try. I'm a witless oaf.'

What that made me, I dreaded to think. I went on steadily hauling in the line until he had scrabbled his way up to stand by my side, then switched off the field. The line and magnet automatically ran into their storage reel in my suit, and we carefully turned and headed back to the other two. Astronauts also have to watch what they say. There is no air in space, so unless you are touching helmets together, you cannot talk with others without a radio.

But while speaking on means your voice becomes fainter with distance, over a radio it will be loud and clear out to the limit of the radio's range. This means cursing under your breath or muttering behind somebody's back will not work. There might be several channels to allow a bit of privacy, or if several conversations are going on at once. 'Do you think they're listening to us?

Suppose someone's got a watch on this frequency—they'll have heard every word we've said. After all, we're in direct line of sight.' 'Who's being melodramatic now? No one except the Observatory would be listening on this frequency, and the folks at home can't hear us as there's rather a lot of mountain in the way.

Sounds as if you've got a guilty conscience; anyone would think that you'd been using naughty words again.' This was a reference to an unfortunate episode soon after Wheeler's arrival.

Since then he had been very conscious of the fact that privacy of speech, which is taken for granted on Earth, not always available to the wearers of spacesuits, whose every whisper can be heard by anyone within radio range. For How much air do you have left? One hand held flat, palm up, while index and middle finger of the other hand are placed on the palm. Sometime people on a space walk want to communicate but do not want to use radio. This can be either due to the sad fact that one or both of the radio sets are out of order, or if the two have a strong motive not to broadcast their conversation to everybody in the universe within radio range. • Some SF novels suggest that two space suited people might turn off their raidos, and touch helmets.

The theory is that the sound of the conversation will be conducted through the contact between helmets. However, others maintain that the area of contact will be so small (since the helmets are basically spherical) that no audible sound will manage to pass. • In Poul Anderson's TAU ZERO, he suggests astronauts will learn how to. In the weaving sheds and cotton mills of Lancashire, workers developed an exaggerated form of speech and gesture called to facilitate lip-reading. • They can use a vacuum-rated marker pen to write words.

• is another possibility, via flashlight or a mirror reflecting Sol. If they are connected by something that will transmit vibration (like a girder) they can use (Morse won't work with percussion because while you can tap a 'dot' you cannot tap a 'dash'). • In Belters use specialized hand gestures similar to those and.

These can also be used like to supplement radio communication, e.g., using a fist to make a 'nod-your-head-yes' gesture (non-verbal so radio doesn't send it, and mostly invisible unless you can see inside their helment). In The Expanse, Belters tend to use hand gestures even when not wearing a space suit, shrugging with their hands instead of their shoulders for instance. • In Larry Niven's ' series, belters do NOT perform any hand gestures at all. This is because Niven's belters fly in very small spacecraft called '. The habitat module is only slightly larger than a coffin. 'You noticed a habit of mine once. I never make gestures.

All Belters have that trait. It's because on a small mining ship you could hit something waving your arms around. Something like the airlock button.' 'Sometimes it's almost eerie. You don't move for minutes at a time.'

(1966) • Actually,. The link shows some proposed signals. • One can use or a. It is difficult to do full blown sign language in a space suit. Sign languages have complicated, nuanced signs that would get lost by the highly restricted motion of the suits. Only big motions would be visible. • If the two are connected by a tether, they can use.

• Sawmill workers had their, because the noise in the mill is too loud for speaking. Something similar is used in steel pipe mills, where even radios are worthless due to the background noise. (ed note: the space cadets are on the hull of the spacecraft, being trained by Sergeant Hanako to use the space suit's rocket jets) A little more than a minute after cutting his jet, he jack-knifed to bring his boots in front of him and clicked on, about ten feet from the instructor.

Hanako came over and placed his helmet against Mart’s so he could speak to him privately, with the radio shut off. “A good job, kid, the way you kept your nerve when you swung past. Okay—I’ll post you for advanced training.” Matt remembered to cut out his walky-talky. “Gee, thanks!” “You did it, not me.” Hanako cut back in the voice circuit. “Okay, there—number four.” Matt wanted to chase back to his room, find Tex, and do some boasting. But there were seven more to go. Some did well, some had to be fished out of difficulty.

The last man outdid himself. He failed to cut off his power in spite of Hanako’s shouts for him to do so. He moved away from the ship in a wide curve and commenced to spin, while the sergeant whipped at the safety line to try to stop the spin and head him back.

At the end of a long fifty seconds his power gave out; he was nearly a thousand feet away and still receding rapidly. The sergeant played him ike a fisherman fighting a barracuda, then brought him in very, very slowly, for there was no way to check whatever speed the tension on the line placed on him. When at last he was in, clicked down, and anchored by static line, Hanako sighed. “Whew!” he said. “I thought I was going to have to go get him.” He went to the cadet and touched helmets, radio off. The cadet did not shut off his instrument.

“I don’t know,” they heard him reply. “The switch didn’t go bad—I just couldn’t seem to move a muscle. I could hear you shouting but I couldn’t move.” Matt went back to the airlock with the group, feeling considerably sobered. He suspected that there would be a vacant place at supper. It was the Commandant’s policy to get a cadet who was to be dropped away from the ship without delay.

Matt did not question the practice, but it jarred him when he saw it happening—it brought the cold breath of disaster on his own neck. To the surprise of the twins Hazel did not continue the argument but followed her son docilely into the air lock. Mr Stone started down the rope ladder; Castor pulled his grandmother aside, switched off both her radio and his and pushed his helmet into contact with hers so that he might speak with her in private.

‘Hazel, what was wrong with the power plant? Pol and I went through this ship last week — I didn’t spot anything too bad.’ Hazel look at him pityingly. ‘You’ve been losing sleep lately? It’s obvious — only four couches.’ ‘Oh.’ Castor switched on his radio and silently followed his brother and father to the ground.

(ed note: context: Teenagers Castor and Pollux Stone want to buy a spaceship and make their fortunes in the asteroid belt. Stone thinks the twins are far too young to go gallivanting off by themselves. He decides to go shopping for a used four-accelerator-couch ship so he, his wife, grandmother Hazel, and the baby can go traveling.

Castor and Pollux can stay home and go to boarding school. Wiley grandmother Hazel is manipulating her son Mr. Stone into getting a ship that the entire family can fit in. As they look over a used ship that Mr.

Stone favors, Hazel pitches a fit about the state of the ship's power plant. Stone demurrers to his mother's judgement. The twins know there is nothing wrong with the plant and ask grandmother Hazel what gives?).

( ed note: on Luna, Kip and Peewee put on spacesuits and make their escape from the alien base) 'Mind your pressure. You're swelling up too fast.' I kicked the chin valve while watching the gauge—and kicking myself for letting a little girl catch me in a greenhorn trick. But she had used a space suit before, while I had merely pretended to.

I decided this was no time to be proud. Give me all the tips you can. I'm new to his.'

'I will, Kip.' The outer door popped silently and swung inward—and I looked out over the bleak bright surface of a lunar plain. For a homesick moment I remembered the trip-to-the-Moon games I had played as a kid and wished I were back in Centerville. Then Peewee touched her helmet to mine. 'See anyone?' 'We're lucky, the door faces away from the other ships. Listen carefully.

We won't use radio until we are over the horizon—unless it's a desperate emergency. They listen on our frequencies. I know that for sure. Now see that mountain with the saddle in it?

Kip, pay attention!' I had been staring at Earth.

She was beautiful even in that shadow show in the control room—but I just hadn't realized. There she was, so close I could almost touch her and so far away that we might never get home. You can't believe what a lovely planet we have, until you see her from outside with clouds girdling her waist and polar cap set jauntily, like a spring hat. I see the saddle.' 'We head left of there, where you see a pass.

Tim and Jock (thugs working for the aliens) brought me through it in a crawler. Once we pick up its tracks it will be easy. But first we head for those near hills just left of that—that ought to keep this ship between us and the other ships while we get out of sight. It was twelve feet or so to the ground and I was prepared to jump, since it would be nothing much in that gravity. Peewee insisted on lowering me by rope.

'You'll fall over your feet. Look, Kip, listen to old Aunt Peewee. You don't have Moon legs yet. It's going to be like your first time on a bicycle.' So I let her lower me and the Mother Thing while she snubbed the nylon rope around the side of the lock. Then she jumped with no trouble. I started to loop up the line but she stopped me and snapped the other end to her belt, then touched helmets.

If I go too fast or you need me, tug on the rope. I won't be able to see you.'

(ed note: 'Tiny' Larsen is the man in charge of buiding Space Station One. Which is an engineering feat bigger than the Panama Canal. His construction crew is stag, all male, by design. He has to fire one of the radiomen when they invent a magnetic way of gambling with dice in free fall, including cheating. The replacement, G. Brooks McNye arrives by rocket. But the rocket departs before Tiny discovers the 'G' is for 'Gloria'.

Tiny figures construction crew moral will tank, and keeps her chaperoned as much as possible. Which isn't much since they need two radiomen to cover all the shifts. Gloria is competent enough, as a matter of fact she trained the current radioman.

Things get testy on the day when they perform the dangerous operation of spinning up the station using JATO units.) Men in space suits all look alike; we used numbers and colored armbands. Supervisors had two antennas, one for a gang frequency, one for the supervisors' circuit. With Tiny and me the second antenna hooked back through the radio shack and to all the gang frequencies—a broadcast.

The supervisors had reported their men clear of the fireworks and I was about to give Tiny the word, when this figure came climbing through the girders, inside the danger zone. No safety line. Miss Gloria, of course. Tiny hauled her out of the blast zone, and anchored her with his own safety line. I heard his voice, harsh in my helmet: 'Who do you think you are?

A sidewalk superintendent?' And her voice: 'What do you expect me to do? Go park on, a star?' 'I told you to stay away from the job. If you can't obey orders, I'll lock you up.' I reached him, switched off my radio and touched helmet. 'You're broadcasting!'

'Oh—' he says, switches off, and touches helmets with her. We could still hear her; she didn't switch off. 'Why, you big baboon, I came outside because you sent a search party to clear everybody out,' and, 'How would I know about a safety line rule?

You've kept me penned up.' And finally, 'We'll see!' (ed note: As it turned out, Tiny was wrong.

The construction crew moral soared, and construction was actually ahead of schedule.). Something smashed into his back with a force that knocked the breath out of him. For a heart-freezing moment he thought his air-tanks had gone, his suit torn open and that he was already sucking frenziedly at vacuum. But his gasp of pure terror brought air rushing into his lungs.

Conway had never known canned air to taste so good. The AACL’s tentacle had only caught him a glancing blow—his back wasn’t broken—and the only damage was a wrecked suit radio. “Are you all right?” Conway asked anxiously when he had Williamson settled in the compartment above.

He had to press his helmet against the other’s—that was the only way he could make himself heard now. For several minutes there was no reply, then the weary, pain-wrecked near-whisper returned.

“My arms hurt. I’m tired,” it said haltingly. “But I’ll be OK when they take me inside.” Williamson paused, his voice seemed to gather strength from somewhere and he went on, “That is if there is anybody left alive in the hospital to treat me.

If you don’t stop our friend down there” Sudden anger flared in Conway. “Dammit, do you never give up?” he burst out. “Get this, I’m not going to kill an intelligent being! My radio’s gone so I don’t have to listen to Lister and Mannon yammering at me, and all I’ve got to do to shut you up is pull my helmet away from yours. (ed note: This is about working in British weaving sheds in the early 1900s) A in full song is a noisy animal, the roar would be disconcerting to anyone not used to it.

None of the weavers wore ear defenders and many had a low level of hearing loss after years of exposure. Many thousands of pounds were spent on experiments to lessen the noise but all of them failed and right to the end of the industry the Lancashire loom made as much noise as it did when it was first invented. There was one small consolation, the noise was low frequency and nowhere near as damaging as modern high speed looms so it wasn’t as bad as some would like to portray it. However, it made communication in the shed by normal speech almost impossible.

The weavers found a way round this, they used to ‘mee maw’ to each other. This was using exaggerated lip movements With no sound so they can lip-read each other. If a weaver wanted to say something privately to another weaver she would place her mouth very close to her friend’s ear so nobody could see her lip movements. If I wanted to spread a message round the shed, say if I was stopping early for some reason, all I had to do was go to the door of the shed, mee maw my message to the first weaver inside the door and before I had walked back to the engine house everyone in the shed had the message.

They stopped at the Locker Rooms at East Lock and suited up. As usual, (grandmother) Hazel unbelted her gun and strapped it to her vacuum suit. None of the others was armed; aside from civic guards and military police no one went armed in Luna City at this late date except a few of the very old-timers like Hazel herself. Castor said ‘Hazel, why do you bother with that?’ ‘To assert my right.

Besides, I might meet a rattlesnake.’ ‘Rattlesnakes? Now, Hazel!’ ‘“Now, Hazel”’ yourself. More rattlesnakes walking around on their hind legs than ever wriggled in the dust. Anyhow, do you remember ’ ‘Uh, not exactly.’ ‘Look it up when we get home. You kids are ignorant Give me a hand with this helmet.’ The conversation stopped, as Buster was calling his grandmother and insisting that they start their game. Castor could read her lips through her helmet; when he had his own helmet in place and his suit radio switched on he could hear them arguing about which had the white men last game.

