by Dan Eaton
While Sandy was eating some more of his dinner Dad said, “Is that what you’re doing with Mussconny Machine?”
Sandy replied, “Mussconny Machine, Mussconny Fabrication, and a couple of other smaller businesses. I love working with machines and the after hours stuff gives me something different to do than the day job, extra income, and in some ways more importantly, a way to give back to the Habitat and help push things to the next level. So, uh, my dream is to see this place self-sufficient from Earth. Until that happens, everything you see around you can just die and wither on the vine because some idiot politician decides money spent here would be better off spent somewhere else that benefits him more. With my businesses I can impact what happens to the Habitat and that gives me a lot of satisfaction.”
“So how do you make enough money to stay in business? Isn’t the market pretty small here?” asked Dad.
Sandy said, “Desmond, I make a habit of finding solutions to the Habitat’s expensive problems. Is the machine the Habitat needs too expensive to ship up from Earth? I build one here for well under the price of getting it from Earth. The Habitat director goes to the bean counters on the Earth and presents them with two options, the expensive one or me. They always go with me. If I wasn’t here then the Habitat would be stuck in place or at least drastically slowed down”
Sandy had finished his meal and summed things up by saying, “So, uh, if you want to do your jobs and then sit around reading or something like that it’s fine. What myself, Christine, Denise and the others that are here for the long term are trying to say is we think the Habitat has a special place in history and if you’re of the mind to help then look for an opportunity. They are out there even if it’s just teaching a ballroom dancing class. Find something you enjoy and then get paid to have some fun. If you have an idea and have questions come talk to me. I’ll help you get it going.”
Mom had just been sitting and listening politely. I wasn’t sure if she was interested in any of this when she spoke up and said, “Sandy, thanks so much for telling us about this. I have a half-baked idea kicking around the back of my head that probably would have come to nothing. Now I think I’ll give it a little more thought and then maybe talk to you again next week.”
Sandy kicked back in his chair and said “Great, please do. Now that I have got ranting on my soap box off my chest, how about you folks? Any questions about life at the Habitat I can help you with?”
Mom sat forward in her chair and said, “Now that you mention it, the house looks a little bare as it comes furnished. What sorts of improvements do people make?” Sandy, Mom, and Dad went back and forth with that discussion for quite a while. I asked if I could be excused so I could go meet up with Willie and Sandy asked if I could hang on because there was something else he wanted to discuss that involved me. They finished up with Sandy saying he would send Mom and Dad a list of folks he recommended they see if they could make appointments with to see what they had done with their houses.
Then Sandy said, “So, uh, now about Bryce. You’re what, thirteen years old?”
I replied “Yes, although I’ll be fourteen on Saturday,” with no idea where he was going with this.
Sandy said, “If we were on Earth I’d wait another couple of years, but we’re on the Moon and I’m desperate. If Bryce is interested I’d like you folks to come take a tour of Mussconny Machine when you have the time. I really need someone to help keep the shop clean and the job is Bryce’s if he wants it. It’s just part time, maybe an hour before school and an hour or so after school.”
Mom and Dad looked at me and I looked back at Sandy and said, “That would be cool.”
Mom spoke up then and said, “Sandy, thanks for everything, especially the offer of the tour and a job for Bryce. I have a lot to think about right now so maybe I’ll take a rain check on the tour and let Desmond and Bryce handle that. I think they are both free tomorrow evening if that works for you.”
The dinner meeting had run longer than I was expecting it to. I really needed to talk with Willie about which gaming specs/controllers we should/could order from Habitat Supply. The guys from the Gogo group we had met at the Meet and Greet had emailed us their recommendations so Willie and I needed to agree on what we were going to order to give us the most flexibility when playing the game. We said goodnight to Sandy and headed back towards the house. I told Mom and Dad I wanted to stop by Willie’s house on the way home and they decided to walk with me and say hello to Willie’s mom and dad. Willie’s mom, Bea was sitting outside their house on a little patio when we got there. She went in and got Willie and then she and her husband Max came out to talk to Mom and Dad. They ended up sitting out on the patio talking while Willie and I went upstairs and figured out what we needed to order. Willie and I talked for a while after putting the order in and then I went outside to collect my parents. Judging from the laughter we had heard upstairs they had all been having a good time. We said our good nights and headed back towards our house. Just as we were passing into the cross passage we ran into what looked like a very hot and sweaty Nina. We said hi and I asked her what she had been doing.
Nina replied, “Myra gave up waiting for you so we’ve been doing the loping with Ananyu for the last couple of hours. If you do it long enough, it eventually turns into a work out.”
