Whole Different Approach

From: xenophile2002 [mailto:xenophile2002@...]

> Mike Combs did a story that involved, amungst other things, using a
> tank of water and mirrors to puff it up like a glass blower (OK,
> there was more to it than that, but you get the idea). Mike, could
> I post the text from _Miranda & the Space Pirates_ that covers
> this? Or maybe you'd post it yourself? You do a better job
> describing the process than I do ("puff it up like a glass blower"?!
> ug).

Here it is, although I'd like to emphasize that at this point I'm not at all
convinced such a method would actually work. It's an idea that's been
around since the 1960's. But I saw one conversation on one of the space
newsgroups where somebody said that the idea was not viable because there
was no particular reason for the bubble of steam to remain at the center. I
assume what was meant was that the surface tension effects for a bubble of
water in 0-G do not scale up.

>From "Miranda and the Space Pirates", at
http://members.aol.com/howiecombs/havnrock.htm:

February 15th, 2099: Our first order of business was to set up the first
primitive habitat. Daddy calls it a "Shake and Bake"
habitat (although the computer talks about the "Cole Technique"). I don't
see where the shaking comes into it, but the baking is
easy to understand.

First, Daddy, Uncle Wes, and Mr. Tanaka dug a hole down to the very
core of Haven Rock. There they placed a giant tank
of water, and then sealed the tunnel back up.

Then we deployed the Portable Solar Concentrator. The Concentrator
is a giant disk made of two sheets of plastic sealed
together at the edges only. One layer is transparent plastic, the other,
aluminized mylar. When it was deployed, the modest
amounts of air trapped inside were enough to completely inflate it in the
vacuum of space. It wound up bulging on both sides,
shaped kind of like a magnifying lens. Now if you point it at the sun, you
have a reflective Solar Concentrator several kilometers
across. The focus is not real good; not really a point, but instead a
smeared-out streak several meters long. But it was good
enough for our purposes.

Uncle Wes and Daddy maneuvered the Concentrator until Haven Rock was
at the focus. The asteroid, slowly turning on its
axis, roasted like a pig on a spit. Over a few days, the surface actually
began to glow red, and soften. But the heat traveled only
very slowly through the body of the big rock. The surface was yellow-hot,
and thoroughly molten before the water tank at the core
was very much above the boiling point.

But today the steam pressure in the tank finally became too great,
and the tank ruptured. The steam blew the molten glob of
nickel-iron into a huge bubble of low-grade steel. I saw Daddy holding his
breath, praying that there wouldn't be a blowout on one
side. But we lucked out. The globe wound up a bit on the lumpy side, but
stayed intact. It rapidly hardened as it ceased expanding,
and now we had the basic structure of our habitat.

Regards,

Mike Combs