by Dan Eaton
I said, “Where’s Mom?”
I didn’t see her and he said she had stepped outside. I went downstairs and then out the door. Mom was sitting in a chair, staring at the wall while sipping her coffee. The lighting in the segment had dimmed down to simulate night time, but you could still see everything. She had her E-Pad in her lap and a small flashlight like device.
I asked about the device and she said it was an optical tape measure. It was a laser powered device for measuring distances. She said it was in the box she had me pick up from Habitat supply.
“Bryce,” she asked, “are you busy tomorrow? I need your help with something. I’d ask your Dad, but he’s going to be busy working on the house tomorrow.” Mom very rarely asks me for my help. Usually it’s Dad and it’s a not so fun request like helping him clean the garage. If it had been Dad, I might have tried to weasel out of it, but Mom I can’t turn down.
I said, “I’m helping the best mom I could ever have. Oh, speaking of Dad, that reminds me. How did the appointments go?”
Mom said they had gone great and they had come back with a lot of ideas. They had placed an order with Habitat Supply and Dad was going to spend tomorrow making the house more into the home they wanted.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
My mom, the CEO.
Good morning fellow NLH residents. It’s Tuesday July 21st, 2037.
In Habitat news this morning it’s Greg Brown’s birthday. Please wish him a Happy Birthday when you see him. There will be a small party this evening at 18:30 at the Northern Grill for his friends.
Sam Tanner taught a NLH safety class last night for Desmond and Bryce Burns, Nolan and Nina Schubeler, and Max and Bea Stephenson. All students passed with flying colors. Bryce and Nina are now authorized for Yellow Hazard areas while the remainder of the class is authorized for both Yellow and Black. Please congratulate the attendees when you see them. Sam would like to remind anyone else needing the class that the next class will be taught on Thursday, July 23rd.
In financial news today, on the Lunar Stock Market shares of Mussconny Machine are trading steady at $15.75 a share, Mussconny Fabrication at $12.23 a share, Hotel Whipple shares are steady at $4.76. O’Reilly’s Shellfish Company is up at $8.25 a share.
The next morning I checked my messages before heading out to breakfast with Mom and Dad. I had a brief message from Dr. Taylor and he said based on the readings from my implanted health monitor it didn’t look like I was getting enough exercise. I imagine every one of us who just got off the shuttle the other day got that message with the exception of Nina and maybe Ananyu. I figured after Mom was done with me, maybe I’d see if Myra wanted to exercise. We headed off to breakfast and then afterward Mom and I went off to do her project while Dad proceeded to Habitat Supply and the house.
Mom took me to Hydroponics #1 and I asked her what she was up to when we got there.
“Denise gave me the task of trying to get more food out of the hydroponics system. She knows that in time we might be able to up the output a little, but there’s nothing we can do in the short time. The Habitat is maxed out currently on the number of people the hydroponics can support and projects like the one your Dad is managing for TransCor require more people. The problem could be fixed by shipping in more food from Earth, but that’s not politically viable plus having fresh food is what we need and the shipping delay means we can’t get really fresh food. Sandy’s talk the other night sparked an idea, but before I take it to him I want to be absolutely sure on the numbers so we’re going to measure everything today.”
We started with Hydroponics #1 which had the same layout as all the other hydroponic rooms. The growth chambers all had the same one meter by one meter by one meter layout. Each hydroponic room held 3 rows of chambers and the rows were stacked three deep which yielded fifty-one square meters of growing space. We checked each hydroponic room just to make sure they all conformed to the same layout. There were fourteen rooms which yielded a grand total of seven hundred and fourteen square meters of growing space. Next, we visited the Garden room where we figured half of the one hundred fifty five square meters was planted. That gave Mom a figure of seven hundred ninety one and a half square meters of growing things in the Habitat. It really didn’t sound like a lot to me.
Next Mom and I walked every hallway in the Habitat. Of course, Mom wasn’t cleared for access to Partition A of Section 1 but Mom was able to figure out what she needed from Partition A of Section 2. I was kind of surprised that what she wanted to measure was the square footage of the walls. When we had walked the whole thing and measured everything off, she finished punching the numbers into her E-Pad and then looked up at me and smiled.
“This is good Bryce, this is very good,” she said. She held out her E-Pad and called Sandy. When he answered, she asked him if he was busy for dinner tonight and said she thought it was time to have a little talk. Then she looked at me, gave me a smile and said, “Let’s go tell your Dad.”