Hazel was preoccupied thereafter as Buster, with the chess board in front of him, was intentionally hurrying the moves, whereas Hazel was kept busy visualising the board. (ed note: Rick is only 15 years old, on his first trip to the moon colony. He is excited about his first lunar excursion with the local scouting troop. Unfortunately he does not understand the 24 hour clock, so arrives at the debarking airlock twelve hours early.) It was eight forty-five when he reached the recessed doorway that was one of the entrances to the North-Down lock area. Sensors responded to his arrival, triggering a flashing light—green, since there was safe pressure on the other side of the door. Rick, as he had been taught, flicked the 'acknowledge reading' switch located high on the door frame. Then he activated the door switch itself.

Despite the need for power economy, doors on the moon that opened into areas even moderately likely to tap vacuum were motor-driven. The chamber Rick entered was not normally exhausted; it was a sort of combined garage and locker-room. However, it did have a large direct exit to the surface for getting out unusually large pieces of equipment. When so used it became an air-lock chamber. On every moon-dweller's mind there was always the possibility of leakage or outright valve failure in any outer room. Rick was aware of that threat, just as the schoolkids he had met a few days before had been aware of rain and cold on Earth.

It was the Big Difference everyone was told about. But awareness was not the same thing as the reflective self-protection of a native. With the door secured behind him-by a strictly manual latch, activation of which shut off a warning bell—he made his way to the main personnel exits. His fervent hope was that the group might still be there. 'Sir, I seemed to have missed a group going out to Picard G. Could you tell me how long ago they left?' Montaux shook his head, at the same time making the negative hand-gesture habitual to people who spent much of their time in space suits.

Probably the one biggest mistake, of course, was made when he walked silently to the numbered locker his uncle had told him would contain his suit, and pulled it out. He donned it quickly and correctly under the attendant's eyeand who, Jim Talles. Asked the world later, would have foreseen that the earlier training session thus would turn out to be a mistake? If Rick had been slow or clumsy, if Pierre Montaux had had the slightest grounds for suspecting Rick Suspee never before had ventured into vacuum But there was nothing to warn Pierre. The suit went on smoothly. It fitted correctly. Rick attached helmet and gauntlets properly, did the proper things to seal them.

He made the proper signals to request tightness check, said the right things over the radio for the communications check. He strode over to the inner lock door, deftly operated the cycling switch, and waited until the inner light flashed green before opening the portal. There was nothing to show that he had not done it all a score, even a hundred, times before.

Montaux let him through, checked the manual seal on the inside after the door closed, and gestured a 'proceed' through the transparent wall. The outer door's light was now green. Rick operated its plainly labeled opening switch, went through, closed it, and disappeared from the sight of Pierre Montaux. And, for many hours, from the sight of mankind.

UN Marines were charging the Martian outpost. The yearlong cold war was going hot. Somewhere deep behind the cool mental habits of training and discipline, she was surprised.

She hadn’t really thought this day would come. The rest of her platoon were out of the outpost and arranged in a firing line facing the UN position. Someone had driven Yojimbo out onto the line, and the four-meter-tall combat mech towered over the other marines, looking like a headless giant in power armor, its massive cannon moving slowly as it tracked the incoming Earth troops. The UN soldiers were covering the 2,500 meters between the two outposts at a dead run. Why isn't anyone talking? She wondered. The silence coming from her platoon was eerie.

And then, just as her squad got to the firing line, her suit squealed a jamming warning at her. The top-down vanished as she lost contact with the satellite. Her team’s life signs and equipment status reports went dead as her link to their suits was cut off. The faint static of the open comm channel disappeared, leaving an even more unsettling silence. She used hand motions to place her team at the right flank, then moved up the line to find Lieutenant Givens, her CO. She spotted his suit right at the center of the line, standing almost directly under Yojimbo.

She ran up and placed her helmet against his. 'What the f**k is going on, El Tee?'

He gave her an irritated look and yelled, “Your guess is as good as mine. We can’t tell them to back off because of the jamming, and visual warnings are being ignored. Before the radio cut out, I got authorization to fire if they come within half a klick of our position.' He gave a start as a pair of mittened paws grasped his upper arms and a helmet clinked against his.

He found himself staring into the raw red features of the U.S. Repair-crew foreman, a likable, plain-spoken man named Grogan. Grogan was being smart enough not to use his suit radio (because this is a joint US-Chinese expedition, the two nations are at 'cold-war' status, and the place is swarming with security agents from both nations). “Beg pardon, sir,” Grogan said, “but what’s going on? We saw the landing leg spring loose through the telescope, but that’s all.” Jameson pressed his helmet against the other man’s. “Tell you all about it later. For now, just make sure that everything you replace in the locking mechanism is all right.

Particularly the bolts.”. In the 1970s, sawmill workers could talk about technical matters or insult each other in their own special sign language.

When the linguists Martin Meissner and Stuart Philpott first started visiting sawmills in British Columbia in the 1970s, they thought they’d find workers communicating without speaking, probably with some simple gestures that contained technical information. There was a long history of such communication in the face of extreme noise: For centuries, American mill workers had used systems of hand signals to tell each other, across the unending roar of the saws, how to cut wood.

What they discovered, though, floored them. The researchers witnessed a sign language system complete enough that workers could call each other “you crazy old farmer,” tell a colleague that he was “full of crap,” or tell each other when the foreman was “f*****g around over there.” Outside of deaf communities, hearing people sometimes develop what are now often called “alternate sign languages” to communicate when words will not do. In monasteries, monks uses signs to communicate in areas where speech is forbidden, for instance.

In industries where machines made speaking impossible—in ships’ engine rooms, in steel mills, textile mills, and sawmills—workers also found ways to communicate with their hands. In 1955, when covered these industrial sign languages, many were already disappearing. But in the 1970s, Meissner and Philpott found a sign language still used in sawmills. Their research further honed in on the culture of one particular mill where workers had developed a system of 157 signs that they used not just to communicate about their work but to trade small talk, tell crude jokes and tease each other.

The linguist were struck by the language’s “ingenuity and elegance,”. It was also a secret hidden in plain sight: the mill workers’ bosses, it seems, had almost no idea what they were saying. The core of the sawmill workers’ sign language was a system of numbers, standardized across the industry. Those signs were shared in a technical notebook, and, the linguists wrote,”in the view of the management, that was about all there was to the language.” But it covered much more ground than technical communication. Workers could talk about quitting time, lunch time, and cigarette breaks.

They could talk about sports and the bets they placed on games. They could talk about their wives, cars, and colleagues. They could tell jokes and comment on what was going on around them without their bosses ever knowing. Compared to a fully developed sign language, which can have thousands of signs, this one was limited in its scope.

It did provide these men with a way to cover the basic grounds of collegial small talk, and in at least one case, sawmill sign language also worked in the home. A couple of years after Meissner and Philpott published their research on British Columbia’s mills, another linguist, Robert Johnson, who had lost his hearing and used a variant on sawmill sign language to communicate with his wife and son, who was also deaf. About three-quarters of their corpus of 250 signs overlapped with the British Columbia sawmill signs Meissner and Philpott had collected. There was also significant overlap with American Sign Language. Betty responded smoothly to the control; he let her drift outward for a hundred feet, then checked her forward momentum and spun her round so that he was looking back at the ship.

Then he began his tour of the pressure hull. His first target was a fused area about half an inch across, with a tiny central crater. The particle of dust that had impacted here at over a hundred thousand miles an hour was certainly smaller than a pinhead, and its enormous kinetic energy had vaporized it instantly. As was often the case, the crater looked as if it had been caused by an explosion from inside the ship; at these velocities, materials behaved in strange ways and the laws of common-sense mechanics seldom applied. Poole examined the area carefully, then sprayed it with sealant from a pressurized container in the pod's general-purpose kit. The white, rubbery fluid spread over the metal skin, hiding the crater from view.

The leak blew one large bubble, which burst when it was about six inches across, then a much smaller one, then it subsided as the fast-setting cement did its work. He watched it intently for several minutes, but there was no further sign of activity. However, to make doubly certain, he sprayed on a second layer; then he set off toward the antenna. He waved a mechanic over to him.

Syaloch would like you to explain your outfit,” he said with ponderous sarcasm. Regular spacesuit here, reinforced at the seams.” The gauntleted hands moved about, pointing. “Heating coils powered from this capacitance battery. Ten-hour air supply in the tanks. These buckles, you snap your tools into them, so they won’t drift around in free fall. This little can at my belt holds paint that I spray out through this nozzle.” “Why must spaceships be painted?” asked Syaloch.

“There is nothing to corrode the metal.” “Well, sir, we just call it paint. It’s really gunk, to seal any leaks in the hull till we can install a new plate, or to mark any other kind of damage. Meteor punctures and so on.” The mechanic pressed a trigger and a thin, almost invisible stream jetted out, solidifying as it hit the ground. “But it cannot readily be seen, can it?” objected the Martian. “I, at least, find it difficult to see clearly in airlessness.” “That’s right, Light doesn’t diffuse, sowell, anyhow, the stuff is radioactive—not enough to be dangerous, just enough so that the repair crew can spot the place with a Geiger counter.” “I understand. What is the half-life?” “Oh, I’m not sure. Six months, maybe?

It’s supposed to remain detectable for a year.”. This, space cadets, is a Radar Gun. Don't roll your eyes at this thing, newbie, I know whatcha thinking and you're dead wrong.

Emphasis on 'dead.' You think you're some kind of Lensman Kimball Kinnison with a 'Look of Eagles' who don't need no stupid kindergarten training-wheels radar gun to tell your closing rate. You think you can just eyeball it. You also think you're actually going to survive longer than five minutes in your first EVA because you are a clueless newbie with delusions of competence. Do a search in for the and you'll see a picture of you.

Just ask Vasily Tsibliyev. On 25 June 1997 those bean-counting morons at thought they could save a few rubles by eliminating the and instead do it manually.

When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991 the Kurs network became the property of the Ukraine, who immediately started price-gouging Roscosmos. So the bean counters figured to heck with the Ukraine, who needs that fancy-smancy Kurs anyway?

Our boys in Roscosmos have the Look of Eagles, they can just eyeball it. Poor Vasily got stuck with the honor of being the first to try it. He was tasked with the job of sitting in the and trying to dock the by remote control. By eyeball, with no Kurs automated docking system for help. Vasily couldn't even begin to tell by eye the distance or closing rate. When he suddenly realized that the Progress was up to ramming speed, he floored the braking rockets, but it was too late.

Progress clobbered a solar panel then plowed into Mir's Spektr module. It ruined the solar panel, crumpled a radiator, and punched a hole in Spektr’s hull which immediately started spewing vital breathing mix into the depths of space.

Oh, and it put the entire station into a tail spin as well, because the ruined solar panel was the one powering the which ordinarily prevented just such an occurrence. The spin made the remaining solar panels not facing the sun anymore, so now there was no solar power at all. The cosmonauts managed to radio ground control enough info on the station's spin so it could be stopped, which is the only reason they didn't all die.

That and their frantic efforts to plug the air leak. After all the finger pointing and recriminations had died down a bit, Roscosmos did some ground simulations with five veteran cosmonauts to see if the concept would work in theory. Because they really hated being gouged by the Ukraine.

And the bean counters really wanted to deflect the blame aimed at them so it would land on poor Vasily. Unfortunately for the bean-counters, all five cosmonauts crashed their ships in the ground simulators. Now the bean-counters faced awkward questions about 'why the flaming frak didn't you idiots try ground simulations first before you tried it live?' The point is, you newbie, the human eye was not built to judge ranges and closing rates in airless space. It is used to judging distance by how the dusty air obscures things with distance. AND IF YOU HAVEN'T FIGURED IT OUT BY NOW THERE AIN'T NO FREAKING AIR IN SPACE!

Just be sure you have your last will and testament on file at the front office. Astronauts may also need a 'beeper'. This is a low powered radar used to locate small objects nearby (like that zero-recoil wrench you let go of 'just for a minute' which seems to have run away). You wave it around until is starts beeping (heard over your suit radio). As you approach the object the beep rate increases.

If you are doing space construction work or asteroid mining, you'll need a radar range-and-rate gun. This is similar to the the highway patrol uses to catch speeders, but it also tells the range. It gives you the precise distance to the object and the current closing rate between you and the object, using radar for range and for closing rate. This is important because it is almost impossible to tell the range to an object by eye in space. And even more impossible to tell how fast it is approaching or receding from you. This is a standard instrument on spacecraft and but not on a space suit. 'I'll borrow a Beeper from Stores,' replied Peter.

'Joe Evans will let me sign for one.' A Beeper, I should explain, is a tiny radar set, not much bigger than a hand-torch, which is used to locate objects that have drifted away from the Station. It's got a range of a few miles on anything as large as a space-suit, and could pick up a ship a lot farther away. You wave it around in space and when its beam hits anything you hear a series of 'Beeps'. The closer you get to the reflecting object, the faster the beeps come, and with a little practice you can judge distances pretty accurately. (ed note: Coyote Westlake is in a small habitat module attached to the asteroid RA45, with her ship the Vegas Girl parked nearby.

When she wakes up, she is startled to discover that the Vegas Girl is now far away from the asteroid.) How the hell could this have happened? She had left the Vegas Girl in a perfectly matched orbit relative to RA45. There was no way she could have drifted that far while Coyote was asleep. Unless she had been sleeping for one hell of a long time. She checked her watch and compared it to the time display on the hab shed’s chronometer. She even checked the date, just to be sure she hadn’t slept around the clock. But no, she had been out only a few hours.

How far had her ship drifted? Coyote grabbed the radar range-and-rate gun out of its rack and aimed it through the spaceward viewport, lining up the sights on the Girl. It was a low-power portable unit, not really meant to work at long range. Normally she used it to establish distance from and velocity toward an asteroid, but it could track her ship just as handily. She got the blinking strobe in the sights and pulled the trigger.