We said goodnight to Nina and went on to our house. I felt bad about standing up Myra again, but it wasn’t like I did it on purpose. I decided to talk to her about it in the morning.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Off to Work
We headed off early to the cafeteria as a family for breakfast. After getting our food we sat down and started talking about the upcoming day. I was excited about going to Sandy’s business this evening and seeing what Miss Gayle had in store for us at school. I also kept an eye on who was in the cafeteria and was relieved when I saw Myra and her parents walk in. We had finished up eating and my Mom was just enjoying her coffee. Dad said he had to go by the SpaceX office for a meeting so Mom gave him a kiss good bye and I said I’d see him later. By this time it looked like Myra and her family were finishing up breakfast so I gave Mom a hug and walked over to their table, I said, “Good morning Mr. and Mrs. Cherneski. Myra could I speak to you please?” Myra’s parents said good morning to me and then gave Myra a hug and said they’d see her later.
Myra looked at me and said, “Go ahead, sit down.”
I could tell from her tone that she wasn’t happy with me so I said, “Myra, I’m sorry I didn’t meet up with you last night or the night before. I really meant to but it’s just been so busy.”
Myra looked me in the eyes and said, “Bryce, I’d like to be your friend but friends can count on each other. You talk like you want to be my friend but your actions say something very different. If you say you want to spend time with me then I expect you to spend time with me. If you can’t be that kind of friend then please just leave me alone.”
I was taken back a little by what Myra said. She had a good point and the way she was seeing me wasn’t the way I saw myself. Mom and Dad had always told me I need to be accountable for my actions and I had to admit I hadn’t been acting the way I had been taught. I said, “Myra you are right and I shouldn’t have said I’d meet up with you if I wasn’t sure I could make it. I’ve done that twice now and I won’t do it again. I really am sorry and do want you for a friend.”
She gave me a little smile and said, “Okay, apology accepted but do it one more time and its strike three, you’re out buster. Now tell me what’s been going on that’s kept you so busy.”
So we sat and talked and I told her about the Gogo group and how happy Willie and I were to find a group here that we could play with. Then I told her about the meeting with Sandy and the tour I had to go on tonight. She told me about her exercising with Nina and Ananyu last night. It was really easy talking with her and we were both surprised when our E-Pads both chirped the 5 minute warning before school was to start. If only I could have this kind of conv
ersation with Nina.
The school day with Miss Gayle was great. She started off the morning by telling us about herself in detail. By the time she was done we knew all about her and had a much closer feeling towards her like she was an old friend we’d just met. Then she had us finish up the assessment tests with the promise that once we had them done she had something special planned for the afternoon. She’d been researching academic team activities and had put together a list of all the possibilities. She then split us up into teams of two based on our interest in the list items. Each team got to research the item and prepare a report/recommendation on the item. As each item was completed she’d split us up again and kept repeating the process until all the items on the list had been done. At that point she had each team report to the class on what they had found and their recommendation. By the end of the day we had decided on the three academic teams. Miss Gayle also helped us decide that we would all help with the V-Blog but chose Ananyu and Adam to be the V-Blog hosts with the rest of us assisting as needed.
After dinner, Dad and I walked over to meet Sandy at the Mussconny Machine facility. Dad was tagging along to get the tour Sandy had promised and to sign the contract for me to work there if everything went okay. Sandy met us at the door with a smile and shook our hands as he thanked us for coming. The Mussconny Machine facility consisted of three rooms laid out in a row. The first room which flanked the hallway was filled with a workshop featuring smaller machines with the exception of the right hand corner away from the hallway. There was a four meter by four meter office carved out of the room that was Sandy’s office. Sandy had a large desk in the office along with several chairs for visitors. This was where he handled any formal meeting with his customers although most meetings were informal affairs over coffee in one of the cafeterias.
The remainder of the room was filled with small machines and racks of raw stock. Sandy said, “The machines in this room were where the company had started. I built each one of them from scratch and then used them to build bigger machines.”
As you came into the room on the left along the wall was a workbench that held a small lathe, then a machine Sandy called a shaper, and finally a machine that I recognized as a drill press. Continuing along the wall opposite of the office there was another small machine that Sandy called a collet lathe and then a workbench with a block on it and a bunch of measuring tools. Next to that on the back wall was a closed doorway marked with a yellow Habitat Risk indicator marker next to it. The remainder of that wall seemed to be taken up by raw material storage. The last thing in the room was a lathe on a moveable cart that was stored along the office wall next to the back wall.
Sandy took us around the room and explained what each of the machines did. The lathes were basically used to rotate a piece of material and then a cutting tool was used to carve the material to the round shape you wanted. Dad was really interested in the machine Sandy had called a shaper. Being an engineer, Dad was familiar with the tools in the machine shop, but had never seen a shaper before. Sandy explained that in the early days of machining most machine shops had a shaper. It was used to create flat surfaces on a piece of material and worked by sliding the cutting tool back and forth across the surface of whatever material you were shaping.
Dad said, “So, it’s similar to a milling machine?”
Sandy said, “When milling machines came along they ended up replacing shapers because they cut more efficiently since the cutter is always turning versus the shaper where the cutter only cuts on the forward stroke.”