We walked back home and found Dad lounging around on our new patio. We had a patio table with four chairs and some additional side chairs for any overflow guests. Inside I found there was a coffee maker and microwave oven in the kitchen. There were a whole series of wall hangings to help liven up the place and several throw rugs in the family room helped to warm up the room and make it seem cozier. We went back outside and sat on the deck as Mom told Dad about the results we had collected and what they meant. She told him that she was ready to talk to Sandy and had invited him to dinner with us.
When dinner time rolled around, we walked down to the cafeteria as a family. The choices this evening were a spaghetti dinner with a roll, the shrimp and rice dish, and a couple of chili dogs served with cheese fries. I know hot dogs aren’t exactly normal meat to start with but something about a 3D printed hot dog just wasn’t doing it for me tonight so I got the shrimp dish along with a salad. Mom and Dad went for the spaghetti dinner with a salad. We were looking for a table when we spotted Sandy, who waved us over. He was sitting with Dr. Belvert who had gone with the shrimp like me and Sandy was being a brave man trying out the chili dogs.
“I hope you don’t mind that I invited Denise to come along, but I think we need her in on this discussion,” Sandy said as we walked up.
We settled down at the table and started eating. Mom looked over at Sandy and Denise and said with a big smile on her face, “I think I have it figured out.”
Denise was first out of the gate and said, “Okay girl, I’ve been waiting for this. Spill it.”
Mom took a sip of her coffee and then started talking. She said she had been staring at the walls outside of the house and thinking about the problem with hydroponics. She had experimented with vertical gardening at our home back in Saint Charles. Using vertical gardening had allowed her to greatly increase the productivity of her home garden. It wouldn’t do a thing to increase the productivity of the hydroponic bays, but if it worked, they could use the readily available wall space in the habitat to vastly increase the amount of plants they could grow. There were some problems to work out and they’d have to choose carefully what they grew, but she thought it could be done.
Sandy asked the first question, “What are the problems with doing vertical gardening?”
Mom replied, “There are several. The easier problem is the vertical gardens won’t be set up for automated production like the hydroponic cells are. The planting, watering, harvesting, and resetting the garden will need to be done by hand. It’s doable, but you said this market has a labor shortage. The other more serious problem is this won’t be hydroponic gardening so we’ll need to work out the methods needed to keep the plants from drowning.”
“Huh,” Sandy said, “so, uh, why would the plants drown?”
Denise spoke up and said, “Sandy, back on Earth you can pile up some dirt, stick a seed in it, and when you water it the water will eventually drain away due to Earth’s gravity. So the plant’s roots get water, but they aren’t soaking in water. Here on
the Moon, the lunar gravity is only one sixth of Earth’s so the capillary effect is much stronger. That well drained mound that grows a plant perfectly fine on Earth becomes a sponge on the Moon and drowns the plant’s roots. That’s one reason we chose to go with the hydroponic cells. However, all is not lost because I’ve been working on that problem since I got here and have the data you need for most of what we’d like to grow.”
Sandy said, “Okay, so hopefully the second problem isn’t as bad as you thought Cheryl. As for the manpower issue, so uh, how much do you need? If you act quickly I bet you can still hire one or two of Bryce’s classmates. You may even be able to snag an extra one or two adults from those who are underutilized. The idea of working in a garden may have a pretty strong appeal to people that have been here a while.”
Mom thought it over and then said, “Okay, problem three is the structure of the vertical garden itself. What we need is basically fabric bags that will hold the soil and attach to a supporting structure that is then mounted to a wall. Can we make something like that and then is there a way to safely attach it to a wall? These things are heavy.”
Sandy grabbed a napkin, pulled a pen from his pocket and started sketching. First, he drew four lines across the page and dimensioned them to be a meter apart. He then drew wall anchors on the lines to secure them to a wall. Next he drew a rectangle across two of the lines and filled it in to resemble a mesh. After that he drew in crude bags attached to the rectangle and then finished it off with a sad looking plant sprouting out of the bag.
He said, “So, uh, is this like what you are thinking about? The wall attachments have to be done carefully, but those are a stock item with a fully documented procedure on where they can be placed and how it has to be done. It’s not a problem at all for an interior wall, but any exterior walls will require permits. It’s definitely doable. The way I see it, we run four cables spaced a meter apart. I’m guessing that’s how high you figured things for?”
Mom said yes and then asked about the rectangle. Sandy said that represented an aluminum mounting plate that would be 3D printed. The trellis work saved weight and material plus gave climbing plants something to attach to. The plates would have hooks along the top and bottom to secure them to the lines. The hooks would be offset on top and bottom so the plates could be stacked above each other on the lines. The hooks would let them be easy dismounted for maintenance like when the garden was being reset for the next growth cycle.