The gun pinged cheerfully twice to indicate it had gotten a good range and rate on its target. Coyote checked the gun’s tracking data display. And her heart nearly stopped.

The Vegas Girl was over one hundred kilometers astern, and the ship was moving away at over three hundred meters a second. But wait a moment. The tracker just showed relative velocity, not which object was doing the moving.

She peered out the port again, and spotted the triple-blink beacon she had left on RA46, the last rock she had worked. She swore silently.

RA46 was in the wrong part of the sky. She fired a ranging pulse at it and got back virtually the same velocity value. The Girl was stationary relative to RA46. So it wasn’t the ship moving. It was this rock. Spotter (n.): An ancient spacer’s tool, dating back almost as far as the navigator’s, the engineer’s, or the medtech’s hand effector, used for locating and profiling distant objects in space: a boon to anyone who has to manage a docking bay, shift cargo in microgravity, perform extravehicular activities in crowded neighborhoods, or engage in the smallest of small-craft operations, which is to say, riding a. The were no more than handheld radar transceivers with direct audio feedback into the user’s helmet interface.

Wave it around, and when you hear beeping, it’s pointing at something. The faster the beeping, the closer that something is to you. Learning what a particular rate meant in terms of range, and keeping an ear on the change of beep rate, were left as skills for the user to develop. The modern spotter is a rather more sophisticated device, thanks to miniaturization and commercial development. Now monitors its position relative to your body to provide a more accurate sense of direction, and even the most basic models provide. More advanced models use a to sweep the beam across a target once detected, providing a profile for target recognition purposes and an estimate of spin. Of course, there is in theory very little use for a spotter in the current age of space, since all spacecraft from the largest to the smallest include a, and are further constructed from which will obligingly disclose its location upon receiving a network request.

The has detailed charts of every object in space larger than a child’s ball. All objects within range should therefore, says theory, already be highlighted on your HUD. It is a sign of the tremendous respect that spacer culture has for theory that there are at least a brace of spotters stored in every airlock and docking bay from the Core to the Rim.

– A Star Traveler’s Dictionary. The calculator in his head proceeded with its business.

Of those American vessels near the Argonne when first contact was made with the enemy, only the Washington was sufficiently massive to go out in a blast of yonder size and shape. If that was the case Captain Martin Diaz of the United States Astromilitary Corps was a dead man. The other ships of the line were too distant, traveling on vectors too unlike his own, for their scout boats to come anywhere close. On the other hand, it might well have been a Unasian battlewagon. Diaz had small information on the dispositions of the enemy fleet.

He’d had his brain full just directing the torp launchers under his immediate command. If that had indeed been a hostile dreadnaught that got clobbered, surely none but the Washington could have delivered the blow, and its boats would be near— There!

For half a second Diaz was too stiffened by the sight to react. The boat ran black across waning clouds, accelerating on a streak of its own fire.

The wings and sharp shape that were needed in atmosphere made him think of a marlin he had once hooked off Florida, blue lightning under the sun— Then a flare was in his hand, he squeezed the igniter and radiance blossomed. Just an attention-getting device, he thought, and laughed unevenly as he and Bernie Sternthal had done, acting out the standard irreverences of high school students toward the psych course. But Bernie had left his bones on Ganymede, three years ago, and in this hour Diaz’s throat was constricted and his nostrils full of his own stench. He skyhooked the flare and hunkered in its harsh illumination by his radio transmitter.

Clumsy in their gauntlets, his fingers adjusted controls, set the revolving beams on SOS. If he had been noticed, and if it was physically possible to make the velocity changes required, a boat would come for him. The Corps looked after its own. Presently the flare guttered out. The pyre cloud faded to nothing. The raft deck was between Diaz and the shrunken sun. But the stars that crowded on every side gave ample soft light.

He allowed his gullet, which felt like sandpaper, a suck from his one water flask. Otherwise he had several air bottles, an oxygen reclaim unit, and a ridiculously large box of Q rations.

His raft was a section of inner plating, torn off when the Argonne encountered the ball storm. She was only a pursuit cruiser, unarmored against such weapons. At thirty miles per second, relative (260 Each 1kg ball does 50% the damage of a ), the little steel spheres tossed in her path by some Unasian gun had not left much but junk and corpses.

Diaz had found no other survivors. He’d lashed what he could salvage onto this raft, including a shaped torp charge that rocketed him clear of the ruins. This far spaceward he didn’t need screen fields against solar particle radiation. So he had had a small hope of rescue. Maybe bigger than small, now. Unless an enemy craft spotted him first. His scalp crawled with that thought.

His right arm, where the thing he might use in the event of capture lay buried, began to itch (he has an implanted isotopal explosive device, to be detonated when taken aboard a hostile ship). But no, he told himself, don’t be sillier than regulations require. That scoutboat was positively American. The probability of a hostile vessel being in detection range of his flare and radio—or able to change vectors fast enough—or giving a damn about him in any event—approached so close to zero as made no difference. Astronaut Stephen K. Robinson anchored to the end of Canadarm2 during STS-114 Sometimes astronauts have to repair or service items that are not directly connected to their spacecraft.

Breaking contact with the ship is possible by using an, but is always risky. A useful compromise is using the concept, having the astronaut's feet attached to a based on the spacecraft, and the platform's arm maneuvers to position the astronaut.

On the International Space Station, this is done with the amazing (successor to the original ). As one adds more gadgets and attachments to a space suit, it gradually morphs into a tiny spaceship.

It starts with spring-loaded broomsticks and picks up speed with the addition of tiny attitude jets and maneuvering rockets. As a parallel development, a rocket engine with a skeletal frame to hold astronauts is the first 'space taxi'. When a space suit is massive enough that one climbs into it instead of putting it on like clothing, equipped with mechanical arms and waldoes, you suddenly have a space pod.

Then if the pod grows to the size of a baby spaceship, but with massive over-sized engines, you finally have a space tug. This was where the broomsticks came in. Commander Doyle had invented them, and the name, of course, came from the old idea that once upon a time witches used to ride on broomsticks.

We certainly rode around the station on ours. They consisted of one hollow tube, sliding inside another. The two were connected by a powerful spring, one tube ending in a hook, the other in a wide rubber pad.

That was all there was to it. If you wanted to move, you put the pad against the nearest wall and shoved.

The recoil launched you into space, and when you arrived at your destination you let the spring absorb your velocity and bring you to rest. Trying to stop yourself with your bare hands was liable to result in sprained wrists.

It wasn't quite as easy as it sounds, though, for if you weren't careful you could bounce right back the way you'd come. There are some professions which have evolved unique and characteristic tools — the longshoreman's hook, the potter's wheel, the bricklayer's trowel, the geologist's hammer. The men who had to spend much of their time on zero-gravity construction projects had developed the broomstick. It was very simple — a hollow tube just a metre long, with a footpad at one end and a retaining loop at the other. At the touch of a button, it could telescope out to five or six times its normal length, and the internal shock-absorbing system allowed a skilled operator to perform the most amazing manoeuvres. The footpad could also become a claw or hook if necessary; there were many other refinements, but that was the basic design.

It looked deceptively easy to use; it wasn't. Everything happened in about five seconds. Brailovsky triggered his broomstick, so that it telescoped out to its full length of four metres and made contact with the approaching ship.

The broomstick started to collapse, its internal spring absorbing Brailovsky's considerable momentum; but it did not, as Curnow had fully expected, bring him to rest beside the antenna mount. It immediately expanded again, reversing the Russian's velocity so that he was, in effect, reflected away from Discovery just as rapidly as he had approached. He flashed past Curnow, heading out into space again, only a few centimetres away. The startled American just had time to glimpse a large grin before Brailovsky shot past him. A second later, there was a jerk on the line connecting them, and a quick surge of deceleration as they shared momentum. Their opposing velocities had been neatly cancelled; they were virtually at rest with respect to Discovery.

Curnow had merely to reach out to the nearest handhold, and drag them both in. While engaging in extra-vehicular activity, our space-suited rocketeers may use a ', or some kind of small jets (a Manned Maneuvering Unit or ). NASA has also developed a nitrogen-gas propelled unit that fits on the backpack, called the (SAFER). The SAFER can help an astronaut return to the shuttle or station in the event that they gets separated from the spacecraft. SAFER has a deltaV capacity of 3 m/s. By Robert Heinlein (1948) The training rocket packs have 15 m/s of delta V for a space-suited astronaut of 136 kilograms of mass (standard rocket packs have more). (1950) The crew used an industrial tank of oxygen as an impromptu thruster to rescue one of the astronauts who foolishly allowed both of his magnetic boots to detach from the ship's hull.

By Issac Asimov (1953) Astronauts used push-units: a torus-shaped pressurized tank of carbon dioxide around the astronaut's waist, connected by tube to the L-shaped push gun. By Robert Silverberg (1955) Astronauts carried a slugthowing pistol with four bullets as a hand-held maneuvering unit.

In reality this is not very efficient. A.45 automatic will give a 68 kg person about 0.088 m/s deltaV per bullet, closer to 0.044 m/s if the person+spacesuit mass is 136 kg. (1976) Commander Koenig uses his space suit's oxygen tanks as emergency maneuvering jets to retrieve the space helmet before he suffocates.

(1984) They retained from the novel, but replaced the with a. The broomstick automatically retains the exact velocity, with a thruster you have to be sure to do a precise burn of the same magnitude in the opposite direction. 'The trick to jetting yourself in space,'—he went on, 'lies in balancing your body on the jet—the thrust has to pass through your center of gravity. If you miss and don't correct it quickly, you start to spin, waste your fuel, and have the devil's own time stopping your spin. 'It's no harder than balancing a walking stick on your finger—but the first time you try it, it seems hard. 'Rig out your sight.'

He touched a stud at his belt; a light metal gadget snapped up in front of his helmet so that a small metal ring was about a yard in front of his face. 'Pick out a bright star, or a target of any sort, lined up in the direction you want to go. Then take the ready position— no, no! Not yet—I'll take it.'

He squatted down, lifted himself on his hands, and very cautiously broke his boots loose from the side, then steadied himself on a cadet within reach. He turned and stretched out, so that he floated with his back to the ship, arms and legs extended. His rocket jet stuck straight back at the ship from the small of his back; his sight stuck out from his helmet in the opposite direction. He went on, 'Have the firing switch ready in your right hand.

Now, have you fellows ever seen a pair of adagio dancers? You know what I mean—a man wears a piece of leopard skin and a girl wearing less than that and they go leaping around the stage, with him catching her?' Several voices answered yes. Hanako continued, 'Then you know what I'm talking about.

There's one stunt they always do—the girl jumps and the man pushes her up and balances her overhead on one hand. He has his hand at the small of her back and she lays there, artistic-like. 'That's exactly the way you got to ride a jet. The push comes at the small of your back and you balance on it. Only you have to do the balancing—if the push doesn't pass exactly through your center of gravity, you'll start to turn.

You can see yourself starting to turn by watching through your sight. 'You have to correct it before it gets away from you. You do this by shifting your center of gravity. Drag in the arm or leg on the side toward which you've started to turn. The trick is—' 'Just a second, Sarge,' someone cut in, 'you said that just backwards. You mean; haul in the arm or leg on the other side, don't you?'

'Who's talking?' 'Lathrop, number six. 'I meant what I said, Mr. 'But—' 'Go ahead, do it your way. The rest of the class will do it my way. Let's not waste time.

Any questions? Okay, stand clear of my jet.' The half circle backed away until stopped by the anchored static lines. A bright orange flame burst from the sergeant's back and he moved straight out or 'up,' slowly at first, then with increasing speed.

His microphone was open; Matt could hear, by radio only, the muted rush of his jet—and could hear the sergeant counting seconds: 'And one! With the count of ten, the jet and the counting stopped. Their instructor was fifty feet 'above' them and moving away, back toward them. He continued to lecture. 'No matter how perfectly you've balanced you'll end up with a small amount of spin.

When you want to change direction, double up in a ball—' He did so. '—to spin faster—and snap out of it when you've turned as far as you want.' He suddenly flattened out and was facing them.

'Cut in your jet and balance on it to straighten out on your new course—before you drift past the direction you want.' He did not cut in his jet, but continued to talk, while moving away from them and slowly turning. 'There is always some way to squirm around on your axis of rotation so that you can face the way you need to face for a split second at least. For example, if I wanted to head toward the Station—' Terra Station was almost a right angle away from his course; he went through contortions appropriate to a monkey dying in convulsions and again snapped out in starfish spread, facing the Station—but turning slow cartwheels now, his axis of rotation unchanged. 'But I don't want to go to the Station; I want to come back to the ship.' The monkey died again; when the convulsions ceased, the sergeant was facing them. He cut in his jet and again counted ten seconds.

He hung in space, motionless with respect to the ship and his class and about a quarter mile away. 'I'm coming in on a jet landing, to save time.' The jet blasted for twenty seconds and died; he moved toward them rapidly. When he was still a couple of hundred feet away, he flipped over and blasted away from the ship for ten seconds. The sum of his maneuvers was to leave him fifty feet away and approaching at ten feet per second. He curled up in a ball again and came out of it feet toward the ship. Five seconds later his boots clicked to steel and he let himself collapse without rebound.

'But that is not the way you'll do it,' he went on. 'My tanks hold more juice than yours do—you've got fifty seconds of power, with each second good for a change of speed on one foot-second—that's for three hundred pounds of mass (15 m/s of delta V for 136 kilograms of mass); some of you skinny guys will go a little faster. 'Here's your flight plan: ten seconds out, counted. Turn as quick as you can and blast fifteen seconds back. That means you'll click on with five foot-seconds. Even your crippled grandmother ought to be able to do that without bouncing off. Unhook—-you're first.'