I sort of knew what a lathe was but I had never seen a milling machine, so most of this was just going right over my head.
Dad said, “Why don’t you have a milling machine?”
“I do in the larger shop, but the machines here in the front room are the first ones I had built. While it isn’t as efficient at cutting as a milling machine, the shaper can easily do a lot of things that were difficult to do with a milling machine and the cutter it used is much simpler than the milling cutters a milling machine used.”
Next up was the room behind the door marked with a yellow Habitat Risk indicator. Neither Dad nor I were cleared at this point to enter a room marked with the yellow Habitat Risk indicator. Sandy had cleared it with Habitat Control beforehand so the annunciator beeped twice as we passed through the door to mark that we had passed but otherwise there weren’t any of the alarms that would have normally gone off. This room was the same width, but deeper than the first room. The machines were much larger and included one of the milling machines Dad had asked about. There was also several industrial sized 3D printers. Seeing them had answered what was bothering me about the first room. I understood Sandy made things with the machines, but I was really struggling to understand why he made things with them. Everyone knew that 3D printing was one of the things that made the expansion of man’s presence in space possible. Instead of having to drag everything up out of Earth’s gravity well, 3D printers enabled things to be quickly made in space from raw materials provided from the Moon and asteroids. If you couldn’t find what you needed in the catalog of objects that could be printed a new design could be easily made. You didn’t even have to know 3D CAD to successfully generate a design as there were adaptive design programs available that would ask you a set of questions to determine the nature of the object you wanted and then the program would produce a design to make what you wanted.
Given that you could just have a 3D printer produce a thing you needed I was having a hard time understanding what Sandy’s business did so I asked him.
“Bryce”, he said, “that’s a good question. So, uh, the first thing you have to understand is that the 3D printers come in a range of capabilities. Even the high end ones you see here can’t do everything although they can print a lot of different things. The low end printers are fine for printing the majority of things most people want to print, but when you need something special then you have to use one of the high end printers. There are only so many high end printers so there’s usually a wait to have something printed. So, uh, there’s also the fact that sometimes because of the material you need to use for the design to work you can’t print it. The main take away for you should be that 3D printing, or what we call additive manufacturing, has some limitations and probably always will. Do you understand that?”
I said, “I do but so much gets done by 3D printing I guess I’m still not seeing why this place is needed?”
Sandy laughed and then said, “Basically, ninety percent of the stuff the Habitat and the orbitals need comes from 3D printers. So, uh, that final ten percent is a real bugger. Either it gets shipped up from Earth, which is extremely expensive or it gets made here at the Habitat which is much cheaper even if the part is destined for an orbital and has to be shipped from here back to low earth orbit.”
Sandy said, “The machines here in this shop other than the 3D printers support what is called subtractive manufacturing. We take a block of material and remove everything that doesn’t look like the part we need. It’s old, but very mature technology. By using both additive and subtractive manufacturing processes I can build one hundred percent of what’s needed for both here and the orbitals. That’s why there’s a need for this business.”
“Okay, I get it now”, I said. Ten percent didn’t sound like much, but if you had to bring all of it up out of Earth’s gravity well it was a very expensive drag on space exploration and that carried a high enough price tag as it was.
Sandy continued with our tour of the second room. There was a hefty manual lathe and a manual milling machine, both with large shields around the work area to contain chips. There was a booth Sandy explained was for welding, and then several large boxes that Sandy said were VMC’s. I had no idea what a VMC was, so I asked Sandy.
“So, uh, a VMC is a Vertical machining center, which is basically a CNC version of that manual milling machine over there. CNC means its computer controlled so we can load a block of material in the machine and the
n load a program that will cut out the part we want automatically. It’s in a sealed box because the cutter needs cooling and lubrication while it’s doing its job so the machine uses what’s called flood coolant. So, uh, there’s a number of spouts that shoot a liquid at the cutter to keep it cool, lubricated, and to evacuate the cut chips away from the cutter. If it wasn’t in a sealed box the thing would make a huge mess of the room with chips and liquid thrown all over the room.”
In addition to the machines and welding booth there were some massive doors along the back wall along with a sturdy window looking into what had to be an airlock. The doors were marked with a black Habitat Risk indicator and I knew there was no way Sandy was taking us into the next room. Sandy saw me looking at the doors and windows and walked over and flipped a switch that turned on the illumination for the lock.
He explained, “That’s my private lock. It doesn’t actually open out onto the lunar surface. It opens into the main maintenance bay which is protected by its own set of locks. They normally keep it pressurized which is why I could get an override to allow you two in this room without too much arguing. Occasionally they dump the atmosphere in the maintenance bay and every now and again they have some equipment they need worked on which then gets pulled into my bay. Bryce, you’ll need to get certified to work in Habitat spaces marked with the yellow indicator if you come to work for me”.
