Defiant (an Ell Donsaii story #9) by Laurence Dahners Read Free Book Online Page B

metals from one another here on earth where we have gravity to help with gradient separation. We just contract it out. Then we port some of the iron, as steel, back up to our orbital factory at the habitat. Out there we’re rolling steel plates to build stuff out of. We’re also experimenting with foamed metals in our space manufacturing.”
    “Foamed metals?”
    Braun grinned, “We blow air bubbles into molten metal to make light but strong honeycombed material. Here on earth the bubbles tend to rise to the upper side but that isn’t a problem in the weightless conditions out at the habitat.”
    “Any problems with these new methods?”
    “Breaking or cutting reasonably sized pieces off the asteroid is the biggest one. It takes a pretty skilled operator running the waldo that points the beam. But also, the fragments can jam up at various stages. Right now we have to send in a waldo to unjam them. Since the centrifugal forces on them are very low they aren’t hard to unjam, but we’re hoping to figure out a way around those man hours. This AJ guy is pretty damn smart. Or maybe ‘smart’ isn’t the best word for it; he just has a knack for seeing simple solutions to complex problems. Anyway, I’m confident he’ll have a solution pretty soon. Earth crushers have a kind of funnel with walls that squeeze inward every so often to smash the fragments. That’d work with rocky asteroids, but not so well with this metallic asteroid material which deforms instead of breaking.”
    Vivian frowned, “Why not just melt it completely and let the molten metal pour through a port?”
    “We tried that on a small scale. It’s pretty hard to keep the molten metal from splattering on the port and ruining it. If you protect the port with ceramic it reduces the size of the port. Even if you use a big port, out there in deep space enough of the heat radiates off a narrow stream of molten metal that it hardens and we kept getting clogs. We’re doing better using the beam to melt chunks loose. They’re hot in places on their surface when they come loose, but they cool as they slowly fall toward the port. Cutting them up into little chunks with hollow ports works amazingly well.”
    Brian said, “Maybe you could put a helical stirring device in the cone to loosen the jams?”
    “I’m pretty sure that’s one of the ideas AJ’s working on.”
    Ell looked around the table, “I know you guys are in the red on the asteroid operations, but it sounds like you should be on your way into the black pretty soon?”
    Rob grinned, “Yeah, early results with the new method suggest we’ll be processing hundreds of tons a day pretty soon. And, the overall ET Resource division is in the black already. Rent on microgravity space in the habitat is pretty lucrative. Someone also had this crazy idea that we could harvest natural gas out of the methane lakes on Titan. The price of natural gas isn’t all that high since more and more power generation is coming from the heat differential out in space, but our costs for harvest and delivery are really low. At the very least it’s been lowering our own rocket launching costs when we use our own hydrocarbons.” He shrugged, “Even with prices low we’re making some money selling them too… and you know it also feels really great providing the world with hydrocarbons for manufacturing. Hydrocarbons that don’t come from our own environment.”
    Ell lifted an eyebrow, “And, how are you guys doing financially on the aforesaid space heating, cooling and electrical generation division?”
    “Oh yeah, we’re way in the black there too. We can’t build hookups fast enough to meet demand for new connections. The D5R investors that gave us our startup are going to be very, very happy.”
    Ell grinned, “That makes it easier for me to meet with them. Can you send me a financial summary?”
    Rob nodded and Ell turned to the Portal Tech group, “How are things going with you guys?”
    Fred spoke for