As the cadet came up, Hanako anchored himself to the ship with two short lines and took from his belt a very long line. He snapped one end to a hook in the front of the cadet's belt and the other to his own suit. The student looked at it with distaste. 'Is the sky hook necessary?' Sergeant Hanako stared at him.

'Sorry, Commodore—regulations. Take the ready position.' Silently the cadet crouched, then he was moving away, a fiery brush growing out of his back. He moved fairly straight at first, then started to turn. He pulled in a leg—and turned completely over.

'Lathrop—cut off your jet!' Snapped Hanako.

The flame died out, but the figure in the suit continued to turn and to recede. Hanako paid out his safety line. 'Got a big fish here, boys,' he said cheerfully. 'What do you think he'll weigh?' He tugged on the line, which caused Lathrop to spin the other way, as the line had wound itself around him. When the line was free he hauled the cadet in.

Lathrop clicked on. 'You were right, sergeant. I want to try it again—your way.' The book says a hundred per cent reserve fuel for this drill; you'd have to recharge.' Hanako hesitated. 'Sign up for tomorrow morning—I'll take you as an extra.'

'Oh—thanks, Sarge!' 'Don't mention it. Koenig's space suit protects him from the worst of the terrible heat and radiation.

Jim's job turned out to be running a small welder that operated on compressed oxygen and acetylene. 'Youll be working on some tricky alloys,' Bart told him.

'Keep the oxygen supply a little under what you need for the best burning. And before you turn it on, get a good grip. It's a small rocket, and don't forget that!' They filed out.

Some of the men seemed to be fully at home already, and simply dived off into space, kicking themselves toward the work. They carried tiny rocket tubes which could be used to kick themselves back in case they misjudged, but it wasn't something Jim cared to try yet. He was glad to see that others pulled themselves along the girders hand over hand. Everything seemed to be done by hand power. Men were moving out to the piles of material scattered about, sorting them, and attaching cords before pulling them back by hand.

There was no weight, but the inertia of the objects sometimes required the power of several men to overcome it. Once in motion, anything tended to keep that motion, and jockeying the parts into place and holding them there was a tricky business.

The welding proceeded well enough, however. Out here without air, the metals could never tarnish. They were given a brightening before being assembled to remove any corrosion from Earth's atmosphere, and then remained bright until they would be welded. Even aluminum and the titanium alloys were manageable. Bart came over after a few minutes and inspected his work. 'Good enough.

But don't sit facing the same way so long. That Sun's hotter than you think. Sit too long in one direction and you'll heat one side of your suit near melting, while the other side freezes stiff. How do you feel?' Jim had almost stopped thinking about that, under the pressure of the work. A boy who'd collapsed on the previous shift had put the welding behind the assembly, and Jim was driving himself to catch up. Bart clapped him on the shoulder and started to move on.

Then he swung back. 'Jim, don't ever let me find you with your belt unfastened on the job again!' He snapped the silicone-plastic strap around the girder and to a hook in the suit. 'I told you that torch was a small rocket!

Let go, and you'll sail out like a bird if you're not strapped down.' 'I guess I forgot this time,' Jim admitted. 'Sorry, Bart!' The welding went on for several hours, until he finished what was ready. Part of the time, he'd been within reach by radio of one of the young college boys, and had struck up a conversation, forcing himself to stop being a lone wolf. He'd found that there was a sound reason for using the oxyacetylene welder instead of an electric rig. The compressed gases were lighter than batteries, and the station was still underpowered.

They'd put up a sun mirror out of sheets of station walls and had used sections of pipe to make a boiler where the heat converged. It was driving a small steam plant and generator, but there were only about ten kilowatts to power the whole station until they could get the main power plant going much later. The work went on more easily in the following days. New men came up from Earth, and most of them went back. One of them did almost the same thing Jim had done, but turned his rocket tube on while it was still pointing toward his helmet. Nobody got much work done that day, and there was no conversation at dinner. At this point, perhaps I should remind you that the suits we use on the station are completely different from the flexible affairs men wear when they want to walk around on the Moon.

Ours are really baby space ships, just big enough to hold one man. They are stubby cylinders, about seven feet long, fitted with low-powered propulsion jets, and have a pair of accordion-like sleeves at the upper end for the operator's arms.

As soon as I'd settled down inside my very exclusive space craft, I switched on power and checked the gauges on the tiny instrument panel. All my needles were well in the safety zone, so I gave Tommy a wink for luck, lowered the transparent hemisphere over my head and sealed myself in. For a short trip like this, I did not bother to check the suit's internal lockers, which were used to carry food and special equipment for extended missions. As the conveyor belt decanted me into the air lock, I felt like an Indian papoose being carried along on its mother's back. Then the pumps brought the pressure down to zero, the outer door opened, and the last traces of air swept me out into the stars, turning very slowly head over heels. The station was only a dozen feet away, yet I was now an independent planet—a little world of my own.

I was sealed up in a tiny, mobile cylinder, with a superb view of the entire universe, but I had practically no freedom of movement inside the suit. The padded seat and safety belts prevented me from turning around, though I could reach all the controls and lockers with my hands or feet. In space the great enemy is the Sun, which can blast you to blindness in seconds.

Very cautiously, I opened up the dark filters on the 'night' side of my suit, and turned my head to look out at the stars. At the same time I switched the helmet's external sunshade to automatic, so that whichever way the suit gyrated my eyes would be shielded.

Presently, I found my target—a bright fleck of silver whose metallic glint distinguished it clearly from the surrounding stars. I stamped on the jet control pedal and felt the mild surge of acceleration as the low-powered rockets set me moving away from the station. After ten seconds of steady thrust, I cut off the drive.

It would take me five minutes to coast the rest of the way, and not much longer to return with my salvage. All his life Gibson had been fascinated by gadgets, and the spacesuit was yet another to add to the collection of mechanisms he had investigated and mastered. Bradley had been detailed to make sure that he understood the drill correctly, to take him out into space, and to see that he didn’t get lost. Gibson had forgotten that the suits on the Ares had no legs, and that one simply sat inside them. That was sensible enough, since they were built for use under zero gravity, and not for walking on airless planets.

The absence of flexible leg-joints greatly simplified the designs of the suits, which were nothing more than perspex-topped cylinders sprouting articulated arms at their upper ends. Along the sides were mysterious flutings and bulges concerned with the air conditioning, radio, heat regulators, and the low-powered propulsion system. There was considerable freedom of movement inside them: one could withdraw one’s arms to get at the internal controls, and even take a meal without too many acrobatics. Bradley had spent almost an hour in the airlock, making certain that Gibson understood all the main controls and catechising him on their operation. Gibson appreciated his thoroughness, but began to get a little impatient when the lesson showed no sign of ending. He eventually mutinied when Bradley started to explain the suit’s primitive sanitary arrangements. “Hang it all!” he protested, “we aren’t going to be outside that long!” Bradley grinned.

“You’d be surprised,” he said darkly, “just how many people make that mistake.” He opened a compartment in the airlock wall and took out two spools of line, for all the world like fishermen’s reels. They locked firmly into mountings on the suits so that they could not be accidentally dislodged. “Number One safety precaution,” he said. “Always have a lifeline anchoring you to the ship. Rules are made to be broken— — but not this one. To make doubly sure, I’ll tie your suit to mine with another ten metres of cord. Now we’re ready to ascend the Matterhorn.” The outer door slid aside.

Gibson felt the last trace of air tugging at him as it escaped. The feeble impulse set him moving towards the exit, and he drifted slowly out into the stars. The friction of the reel had checked his momentum when the cord attaching him to Bradley gave a jerk. He had almost forgotten his companion, who was now blasting away from the ship with the little gas jets at the base of his suit, towing Gibson behind him. Gibson was quite startled when the other’s voice, echoing metallically from the speaker in his suit, shattered the silence.

“Don’t use your jets unless I tell you. We don’t want to build up too much speed, and we must be careful not to get our lines tangled.” “All right,” said Gibson, vaguely annoyed at the intrusion into his privacy. He looked back at the ship. It was already several hundred metres away, and shrinking rapidly.

“How much line have we got?” he asked anxiously. There was no reply, and he had a moment of mild panic before remembering to press the “TRANSMIT” switch. “About a kilometre,” Bradley answered when he repeated the question. “That’s enough to make one feel nice and lonely.” “Suppose it broke?” asked Gibson, only half joking. It could support your full weight, back on Earth.

Even if it did, we could get back perfectly easily with our jets.” “And if they ran out?” “This is a very cheerful conversation. I can’t imagine that happening except through gross carelessness or about three simultaneous mechanical failures. Remember, there’s a spare propulsion unit for just such emergencies— — and you’ve got warning indicators in the suit which let you know well before the main tank’s empty.” “But just supposing,” insisted Gibson. “In that case the only thing to do would be to switch on the suit’s S.O.S. Beacon and wait until someone came out to haul you back. I doubt if they’d hurry, in such circumstances. Anyone who got himself in a mess like that wouldn’t receive much sympathy.”.

(1955) Orion Space Taxi Propulsion Chemical Specific Impulse 450 s Exhaust Velocity 4,500 m/s Wet Mass 1,584 kg Dry Mass 759 kg Mass Ratio 2.0 ΔV 3,120 m/s Payload 136 kg (2 people) Length 3 m Diameter 1 m wide General Dynamics 2-Man Space Taxi Propulsion Chemical Specific Impulse 450 s Exhaust Velocity 4,500 m/s Wet Mass 361 kg Dry Mass 155 kg Propellant Mass 206 kg Mass Ratio 2.3 ΔV 3,750 m/s Crew 2 Height 3.5 m In about Orion drive spacecraft, they mention a space taxi. It carries two crew members, has a hardware mass of 623 kilograms, and a propellant mass of 825 kilograms. As near as I can measure from the diagram, it can be approximated as a cylinder with a height of two meters and a radius of 0.5 meters, with a hemisphere of radius 0.5 meters on each end. This gives it an internal volume of 2 m 3.

Assuming it has chemical propulsion, the propellant would take up about 0.8 cubic meters, and the two crew would take up 0.14 cubic meters. Carrying two crew, it would have a mass ratio of about 2, and thus a deltaV of about 3,120 m/s.

In Volume 10: 'Space Age in Fiscal Year 2001'. Proceedings of the Fourth AAS Goddard Memorial Symposium, 15-16 March 1966, Washinton DC Krafft Ehricke has a diagram featuring what appears to be the same space taxi. General Dynamics had designs for one and two-man space taxis that again appear to be the same ones.

The two man version was described to have a dry mass of 155 kg and 206 kg of propellant (probably space storage hpergolic propellants). This would give it a mass ratio of 2.3 and thus a deltaVof about 3,750 m/s. For more details refer to. Candle (n.): A candle, or putt-putt, is the simplest transport spacecraft that can be devised, consisting essentially of a tank of powering a thrust motor and a simple reaction-control frame. The pilot, supported by their vacuum suit, rides the candle — the tank itself — in much the same manner as a velocipede. The additional accoutrements and controls of a candle vary widely by type.

Most common are, to make their handling less temperamental in the face of mass shifts. Commercial models often include a range of accessories: navigation, Orbital Positioning Systems (space version of ), a comfortable saddle and space for passengers, cargo, canned life support reserves, and so forth. But the virtue of a candle is its simplicity. One can be put together out of parts readily obtainable from even a half-stocked, or for that matter from those lying around any wreckyard, or even crash site. Such a scrap-candle may consist of little more than the tank and motors, with handhold bars and lash-downs for bagged cargo welded on where they might be useful. Some go so far as to strip the navigation system down to a row of firing switches for each motor, requiring the pilot to figure burn times and vectors by eye, or at least by pocket-contents.

Indeed, in many spacer cultures across the Worlds, building one’s first candle from parts, salvaged, scrounged, and where necessary even purchased, is considered a rite of passage for the young. More cynical observers consider the true rite of passage being making one’s first candle flight without having to be ignominiously hauled home by the Orbit Guard.

- A Star Traveller’s Dictionary. Matt pulled himself along, last in line, and found the scooter loaded. He could not find a place; the passenger racks were filled with space-suited cadets, busy strapping down. The cadet pilot beckoned to him.

Matt picked his way forward and touched helmets. 'Mister,' said the oldster, 'can you read instruments?'

Guessing that he referred only to the simple instrument panel of a scooter, Matt answered, 'Yes, sir.' 'Then get in the co-pilot's chair. What's your mass?'

'Two eighty-seven, sir,' Matt answered, giving the combined mass, in pounds, of himself and his suit with all its equipment. Matt strapped down, then looked around, trying to locate Tex and Oscar.

He was feeling very important, even though a scooter requires a co-pilot about as much as a hog needs a spare tail. The oldster entered Mart's mass on his center-of-gravity and moment-of-inertia chart, stared at it thoughtfully and said to Matt, 'Tell Gee-three to swap places with Bee-two.' Matt switched on his walky-talky and gave the order. There was a scramble while a heavy-set youngster changed seats with a smaller cadet. The pilot gave a high sign to the cadet manning the hangar pocket; the scooter and its launching cradle swung out of the pocket, pushed by power-driven lazy tongs.

A scooter is a passenger rocket reduced to its simplest terms and has been described as a hat rack with an outboard motor. It operates only in empty space and does not have to be streamlined. The rocket motor is unenclosed. Around it is a tier of light metal supports, the passenger rack. There is no 'ship' in the sense of a hull, airtight compartments, etc.

The passengers just belt themselves to the rack and let the rocket motor scoot them along. The taxi looked like a huge, short salami, twenty feet long and eight in diameter. There was a small dome for the pilot to see out, and an air lock at the front, while the rear carried a small rocket motor.

