Tank Farm Dynamo

2

In the beginning there was the space shuttle. Never mind what came earlier. Before version two of the shuttle, space was a place for robots and daredevils.

With tight budgets and all, the Space Transportation System has stayed fundamentally the same. A big, complex manned orbiter is launched from Canaveral or Vandenberg, strapped to two solid rocket boosters and one huge fuel tank carrying 770 tons of cryogenic propellants for the shuttle main engines. The engines are part of the orbiter, so they can be brought home and reused. The solid boosters drop off minutes after liftoff and are recovered for refurbishment. Even the unmanned heavy-lift cargo launchers use the same basic system.

But until our group came along, the huge external tanks were simply dumped, after fueling the shuttle to almost orbital velocity.

Once upon a time people thought we were on the verge of colonizing space. But then tight budgets and disasters cut the size of the STS fleet, and the cost of a pound sent into orbit remained in four figures. Visions of big O’Neill colonies and grand cities on the moon foundered without the bootstrap mass needed to build the dreams.

The lock passed me through. I stowed my hardsuit in a restorer locker whose nameplate simply read “Bossman.” While I racked my equipment, I recalled all the times I had explained the Tank Farm to audiences on Earth: to congressmen, housewives, investors—to anyone who would listen.

Back in the early eighties it was shown that the thirty-five-ton external tank can be carried all the way into orbit at zero cost to the orbiter’s thirty-ton cargo capacity. Thirty-five tons of aluminum and polymers, already shaped into vacuum-tight cylinders, delivered free!

And that wasn’t all. On arrival the tanks would contain another five to thirty-five tons of leftover liquid hydrogen and oxygen, usable in upper stage engines, or to run fuel cells, or to be converted to precious water.

At a time when the grand hopes for space seemed about to fall apart, the ET was like manna from Earth to Heaven. When the government didn’t seem eager to seize the opportunity—when they built their cramped, delicate, little “space stations” from expensive modules in the old-fashioned way—the Colombo-Carroll Foundation, a consortium of U.S. and Italian interests, offered to buy the tanks.

We would save them, until the world wised up, then sell them back. Meanwhile, the Tank Farm would provide orbit boosts via the tether-sling effect, saving customers fuel and time and paying our way until other investments matured.

For ten years the Farm had been on course, but it seems we’d omitted a few lines of fine print in our contract. The Feds had to let us buy the tanks at a fixed price, but nothing in the contract said they had to give us the residual hydrogen and oxygen, too.

It never occurred to us they’d not want to give us all the water we needed! Who in the world would have thought they’d ever want to take the Tank Farm away from us?