They went through the lock. Inside were two seats, fuel tanks, and steering assembly, as well as cargo space. Jerry blasted off, after cranking a hand gyroscope to turn them. It was a weak, cautious blast that used little fuel.

'Better to take your time and not waste fuel,' he explained. 'Once you get moving, there's nothing to stop you.' They drifted toward the rocket, turning over by the use of the gyroscope, and Jerry brought them to a stop with a single quick blast of the rocket tube. It was precise, beautiful work. They coasted a few feet away, while he turned them over again until the nose pointed to the rocket's lock, which was open. 'Slip your helmet back on, Jim,' Jerry ordered. 'Go out into the lock and catch that rope.'

The man in the ship ahead had already thrown the cord. Jim found the end and fastened it to a bite inside the lock. The taxi was pulled up to the main lock, where it fitted snugly against the silicone-rubber gasket to make an airtight seal. They took the passengers back, and then began making trips to ferry the supplies. These were dumped out of the big rocket by the pilot and his men.

Apparently they put on space suits, evacuated the air from the cargo section and lock, and simply pitched the crates and pieces into space. It was Jim's job to go out of the taxi and secure these with cords to a ring on the back of the taxi, leaving enough distance so the rocket blast wouldn't hurt them. Captain Stone sighed. 'I'm going with you. Will your scooter take three?' It's got Reynolds saddles; set any balance you need.' Hazel allotted one-fourth her fuel as safety margin, allotted the working balance for maximum accelerations, figuring the projected mass-ratios in her head.

Hazel worked the new mass figures over; with Edith, her suit, and the spare bottle subtracted she had spare fuel. She lined up on City Hall by flywheel and stereo, spun on that axis to get the sun out of her eyes, clutched her gyros, and gave it the gun. The next thing she knew she was tumbling like a liner in free fall. She remembered from long habit to cut the throttle but only after a period of aimless acceleration, for she had been chucked around in her saddle, thrown against her belts, and could not at first find the throttle. Quickly she checked things over. There was not much that could go wrong with the little craft, it being only a rocket motor, an open rack with saddles and safety harness, and a minimum of instruments and controls.

It was the gyros, of course; the motor had been sweet and hot. They were hunting the least bit, she found, that being the only evidence that they had just tumbled violently. Delicately she adjusted them by hand, putting her helmet against the case so that she could hear what she was doing.

Only then did she try to find where they were and where they were going. Let's see—the Sun is over there—and that's Betelgeuse over yonder—so City Hall must be out that way. She ducked her helmet into the hemispherical 'eye shade' of the stereo. There she be! The Eakers place was the obvious close-by point on which to measure her vector. She looked around for it, was startled to discover how far away it was. They must have coasted quite a distance while she was fiddling with the gyros.

She measured the vector in amount and direction, then whistled. There were, she thought, few grocery shops out that way—darn few neighbors of any sort. But she kept trying to call Mrs. Eakers, or anyone else in range of her suit radio while she again lined up the ship for City, with offset to compensate for the new vector. She was cautious and most alert this time—in consequence she wasted only a few seconds of fuel when the gyros again tumbled. She unclutched the gyros and put them out of her mind, then took careful measure of the situation. The Eakers dump was now a planetary light in the sky, shrinking almost noticeably, but it was still the proper local reference point.

She did not like the vector she got. As always, they seemed to be standing still in the exact center of a starry globe—but her instruments showed them speeding for empty space, headed clear outside the node. Carefully she lined up the craft by flywheel; carefully she checked it when it tried to swing past. She aimed both to offset the new and disastrous vector and to create a vector for City Hall.

She intentionally left the gyros unclutched. Then she restrapped Lowell in his saddle, checked its position. 'Hold still,' she warned. 'Move your little finger and Grandma will scalp you.'

Just as carefully she positioned herself, considering lever arms, masses, and angular moments in her head. Without gyros the craft must be balanced just so. 'Now,' she said to herself, 'Hazel, we find out whether you are a pilot—or just a Sunday pilot.' She ducked her helmet into the eyeshade, picked a distant blip on which to center her crosshairs, and gunned the craft. The blip wavered; she tried to rebalance by shifting her body.

When the blip suddenly slipped off to one side she cut the throttle quickly. Again she checked her vector. Their situation was somewhat improved.

Again she called for help, not stopping to cut the child out of hearing. He said nothing and looked grave.

She went through the same routine, cutting power again when the craft 'fell off its tail.' She measured the vector, called for help—and did it all again. A dozen times she tried it. On the last try the thrust stopped with the throttle still wide open. With all fuel gone there was no need to be in a hurry.

She measured her vector most carefully on the Eakers' ship, now far away, then checked the results against the City Hall blip, all the while calling for help. She ran through the figures again; in a fashion she had been successful. They were now unquestionably headed for City Hall, could not miss it by more than a few miles at most—almost jumping distance. But, while the vector was correct in direction, it was annoyingly small in quantity—six hundred and fifty miles at about forty miles an hour; they would be closest in about sixteen hours. Roger Stone explained. The twins looked at each other.

'Dad,' Castor said painfully, 'you mean Hazel took Mother out in our scooter?' The twins questioned each other wordlessly again. 'Why shouldn't she? 'Well, you see...

Well, it was like this—' 'Speak up!' 'There was a bearing wobble, or something, in one of the gyros,' Pollux admitted miserably.

'We were working on it.' In Charlie's place!'

'Well, we went over there to see what he had in the way of spare parts and, well, we got detained, sort of.' Their father looked at them for several seconds with no expression of any sort. He then said in a flat voice, 'You left a piece of ship's equipment out of commission. You failed to log it. You failed to report it to the Captain.' 'Go to your room.'

We want to help!' 'Stay in your room; you are under arrest.'

Castor thought about it. That could be really bad.' He added suddenly, 'But quit jittering, just the same. Start thinking instead. What happened? We've got to reconstruct it.'

'What happened?' Are you kidding? Look, the pesky thing tumbles, then anything can happen. 'Use your head, I said.

What would Hazel do in this situation?' They both kept quiet for some moments, then Pollux said, 'Cas, that derned thing always tumbled to the left, didn't it? 'What good does that do us? Left can be any direction.' You asked what Hazel would do.

She'd be along her homing line, of course—and Hazel always oriented around her drive line so as to get the Sun on the back of her neck, if possible. Her eyes aren't too good.' Castor screwed up his face, trying to visualize it.

'Say Eakers' is off that way and City Hall over here; if the Sun is over on this side, then, when it tumbles, she'd vector off that way.' He acted it with his hands. When you put in the right coordinates, that is. But what else would she do? What would you do? You'd vector back—I mean vector home.' How could she?

With no gyros?' 'Think about it. Would you quit? Hazel is a pilot.

She'd ride that thing like a broomstick.' He shaped the air with his hands.

'So she'd be coming back, or trying to, along here—and everybody will be looking for her 'way over here.' Castor scowled. 'It had better be. They'll be looking for her in a cone with its vertex at Eakers'—and they ought to be looking in a cone with its vertex right here, and along one side of it at that.' When Charlie had dug his scooter out of the floating junkyard moored to his home they soon saw why he had refused to lend it.

It seemed probable that no one else could possibly pilot it. Not only was it of vintage type, repaired with parts from many other sorts, but also the controls were arranged for a man with four hands. Charlie had been in free fall so long that he used his feet almost as readily for grasping and handling as does an ape; his space suit had had the feet thereof modified so that he could grasp things between the big toe and the second, as with Japanese stockings. The crate was old but Charlie had exceptionally large tanks on it; it could maintain a thrust for plenty of change-of-motion. Its jet felt as sweet as any. But it had no radar of any sort. 'Charlie, how do you tell where you are in this thing?'

'That' proved to be an antiquated. The twins had never seen one, knew how it worked only by theory. They were radar pilots, not used to conning by the seats of their suits. Seeing their faces Charlie added, 'Shucks, if you've got any eye for angle, you don't need fancy gear. Anywhere within twenty miles of the City Hall, I don't even turn on my suit jet—I just jump.'

They cruised out the line that the twins had picked. Once in free fall Charlie taught them how to handle the compass loop. 'Just plug it into your suit in place of your regular receiver. If you pick up a signal, swing the loop until it's least loud. That's the direction of the signal—an arrow right through the middle of the loop.' 'But which way? The loop faces both ways.'

'You have to know that. Or guess wrong and go back and try again.' Charlie, anticipating what would be needed, had swung ship as soon as he had quit accelerating. Now he blasted back as much as he had accelerated, bringing them dead in space relative to City Hall and the node. He gave it a gentle extra bump to send them cruising slowly back the way they had come.

Pollux listened, slowly swinging his loop. Castor strained his eyes, trying to see something, anything, other than the cold stars.

'Got it again!' Pollux pounded his brother. Old Charlie killed their relative motion; waited. Pollux cautiously tried for a minimum, then swung the loop, and tried again.

He pointed, indicating that it had to be one of two directions, a hundred and eighty degrees apart. Castor asked Charlie. 'Over that way.' 'I can't see anything.' I got a hunch.'

Castor did not argue. Either direction was equally likely. Charlie gunned it hard in the direction he had picked, roughly toward Vega. He had hardly cut the gun and let it coast in free fall when Pollux was nodding vigorously.

They coasted for some minutes, with Pollux reporting the signal stronger and the minimum sharper... But still nothing in sight. Castor longed for radar. By now he could hear crying in his own phones. It could be Buster—it must be Buster.

'There she is!' It was Charlie's shout.

Castor could not see anything, even though old Charlie pointed it out to him. At last he got it—a point of light, buried in stars.

Pollux unplugged from the compass when it was clear that what they saw was a mass, not a star, and in the proper direction. Old Charlie handled his craft as casually as a bicycle, bringing them up to it fast and killing his headway so that they were dead with it. He insisted on making the jump himself. Stan and Fred discovered that it took almost nineteen minutes just to get to Charlie Victor, Mod Four Seven. There were a lot of hatches to go through and a lot of modules to traverse.

'Fred, if we don't find some faster way to move around this rabbit warren, a lot of people are going to be dead before we reach them,' Stan pointed out, finally opening the hatch to Mod Four Seven. Fred was right behind him through the hatch. 'I'll ask Doc to see Pratt about getting us an Eff-Mu.' 'What's that?' 'Extra Facility Maneuvering Unit. A scooter to anybody but these acronym-happy engineers.'

'You want an Eff-Mu so you can get around GEO Base faster.' We lost the hyperpyrexia case because we couldn't get there fast enough. It takes forever to go through all the hatches and corridors of GEO Base.' 'Stan, I agree on both counts,' Tom replied. 'You need an Eff-Mu, and all of us need to be able to get around GEO Base faster in emergencies.

But do you think a standard two-man Eff-Mu will really do the job?' 'Why don't Earth-bound paramedics use motorcycles?' 'I see what you mean. We need room for the patient.' Eventually maybe not, but right now we've got to provide that, too.

Is there any Eff-Mu type that'll handle the two of you plus a patient?' Pratt called him. 'Doc, your special ambulance is coming up in the next Cot-Vee supply ship.

Should be docking in six hours at Portlock Foxtrot. We're also putting a docking collar module on the free end of your med module, so don't be disturbed when you hear noises. You'll be able to dock right to your sick bay.' (ed note: one hex module is a hexagonal prism, about 3.7 meters wall to wall (12 feet), 15.2 meters long (50 feet), and has a volume of 241 cubic meters (8,500 cubic feet) The Pumpkin turned out to be a masterpiece of quick-and-dirty engineering. It was half a hex module outfitted with a StarPacket vernier engine as its main propulsion system and a series of electric thrusters for maneuvering. It had no direct view to the outside universe, only an array of video displays—large windows in space were a constant trouble source because the state of the art couldn't keep them from leaking, and the Pumpkin's life-support consumables were limited to twenty-four man-hours with no recycling. The unit sported a universal docking collar on the end of the hex module opposite the StarPacket vernier engine.

Tom went with Fred and Stan to take delivery of their new gadget and bring it around to the med module dock. Pratt's men had latched the half hex of a docking port and pressure lock to the med module a few hours earlier in an operation that took only twenty minutes. GEO Base had been designed like an Erector set with plug-in modules; there was no time to build pretty or permanent space facilities on this job.

He looked over the panel. 'Attitude indicator. Four relative velocity indicators linked to eight search radars and three lidars at will.

Beacon transponders. You know, this really isn't that much different from flying airplanes on instruments.' And it wasn't. They returned for their P-suits, loaded another twenty-four man-hours of oxygen aboard, then checked out the Pumpkin—propellant load, battery-charge level, life-support-system consumables level, and the rest of a three-page checklist that someone had managed to put together for the Pumpkin when it was assembled at LEO Base. The controls had been highly simplified and were like those of a helicopter, with two sidearm controllers and two foot pedals to provide control in roll, pitch, yaw, and translation in six degrees of freedom. The StarPacket vernier engine offered enough thrust to get the Pumpkin moving for fast sprints, while the electric thrusters—the same kind used to propel the SPS array modules from LEO Base—permitted the gentlest of velocity changes.

The Pumpkin's saved a couple of people already. Three of us have learned how to operate it: Stan, Fred, and myself. Now I understand why space pilots are people who are instrument-rated airplane pilots and also own their own boats.

'Flying' the Pumpkin is like flying an airplane by instruments; you must believe what those gauges are telling you, and you can't pay any attention to the inputs from your vestibular apparatus or from kinesthetic senses. Docking and undocking the Pumpkin is like bringing the S.S. Patrick Miller alongside and gently docking to a pier; the Pumpkin has far less momentum, however, and is probably more like docking a row boat. There isn't anything difficult about it provided you aren't in a hurry.

That's going to be the biggest problem with the Pumpkin. When Fred and Stan are on a call, they're in a hurry. I expect to get reports of hard docks. I hope they don't crumple too much stuff until they learn how to handle the Pumpkin under the stress of an emergency.

I'm not too worried about them crumpling the Pumpkin; all the stress is column loading on that hex module, and it'd take a big bump to make the structure fail in that mode. Together, they went through the power-up checklist. Total time, forty-two seconds. Less than three minutes after the call, Fred retracted the docking latches and backed the Pumpkin away from the med module on thruster power. While Fred was doing that, Tom interfaced the ship's computer with the one in GEO Base via radio link; he called up a three-dimensional display of the current GEO Base configuration and had the computer call out the location of the accident site. 'Computer has fed course parameters to the guidance system,' Tom reported.

Fred slued the ship and coupled the autopilot. Autopilot locked on. Stand by for thrust.' Tom spoke over the radio. 'Traffic, Pumpkin.

Departing med module under primary thrust for Array Subassembly Module One Zero Seven. Are we clear to boost?' Fred held his finger over the abort switch in anticipation of a possible Traffic delay. But it didn't come. 'Pumpkin, Traffic.

Clear to boost.' The boost came with a little fishtailing. 'Doc, this autopilot doesn't warm up fast enough. We'll have to go manual follow-up.'

'I'll take it, Fred.' Flying the Pumpkin wasn't as hard as flying a light airplane on instruments through an overcast at night. In this case, with the course already plotted by the computer, all Tom had to do was keep the marker bugs centered on the attitude-situation and relative-velocity displays.

With the sidearm controller in one hand and the thruster and vernier throttles in the other, Tom didn't let the red Xs of the marker bugs deviate from the center of the display. They picked up the group of P-suited figures on video long before the computer called for retros.

To keep the thruster and vernier discharges away from the P-suited workers, Tom slued the Pumpkin in yaw and applied retro thrust by vector. The paramedic didn't say anything, but reached over and activated Tom's P-suit backpack.

Tom did the same for Fred. Only then did they disconnect from the Pumpkin's life-support system. 'Dump pressure, Fred.' Tom felt his suit pressurise as the atmosphere of the Pumpkin was dumped into space through spill valves that equalized the thrust produced.

Normal procedure wouldn't have permitted dumping of pressure, nitrogen being the one gas that had to be brought up from Earth. In addition, the venting created a gas halo around the ship that might have permitted arcing of electrical equipment on the SPS array. But in an emergency where the Pumpkin had to be depressurized rapidly, there was no alternative. (ed note: Keven, Glenda, and Jacob have been stranded on a tiny asteroid orbiting Ceres by the Bad Guys. They are in a mostly stripped base, trying to figure out how to get down to Ceres using only what is available) Kevin prowled through the corridors of their prison.

There has to be some way, he told himself. Ceres mocked him from below, less than three hundred kilometers down. It hung huge in the night sky.

Three hundred kilometers down, and we're moving about half a kilometer a second relative to Ceres, Kevin thought. That's not very much velocity. Under a thousand miles an hour. It doesn't take much energy to get to that speed.

How much gasoline does it take to accelerate a car on Earth up to a hundred miles an hour—a gallon or so? We only need ten times that, not even that much. There's plenty of hydrogen and oxygen. Marvelous rocket fuels if we only had a rocket. More than enough to get us down, except that the temperature of hydrogen burning in oxygen is a lot hotter than anything we have to contain in it— No. That's not right.

The fuel cells do it. But they do it by slowing down the reaction, and they can't be turned into rocket engines. He remembered the early German Rocket Society experiments described by Willy Ley. The Berliners had blown up more rockets than they flew, and they were only using gasoline, not hydrogen. Liquid-fuel rockets need big hairy pumps, and Kevin didn't have any pumps. What did he have?

Fuel cells, plenty of them, and so what? An electric-powered rocket was theoretically possible, but Kevin didn't have the faintest idea of how to build one, even if there was enough equipment around to do it with. He wasn't sure anyone had ever built one—certainly he couldn't. Back to first principles, he thought. The only way to change velocity in space is with a rocket.

What is a rocket? A machine for throwing mass overboard. The faster the mass thrown away goes in one direction, the faster the rocket will go in the other, and the less you have to throw. All rockets are no more than a means of spewing out mass in a narrow direction. A rocket could consist of a man sitting in a bucket and throwing rocks backward. That might get a few feet per second velocity change, but so what? There simply wasn't enough power in human muscles—even if he did have a lot of rocks.

Was there any other way to throw them? Not fast; and unless the thrown-away mass had a high velocity, the rocket wouldn't be any use. He went on through the tunnels, looking at each piece of equipment he found, trying to think of how it might be used. You can throw anything overboard to make a rocket.

Hydrogen, for example. That's all Wayfarer's engines did, heat up hydrogen and let it go out through the rocket nozzle. We have hydrogen under pressure— Not enough. Nowhere near enough hydrogen and nowhere near enough pressure, not to get velocity changes of hundreds of miles an hour. Ditto for oxygen.

Gas under compression just can't furnish enough energy. Chemical energy; burning hydrogen in oxygen would do it, but it gave off too much; there was nothing to contain that reaction except the fuel cells and they did it by slowing the reaction way down and— And I'm back where I started, Kevin thought. Plenty of energy in the fuel cells if I could find a way to use it. Could I heat a gas with electricity? Certainly, only how— His eye fell on the hot-water tank in the crew quarters.

An electric hot-water tank. There was a pressure gauge: forty pounds per square inch. Forty p.s.i.—He looked at the tank as if seeing it for the first time, then went running back to the others.

'Glenda, Jacob, I've got it.' 'Sure it works.' Kevin grinned. 'Steam at forty p.s.i. Will come out fast. About a kilometer a second.'

'I believe you,' Glenda said. 'But it sounds silly. Steam rockets?' Kevin shrugged. 'It is silly.

There are a lot more efficient systems. But this will work—' 'In a low g field,' Jacob said. 'You will not have much thrust. Of course you won't need much.' 'I'm sure it works,' Kevin said.

'Now all we have to do is build it.' He made himself sound confident; he knew how much room for error there was in his figures. 'Look, it takes nine hundred and eighty calories to turn a gram of water into steam. We heat that steam up another thirty or forty degrees and let it out. The energy is moving molecules. We know the molecular weight of water, so we can figure the number of molecules in a gram and—' They disconnected the hot-water tank and drilled holes in it.

Several turns of heating wire went through the holes, then they sealed them in epoxy. At one end of the tank they drilled a large hole and threaded a pipe into it, threaded a large valve onto the pipe, and welded a makeshift rocket nozzle beyond that.

When it was done they tethered the tank and filled it with water, then connected a fuel cell to the heating leads. 'Here goes,' Kevin said. He threw the switch to start the heaters.

Slowly the water inside heated, then began to boil. The pressure shown on the gauge began to rise. In half an hour they had forty-five pounds of pressure. 'All right, let's try it,' Kevin said. Glenda turned the valve to let out steam.

A jet of steam and water shot out across the surface of the moonlet. Ice crystals formed in space and slowly settled to the rocket surface. The jet reached far away from them, well off the moonlet itself. The tank pulled against its tether lines, stretching the rope. Kevin shouted. 'Damn it, we're going to make it!' He shut off the electricity.

'Let's get her finished.' It didn't look like a spaceship. It didn't even resemble a scooter, crude as those were. It looked like a hot-water tank with fuel cells bolted onto it. For controls it had vanes set crosswise in the exhaust stream, spring-loaded to center, with two tillers, one for each vane; a valve to control steam flow; and switches to connect the fuel cells to the heaters. Nothing else.

The tank itself was fuzzy: They'd sprayed it with Styrofoam, building it up in layers until they had nearly a foot of insulation. There were straps on opposite sides of the tank to hold two passengers on. The tank held nearly a hundred gallons of water. Kevin calculated that they had more than enough energy to boil it all in their two fuel cells, and they would only need sixty gallons to get to Ceres. The number was so small that he ran it four times, but it was correct. The strangest part was the stability system: a pair of wheels taken from a mining cart and set up in front of the water tank.

Electric motors rotated the wheels in opposite directions. The total mass of Galahad with full water tank was just under 550 kilograms. It took only a gentle effort to push the steam rocket away from the moonlet, but the cartwheel-gyros resisted any effort to turn it. Finally they got it oriented properly in space. Then they climbed aboard.

'Full head of steam,' Kevin said. 'Almost fifty pounds. 'Ready—' He twisted the steam valve. At first both steam and water were expelled from the tank, but as they began to accelerate, the water settled and the exhaust valve let out only steam. C-2 dropped away. They missed it. It was a prison, but a safe one; now they had only their makeshift steam rocket.

Galahad showed a tendency to tumble, but with the gyros resisting, they were able to control it with the steering vanes. A plume of steam shot from the tank, rapidly crystallizing into ice fog that engulfed them. That's going to make it hard to see,' Kevin said. 'Nothing we can do about it.'

He peered down toward Ceres. It didn't seem any closer. Jacob's farewell faded in their headsets.

Norsedal's calculations had shown that twenty minutes' thrust should be enough to cancel all their orbital velocity. It would use up just about half their fuel. Once Galahad was stopped dead in orbit above Ceres, they would fall toward the asteroid, and they would have half their steam left to counteract that. The trouble was that Jacob couldn't calculate how high above Ceres they would be when the twenty minutes were finished.

As they lost velocity, they would lose altitude, and their orbit would no longer be a smooth circle, but an ellipse intersecting Ceres—somewhere. At the end of twenty minutes Kevin cut the power off. He was pleased that they still had thirty pounds of steam pressure. 'Yes, but that's what the numbers say.'

And a year ago I was working equations in school, Kevin thought. Numbers to crunch and write down for examinations.

Now they're something to stake your life on. The long-distance shuttle, the Rather Not, had its permanent mooring in the hollow center of the Orb. A four-legged strutwork held it in place against the gentle centrifugal tug, so it remained fixed over a repair berth. Mara clipped onto a mooring line that ran out to the Rather Not and adroitly pushed off from the Orb’s inner wall.

Tsubata watched her movement with a critical eye. After a moment of coasting she flexed and turned so that her feet pointed toward the shuttle. She squirted her jets and slowed perceptibly. As an extra fillip, she unclipped from the mooring lines a few meters away and landed catlike on the tail section. “Good enough. Don‘t move till I get there,” Tsubata said over suit radio. “Okay.” Mara watched him swim easily across the twenty meters between them.

He probably wanted her to mess up the maneuver; it would be easy to document if he had a friend watching on 3-D and would make a good first entry in a file. She knew enough about organizations to guess that, if Tsubata wanted to get rid of her, he would have to build a thick folder of instances to prove incompetence.

As Tsubata moved toward her, Mara glanced around and attached her suit tie-line to the nearest pipe. Most shuttles she had seen were different, each thrown together from cannibalized spare parts that came to hand. The Rather Not had a few customized pieces and the magnetic shielding coils were considerably larger, but otherwise it was like the others—all bones and no skin. The pilot couch was located at dead center of gravity in the middle, surrounded by struts, tanks, pipes, hauling collars, and storage lockets, all placed to obscure as littie of the view as possible. A large ion engine was mounted behind the couch in gray housing. It was lumpy but balanced; it wouldn't go into spinover if a pilot made a wrong move. As Tsubata touched down she glided away from him, perching on top of the pilot couch backrest.

“I told you not to move.” Tsubata came after her. “You’re going to have to give me more latitude than that. I know you’re not exactly tingling with anticipation to see me out here, but that’s the way it’s got to be.” Tsubata said nothing, waving a hand to dismiss the subject.

“First, I’m going to make sure you know what every piece of equipment on this shuttle is for.” Mara had expected to know most of it, but there was a bewildering maze of detail. There were systems for fuel feed, a pipe complex regulating attitude jets, three different super-conducting magnet configurations for screening against Van Allen belt particles, two overlapping electrical systems, navigation index, vector integrater, multiple communications rigs, an emergency high-gain antenna for work when the Orb and shuttle were not in line of sight, gyros, radio, hauling apparatus, repair parts, life support—all this had to be integrated so that a change in one system didn’t cause a malfunction in another. In the next three hours Mara gained considerable respect for Tsubata and his work. He made it clear to her that a shuttle could not be run by the book; like most human creations, it demanded intuition, craft, and a certain seat-of-the-pants shrewdness. It wasn’t until two days later that Tsubata considered her competent enough to take the Rather Not out on a routine flight. (ed note: Aeneas MacKenzie is being boosted into orbit by.) Ten gravities for ninety seconds is easily within the tolerance of a healthy man; but Aeneas had no wish to prolong the experience. He was laid flat on his back in a nylon web, encased in baggy reflective coverall and under that a tight garment resembling a diver's wet suit (a ).

The neckseal and helmet were uncomfortable, and it was an effort to exhale against the higher pressures in the helmet. He had thought waiting for the launch the most unpleasant experience he'd ever had: lying awkwardly on his back, with no control of his destiny, enclosed in steel; then the laser cut in.

He weighed far too much. His guts ached.

Like the worst case of indigestion imaginable, he thought. There was no way to estimate the time. He tried counting, but it was too difficult, and he lost count somewhere.

Surely he had been at eighty seconds? He started over again. There was noise, the loud, almost musical two-hundred-fifty-cycle tone of the explosions produced as the laser heated the air in the chamber under him—how close? That great stabbing beam that could slice through metal aimed directly at him; he squirmed against the high gravity, and the effort was torture.

The noises changed. The explosion tone drifted down the scale.

He was beyond the atmosphere, and the laser was boiling off material from the thrust chamber, reaching closer and closer to him— Silence. The crushing weight was gone. He was falling endlessly, with no way to know. Was he in orbit? Or was he plunging downward to his doom?

He closed his eyes to wait, and then he felt he was truly falling, with the sick sensations of a boat in motion—he opened his eyes again to orient himself in the capsule. Will they pick me up?

There was no reason they shouldn't. New crewmen arrived weekly, and he was merely another. He listened for a voice, a signal, anything— 'Hullo, laddie. All right in there?' Aeneas grabbed for the microphone and pressed the talk switch.

'That was one hell of a ride.' He fought for control of his voice. 'I think I'm all right now.' 'Except that you feel like letting the world's record fart, right?'

The voice said. You'll feel better.' (one of the drawbacks of a skintight space suit) He tried it.

'Hang on there, mate. Be alongside in a minute,' the voice said. It took less than that. There were clunks and thuds, and the capsule jarred with some impact. You're new in this game, they tell me.' 'Yes, very,' Aeneas replied.

So we'll start by testing your suit. I've got a bottle attached to the outlet, crack the atmosphere evac valve a half turn, there's a good chap.' A short moment of panic. The capsule held half an atmosphere. When the capsule was evacuated, only his helmet above the neckseal would contain pressure. The tight garment he wore was supposed to reinforce his own skin so that it would be able to hold the pressure differences, and it had worked in the ground training chamber; but there had been physicians waiting there. Aeneas did as he was told.

As the air hissed out, the pressure in his guts returned, but worse. 'Fart again, lad.

How's the breathing?' He carried out the instruction.

Again it helped. It was hard work to breathe out, but there didn't seem to be any problems. Open the valve the rest of the way and let's get you out of there.' Pumps whirred, and he felt more sensations of internal pressure. The wetsuit was very tight around every part of his body. His heart pounded loudly, and he felt dizzy. 'Now unstrap and open the hatch.'

The steel trap around him seemed comfortable and safe compared to what he might find outside. Aeneas gingerly unfastened the straps that held him to the D-frame-webbed bunk and immediately floated free.

It took longer than he had thought it would to orient himself and get his feet braced so that he could turn the latches on the hatchway, but Aeneas was surprised to find that he had no trouble thinking of what had been the capsule 'wall' as now 'down' and the hatchway as 'up.' The falling sensation vanished as soon as there was something to do. The man outside hadn't mentioned the tether line on its reel on his belt, but the ground briefing had stressed that before the hatch was open he should clip the tether to the ring by the hatchway. That took fumbling, but he managed it. The hatch opened smoothly and he put his head outside. There was brilliant sunshine everywhere, and he was thankful for the sun visor and tinted faceplate of his helmet.

Crisp shadows, Earth an enormous bulging circular mass of white clouds and blue sea, not below but just there; stars brilliant when he looked away from Earth and sun... he had seen the pictures a thousand times. It wasn't the same at all. He used his hands to rotate himself.

There was an odd vehicle about seven meters long at the aft end of the capsule. Its nose was shoved into the capsule thrust chamber, and it reminded Aeneas of dogs (maybe 'dog-sled?' An open framework of thin aluminum bars with—saddles? A mirrored helmet atop bulky metallic shining coveralls perched on the nearest saddle. Aeneas couldn't see a face inside it. 'One of the ones who listen, eh?' The voice said.

Now you see that line above you?' Aeneas looked up and saw an ordinary nylon rope. It seemed to be a solid rod. 'Get hold of it and clip it on your belt.

After that, reach inside and unclip your own line. And don't be slow about it.' There was a pleasant note to the voice, but it expected to be obeyed. Aeneas complied quickly. He was reeled very slowly toward the spindly personnel carrier, and with a lot of difficulty and help from the pilot managed to get astride one of the saddles.

His feet slipped easily under loops in the thing's 'floor'—Aeneas supplied the quotation marks because there was only a minuscule grillwork there—and a safety harness went around his waist. Now that he was in the carrier, he could look around, and he did unashamedly. The launch crew had cut it pretty fine, Aeneas told himself. Heimdall floated less than a kilometer away. It looked like a junkyard. Two large curved cylindrical sausages on the ends of cables rotated around each other at a distance of nearly half a kilometer. The sausages had projections at crazy angles: solar cell arrays, shields, heat dissipation projectors connected to the station by piping, antennae.

There was an inflated tube running from each cylinder to an amorphous blob between them, and part of the center structure rotated with the cylinders. Most of the center did not rotate. Other junk—the pregnant machinegun shapes of supply capsules, cylinders of all sizes, inflated structures of no recognizable shape—floated without apparent attachment near the axis of spin. Solar panels and orange sunshades lay everywhere. Heimdall had no real form.

'Quite a sight, isn't it?' His companion said. 'Name's Kit Penrose, old chap. Officer in charge of everything else. Weight control, atmosphere recycling, support systems, all the marvy things like that. Also the taxi driver. 'Oh, Christ, a bloody Scot.

You don't sound one. Aeneas shrugged, realized the gesture couldn't be seen, and said, 'Like you. Little of everything, I suppose. And I'm American.' 'American, eh? Whoever or whatever you are, the ground crew seemed worried about you.

Well, you're OK. He did something to the panel in front of him and the spindly structure moved slowly toward the satellite. His capsule was still attached at the nose. 'We'll just take this along, eh?'

Penrose said. 'Yes, my kit's in there.' And I may need everything in it, Aeneas thought. It took a long time to cover the short distance to the station.

Kittridge Penrose burned as little mass as possible. 'Energy's cheap up here,' he told Aeneas. He waved carelessly at the solar panels deployed everywhere and at mirrors fifty meters across that floated near the station. The mirrors were aluminized Mylar or something like it, very thin, supported by thin fiberglass wands to give them shape. 'Plenty of energy.

Not enough mass, though.' • Note the fish trap over the entrance. Click for larger image •. As they neared Heimdall, it looked even more like a floating junkyard. There was a large cage of wire netting floating a hundred meters from the hub, and it held everything: discarded cargo and personnel capsules, air tanks, crates, and cylinders of every kind. It had no door except an inward pointing cone—an enormous fish trap, Aeneas thought. They headed for that, and when they reached it and killed their approach velocity, Penrose unfastened himself from the saddle and dove into Aeneas' capsule.

He emerged with two sealed cylindrical fiberglass containers of gear Aeneas had brought up and clipped them to the wire net of the cage. He did the same with the spindle vehicle they'd crossed on, then did something that released the personnel capsule from its faintly obscene position on the taxi's nose. Penrose gripped the cage with one hand and strained to shove the discarded capsule with the other. Nothing seemed to happen.

Then the capsule moved, very slowly, down the tube into the cage; the motion was only barely apparent, but Penrose turned away. 'Takes care of that.

We'll have a crew come take it apart later. I'll carry your luggage.' He reached down and pulled the safety line out of the reel on Aeneas' belt and clipped it to his own. 'Now you're tethered to me, but if you drift off and I have to pull you in, I'll charge extra for the ride.

Follow me, and the trick is, don't move fast. Keep it slow and easy.' They pulled themselves across the wire cage. It looked like ordinary chicken wire to Aeneas, a more or less sphere of it a hundred meters in diameter. There were other blobs of wire cage floating around the station.

When they got to the side of the cage facing Heimdall, Aeneas saw a thin line running from the cage to the nonrotating hub between the cylinders. Up close the rotating cylinders on their cables and inflated tunnel looked much larger than before; twenty meters in diameter, and made of segments, each segment at least twenty meters long. They pulled themselves gingerly along the tether line to an opening ahead. There was no air in the part of the hub they entered. Penrose explained that the interface between rotating and nonrotating parts was kept in vacuum. Once inside, Aeneas felt a gentle tug as the long tube, leading to the capsules at the end of the tether line pushed against him until he was rotating with it.

Before Aeneas could ask, Penrose pointed up the tube away from the direction they were going. 'Counterweights up there,' he said. 'We run them up and down to conserve angular momentum.

Don't have to spend mass to adjust rotation every time somebody leaves or comes aboard. Course we have to use mass to stop ourselves rotating when we leave, but I've got an idea for a way to fix that too.' As they descended, Aeneas felt more weight; it increased steadily. They passed into the first of a series of multiple airlocks. Then another, and another. 'Hell of a lot easier than pumping all this up every time,' Penrose said. 'Feel pressure now?'

It's easier to exhale.' 'You could breathe here.

They passed through another set of airlocks and felt increasing weight; after that it was necessary to climb down a ladder. The walls of the silo they were descending were about three meters in diameter. They stood out stiffly from the pressure and seemed to be made of the same rubberized cloth as his pressure suit, but not porous or permeable as his suit was.

Eventually they reached a final airlock, and below that the silo had metallic walls instead of the inflated nylon. The final airlock opened onto a circular staircase and they climbed down that into the cylindrical structure of the station itself. This is an emergency lunar escape vehicle concept, in case an Apollo Lunar Module crashed upon landing. It was designed to be assembled from various parts canibalized from the wreck.

Note that in the two-man version, the pilot gets an acceleration chair, but the poor second astronaut is slung under the chair by straps. You can read more about this, and. • Artwork by click for larger image • Artwork by click for larger image • Artwork by click for larger image • Artwork by click for larger image • Artwork by click for larger image. A space pod is a small pressurized vehicle with one or more waldoes or mechanical arms.

They are often used for space construction and maintenance. In the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey, they were referred to as 'EVA pods.' In Wernher von Braun and Disney's Man In Space series, they were called 'bottle suits.' They are also known as 'closed-cabin cherry picker', 'manned autonomous work system', and the ever popular 'man-in-a-can.' One of their main advantages over a soft space suit is that they solve the.

• EVA Pod Manned Autonomous Work System Artwork by for his Orion's Arm future click for larger image • EVA Pod Manned Autonomous Work System Artwork by for his Orion's Arm future click for larger image • EVA Pod Manned Autonomous Work System Artwork by for his Orion's Arm future click for larger image • EVA Pod Manned Autonomous Work System Artwork by for his Orion's Arm future click for larger image • EVA Pod from movie 2001 A Space Odyssey. Note how the maniuplators are fractal.

Jameson turned back toward the repair rig. The two lobsters, bright orange against blackness, were maneuvering themselves into position, getting a helpful nudge or two from the men swarming around them. A repair lobster was nothing more than a simple cylinder with a plastic bubble for the head of its operator at one end. It got its name from the two big claw-like waldos at the forward end and the twin rows of smaller specialized limbs down its ventral surface.

One of the lobsters anchored itself on the Callisto lander’s hull and grasped the embedded landing foot. It tugged gently, trying t.

Results A total of 1113 King County residents undergoing mechanical ventilation met the criteria for acute lung injury and were 15 years of age or older. On the basis of this figure, the crude incidence of acute lung injury was 78.9 per 100,000 person-years and the age-adjusted incidence was 86.2 per 100,000 person-years. The in-hospital mortality rate was 38.5 percent. The incidence of acute lung injury increased with age from 16 per 100,000 person-years for those 15 through 19 years of age to 306 per 100,000 person-years for those 75 through 84 years of age. Mortality increased with age from 24 percent for patients 15 through 19 years of age to 60 percent for patients 85 years of age or older (P. Acute lung injury is a syndrome consisting of acute hypoxemic respiratory failure with bilateral pulmonary infiltrates that is associated with both pulmonary and nonpulmonary risk factors and that is not primarily due to left atrial hypertension. Despite recent advances in our understanding of the pathophysiology, treatment, and long-term outcome of acute lung injury, prospective, population-based data on the incidence and outcome of acute lung injury in the United States have not been available.

There has, however, been a prospective, population-based study of patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), a subtype of acute lung injury characterized by more severe hypoxemia. That study, which estimated the incidence of ARDS as 8.3 per 100,000 person-years, was performed in 6 of the 40 hospitals in Utah in 1989, before the availability of current definitions of acute lung injury. On the basis of these and other data suggesting an incidence of acute lung injury and ARDS of 1.5 to 8.3 per 100,000 person-years, these syndromes are considered rare. However, the studies on which these estimates are based were limited by several factors, including extrapolation from less than a complete year of observation or from a subgroup of the hospitals in a region, use of inaccurate administrative coding, an absence of procedures to ensure reliable case identification, use of obsolete definitions, and use of observations from countries where differences in the availability and utilization of intensive care services may limit the applicability of the data to the United States. The King County Lung Injury Project (KCLIP) was designed to address some of the limitations of previous studies and to answer questions about the incidence and outcomes of acute lung injury and ARDS. Study Design and Setting We conducted a prospective cohort study to determine the incidence and outcome of acute lung injury.

The study was conducted in 21 hospitals, which included all 18 hospitals in King County, Washington, that care for patients undergoing mechanical ventilation, as well as three hospitals in adjacent counties that also care for this group of patients. King County is the 12th most populous county in the United States, covering 5700 km 2 (2200 mi 2) and encompassing the urban areas around Seattle and the surrounding rural areas. Because it is bounded on the west by water and on the east by mountains, it is unlikely that residents would seek health care outside the county. In comparison with the total U.S. Population, the 1.74 million persons living in King County in 2000 were wealthier (with a median annual family income of $53,000, as compared with $42,000 for the United States), were younger (with 10.5 percent 65 years of age or older, as compared with 12.4 percent for the United States), and had a different racial distribution (with 5.4 percent black and 10.8 percent Asian, as compared with 12.3 percent and 3.6 percent, respectively, for the United States).

In 2000, the cause-specific mortality rates in King County for diseases related to acute lung injury (pneumonia, trauma, and septicemia) were comparable to or lower than those for the United States as a whole. According to the Washington State Comprehensive Hospital Abstract Reporting System (CHARS) database, 96.4 percent of King County residents who underwent mechanical ventilation in Washington State in 2000 received their care at one of the 21 KCLIP study hospitals.

Four of these hospitals are primary teaching affiliates, where all critically ill patients receive care from resident physicians; these are classified as academic hospitals in the analysis. Data were obtained from each hospital for 12 consecutive months during the period from April 1999 through July 2000. Identification of Cases Using data routinely obtained during clinical care of the patients, we identified patients with acute lung injury according to the definition of the American–European Consensus Conference on ARDS.

The criteria are the presence of acute hypoxemia with a ratio of the partial pressure of arterial oxygen to the fraction of inspired oxygen (PaO 2:FiO 2) of 300 mm Hg or less (for acute lung injury) or of 200 mm Hg or less (for ARDS); bilateral infiltrates (including very mild infiltrates) seen on a frontal chest radiograph that are consistent with pulmonary edema; and no clinical evidence of left atrial hypertension or (if it is measured) a pulmonary-artery wedge pressure of 18 mm Hg or less. If a patient had more than one episode that met the criteria, only the data from the first episode were included in the study. All patients who were undergoing mechanical ventilation in an intensive care unit (ICU) through either an endotracheal tube or a face mask were screened for enrollment. To ensure that patients were not missed, we examined data from at least two sources at each hospital, including logs of patients undergoing mechanical ventilation, billing records, and other hospital databases. Patient records were cross-checked among hospitals to ensure that transferred patients were counted only once in the study. Patients were excluded from the study if they were not residents of King County (as determined by the ZIP Code of their primary residence), if they were less than six months of age (to exclude patients with neonatal respiratory distress syndrome), or if they had undergone mechanical ventilation for less than 24 hours after an operative procedure. Only arterial blood gas measurements obtained while the patient was intubated were assessed.

The arterial blood gas values with the worst PaO 2:FiO 2 ratio, regardless of the positive end-expiratory pressure, were used to assess oxygenation for each 24-hour period, and the values obtained on the first day on which the PaO 2:FiO 2 ratio was 300 mm Hg or less and other criteria were met were used to classify patients as having either acute lung injury or ARDS. Because the PaO 2:FiO 2 ratio becomes an increasingly unreliable assessment of shunt when the FiO 2 is below 0.40, the ratio was used to assess oxygenation only when the FiO 2 was 0.40 or more.

The study used a standardized protocol to identify patients who met the enrollment criteria for acute lung injury. We used respiratory therapists and research nurses who had been trained in the reliable identification of chest radiographs that met the study criteria for acute lung injury and to collect data on clinical risk factors for acute lung injury. Comment Installer Emulateur 3ds Download. Trained medical-record abstractors collected other data from the medical records.

Because our chest-radiography protocol was not designed to distinguish between chronic and acute abnormalities, radiographs showing bilateral parenchymal opacities in patients with a diagnosis of chronic pulmonary disease, such as asbestosis, pulmonary fibrosis, lymphangitic carcinoma, and bronchiectasis, were set aside for separate analysis. To exclude pediatric patients, the analysis included only patients who were at least 15 years old. We chose this age cutoff on the basis of U.S. Census tables, which classify adolescents and young adults into age categories of 10 through 14, 15 through 19, and 20 through 24 years. Patients were assessed for the presence of any risk factors for acute lung injury during the four days before the onset of acute lung injury. These risk factors included severe sepsis, which was divided into sepsis with a suspected pulmonary source (pneumonia) and sepsis with a suspected nonpulmonary source or an unidentified source; severe trauma (with an Injury Severity Score above 15 [possible scores range from 0 to 75, with higher scores indicating more severe injury]); witnessed aspiration, transfusion of more than 15 units of blood within a 24-hour period, drug overdose, pancreatitis, near-drowning, and inhalation injury. For this analysis, no attempt was made to assign a primary risk factor, and therefore the risk-factor categories are not mutually exclusive.

Patients with diagnoses of acute myocardial infarction or congestive heart failure on admission to the ICU and with no identifiable risk factors for acute lung injury were considered to have clinical evidence of left atrial hypertension, as were patients with a pulmonary-artery wedge pressure greater than 18 mm Hg on all days on which other criteria for acute lung injury were met ( Figure 1 The Study Cohort in the King County Lung Injury Project. PaO 2 denotes the partial pressure of arterial oxygen, FiO 2 the fraction of inspired oxygen, and PAWP the pulmonary-artery wedge pressure.

Validation of Screening Protocol Over a two-month period (from May 1 through June 30, 1999), we compared the results obtained by screening with the use of our protocol with the results obtained by clinical screening of 382 patients undergoing mechanical ventilation at Harborview Medical Center. Each group of screeners was blinded to the results obtained by the other group. After adjudication of discordant cases by two clinicians (an intensivist and a chest radiologist), who were also blinded to the results of case assignment by the two groups of screeners, our screening protocol had a kappa value of 0.91 and an agreement of 96 percent with the adjudicated diagnosis of acute lung injury. Quality Control Extensive efforts were made to ensure the quality of the data collected throughout the study. At each site, the data from a randomly chosen 5 percent of screened patients and from all patients about whom the screeners had questions were reviewed by the study physicians, including review of the chart and chest radiographs.

Data from a random sample of 7 percent of cases were abstracted and entered into the database twice, with an error rate of less than 0.25 percent. The charts were reevaluated until the final notes, laboratory test results, and other results were complete. Complete data were available for 98.3 percent of the patients. Statistical Analysis The results are presented as percentages for categorical variables and as medians with interquartile ranges or as means with standard deviations for continuous variables. Depending on the distribution of the data, the Pearson chi-square test, the Mann–Whitney test, or Student's t-test was used to compare groups.

Rates per 100,000 person-years were age-adjusted to the U.S. Population in 2000. Statistical analyses were performed with SAS software (version 9). The study was approved by the University of Washington institutional review board and, when required, by the institutional review boards at the individual sites.

Results During the study period, 6235 residents of King County underwent mechanical ventilation at the study hospitals, and 4251 were screened for the study. Of these, 1687 eligible patients (40 percent of the screened patients) met the criteria for acute hypoxemic respiratory failure and had a qualifying chest radiograph. Five hundred seventy-four of these 1687 patients (34 percent) had left atrial hypertension according to the clinical diagnosis or (when available) data from echocardiography or measurement of pulmonary-artery wedge pressure. The remaining 1113 patients met the criteria for acute lung injury, with an initial PaO 2:FiO 2 of 300 mm Hg or less ( ). Eight hundred twenty-eight of these (74 percent) had an initial PaO 2:FiO 2 of 200 mm Hg or less, meeting the criteria for ARDS, and 61 patients (21 percent of the 285 patients with a PaO 2:FiO 2 greater than 200 mm Hg and equal to or less than 300 mm Hg) progressed on either day 3 or day 7 of acute lung injury to a PaO 2:FiO 2 of 200 mm Hg or less. According to these data, the incidence of acute lung injury in King County was 78.9 cases per 100,000 person-years, and the incidence of ARDS was 58.7 cases per 100,000 person-years.

The in-hospital mortality rate was 38.5 percent (95 percent confidence interval, 34.9 to 42.2 percent) for patients with acute lung injury and 41.1 percent (95 percent confidence interval, 36.7 to 45.4 percent) for those with ARDS. Patients who presented with a PaO 2:FiO 2 greater than 200 mm Hg and equal to or less than 300 mm Hg and who progressed on day 3 or day 7 to a PaO 2:FiO 2 of 200 mm Hg or less had a mortality rate of 41.0 percent, similar to that of patients who presented with ARDS (P=0.5). Patients who presented with a PaO 2:FiO 2 greater than 200 and equal to or less than 300, and who did not progress on day 3 or day 7 to a PaO 2:FiO 2 of 200 or less, had a lower mortality rate (28.6 percent) than did patients with ARDS (P=0.001).

The most common risk factor for acute lung injury was severe sepsis with a suspected pulmonary source (46 percent), followed by severe sepsis with a suspected nonpulmonary source (33 percent). In this cohort, mortality varied according to the risk factor from 24.1 percent (95 percent confidence interval, 13.2 to 34.9 percent) among patients with severe trauma, to 40.6 percent (95 percent confidence interval, 35.1 to 46.1 percent) among patients with severe sepsis with a suspected pulmonary source, to 43.6 percent (95 percent confidence interval, 31.9 to 55.2 percent) among patients with witnessed aspiration. Extrapolating the age-adjusted incidence and mortality to the United States population leads to an estimate of 190,600 cases of acute lung injury per year, with an associated 74,500 deaths and 2.2 million days in ICUs ( Table 1 Incidence of Acute Lung Injury and ARDS and Mortality from These Conditions. The incidence and mortality increased with age ( Figure 2 Age- and Risk-Specific Incidence of and Age-Specific Mortality from Acute Lung Injury. Risk-factor categories are not mutually exclusive; P. Discussion Our data suggest that the incidence of acute lung injury in the United States is between 2.5 and 5 times as high, and the incidence of ARDS is between 2 and 40 times as high, as previous studies have indicated.

According to these findings, 74,500 persons die of acute lung injury in the United States each year, a figure that is comparable to the number of adult deaths attributed to breast cancer or human immunodeficiency virus disease in 1999. It is equally important to note that more than 100,000 patients survive acute lung injury each year, many of whom require care for cognitive abnormalities, weakness, depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder. In our study, only 34 percent of the survivors were well enough to be discharged directly home, a figure that probably reflects the fiscal pressures to shorten hospital stays and the degree of impairment after acute lung injury. Because the risk of acute lung injury and the mortality attributed to it increase with age, our results have important implications for the planning of services for critical care, mechanical ventilation, and rehabilitation in the future. On the basis of the age-specific incidence and mortality rates that we observed and projections of the future demographic characteristics of the U.S.

Population, we estimate that in 25 years the annual incidence of acute lung injury will be 335,000 cases, with 147,000 deaths per year. Several lines of reasoning support these results and suggest that the incidence of acute lung injury in the United States has been substantially underestimated in the past. By combining recent data on the incidence of severe sepsis and severe trauma (defined by Injury Severity Scores above 15) with data on the incidence of ARDS among patients with these conditions, the incidence of ARDS in the United States can be calculated as 56 to 82 cases per 100,000 person-years.

Another estimate, extrapolated from screening data from the ARDS Network clinical trial, was based on the conservative assumption that cases of acute lung injury are observed only in large ICUs with more than 20 beds; according to this estimate, the incidence of acute lung injury was 64.2 cases per 100,000 person-years. Finally, it is of historical interest that an expert consensus in 1972 estimated that there were 150,000 cases of ARDS per year in the United States, which is similar to the estimates we project. There are a number of important limitations to this study. First, the study was conducted in a single region in which the epidemiology of acute lung injury may differ from that elsewhere in the United States. However, regional studies, most notably those from Olmsted County in Minnesota and Framingham, Massachusetts, have provided invaluable epidemiologic data for many diseases. Children less than 15 years of age were excluded from this analysis, and therefore we cannot comment on the burden of pediatric acute lung injury.

The demographic features of King County are not identical to those of the United States as a whole. Although we present an age-adjusted analysis, the numbers of patients of certain races (for example, black patients) were too small to allow us to present reliable race-adjusted figures. The limited data that are available suggest that the younger age, higher socioeconomic status, and unrepresentative racial distribution of King County residents should bias our study toward underestimation of the true incidence of, and mortality from, acute lung injury in the United States. Some of the differences between the academic and community sites may be explained by local differences in care procedures; for example, nearly all patients in the region with severe trauma are sent to an academic trauma center.

Finally, patients may have been misclassified because of deficiencies in our protocol, missing documentation, or a lack of available clinical tests. We tried to minimize the risk of misclassification by validating the protocol against the results of clinical-trial screening conducted at an institution with experience in the investigation of acute lung injury and by supplementing screening with extensive quality control, which included central review of cases and chest radiographs. Our approach reflects current practice for enrolling patients in clinical trials of acute lung injury; this practice does not require a specific diagnostic protocol to exclude clinical evidence of left atrial hypertension or to establish the presence of risk factors for acute lung injury.

Recent studies suggest that elevated left atrial pressure and acute lung injury frequently coexist, and therefore some misclassification may be unavoidable until better biomarkers of acute lung injury are developed. Finally, with the notable exception of the incidence of acute lung injury, the cohort we studied is similar to other population-based cohorts in studies of acute lung injury with regard to a number of factors, a finding that supports the external validity of our case-identification protocol ( Table 3 Comparison of KCLIP Cohort with Other Population-Based Cohorts in Studies of Acute Lung Injury. On the basis of our results, acute lung injury and ARDS occur with a higher incidence than previously reported and therefore have a substantial impact on public health in the United States. Data from population-based epidemiologic studies of critical illnesses are essential for understanding the mechanism, trends, and burden of these diseases. Supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (SCORHL30542), by the Firland Foundation, and by an unrestricted educational grant from Advanced Lifeline Services. We are indebted to the physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists, medical-records personnel, and administrative staff of the King County Lung Injury Project hospitals, without whose hard work this project would not have been possible: Auburn Regional Medical Center, Children's Hospital and Medical Center, Enumclaw Community Memorial Hospital, Evergreen Hospital Medical Center, Group Health Cooperative/Eastside, Harborview Medical Center, Highline Community Hospital, Mary Bridge Children's Hospital, Northwest Hospital, Overlake Hospital Medical Center, Swedish Medical Center–Providence, St.

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