Mom looked over the drawing and said the plates looked good. She’d have to go through Denise’s data to see what the bags holding the soil/plants would need to look like.
She then said, “Denise, what about soil? Do you have enough biochar available to get me started?”
Denise said, “Yes, I’ve got plenty on hand. Sandy, I can see you’re about to ask so to save time biochar is basically charcoal. I take all the left over vegetable matter from the hydroponic cells and use pyrolysis to convert it to biochar. Biochar is one of the things you need to add to regolith to start turning it into dirt you can grow things in. It’s what I used to create the dirt I used in the Garden section. That reminds me, Cheryl, we should swing by the Garden so you can take a look at some of the tricks I used to get things to grow there in soil.”
Mom looked over at me and Dad and asked the question that must have been bugging her since our first dinner with Sandy.
“Denise, can I do this on my own? Is it legal? Sandy talked a lot about starting up my own company, but it just seems strange that this isn’t something the Habitat itself would do with me as the agent of change.”
Denise took a moment and answered, “Cheryl, I know by now you must have read your contract several times very carefully. You are working for the habitat and what’s most important to the habitat is to keep the bean counters back on Earth happy. You were hired to fix the problem with the hydroponic cells. At work I need you to keep plugging away at the hydroponic cells. There is money for that, but not to pay you to find a better answer. But if you were to form a company and present a solution that would augment the output of the hydroponic cells in such a way as to allow the expansion of people at the Habitat no one is going to stand in your way as long as you do it with your time and money.”
Mom sat back in her chair a minute and then laughed. She said, “Well, I guess I have the time, but no way do we have the money for this.”
Denise looked over at Sandy and said, “You put her up to this, you got any ideas?”
Sandy looked over at Mom and Dad and then asked Mom, “How big are we talking?”
Mom said, “Bryce and I measured everything out today. Mounting vertical gardens on readily accessible wall space, there’s a total of approximately ten thousand two hundred and seventy eight square meters available for growing things. That’s compared to the current seven hundred and fourteen square meters in hydroponic food production plus another seventy seven and a half square meters in the Garden section. The yields probably won’t be as high as the hydroponic cells, but it’s nothing to sneeze at either. Assuming we could plant the total square meterage and we could get at least half the yield we do from the hydroponic cells you could conceivably have the habitat supporting up around 2500 people.”
Sandy sat and thought for a minute. Then he smiled and looked at my mom and said, “How about we start with a technology demonstrator? If you can pull that off I’m sure I can get the financial backing you’ll need to go full scale. How about starting with the wall the Garden shares with Section 4? Give me a day to draw up some paperwork and get some parts made. In the meantime, why don’t you discretely talk to some of Bryce’s classmates and see if they’d be interested in working with you. I’d suggest using the contract I gave Bryce as a model for hiring them when the time comes.”
I had this bright idea that afterward I’d go see if Myra wanted to try the loping stuff, but then Mom said she was going over to the Cherneski’s and I figured Myra would be tied up for a while. I wandered out to the Grand and found Nina and Adam were there so I joined them. It would have been cool if Adam had needed to be elsewhere and I could have spent some time with just Nina but it was fun anyways and I finally got some exercise in.
Mom talked to Denise at work the next day because she had been wondering about what the data we had collected meant. The hydroponic cells supported food, at least some, for the current three hundred and sixteen residents of the Habitat. But there was a rule of thumb that said you needed to grow about eleven point seven square meters of plants to provide the oxygen and clean up the carbon dioxide for one person. Given the numbers we had collected the Habitat was self-sufficient in air for only about sixty seven people. That meant the Habitat was really dependent on the Life Support systems to maintain the air quality and there was no redundancy from growing things to provide any backup. That surprised her since normally NASA liked to play it safe and have redundancies built into the system.
Mom asked Denise about it and she said, “Once upon a time there was a good plan and the redundancy you’re talking about was present.”
“So what happened?” Mom asked.
Denise took a minute to gather her thoughts and then said, “We were too successful, and things in cislunar space changed far more rapidly than we expected, a combination of the two. In the original plan the Habitat would have been far smaller at this point than it is now. We expanded the facility faster than expected because we were able to construct things faster in part due to the contributions Sandy made. The ice mined from the crater has provided a constant stream of volatiles like oxygen and the construction we’ve been doing has let us recover a lot of oxygen from the regolith. Between those two ready sources of oxygen and all of the oxygen that we’ve recovered and put in storage the idea of being self-sufficient for air to breathe via the plants we grew lost emphasis. Of course, there’s more to air than oxygen, but between the solar energy we collect here and the energy beamed down to us from the solar array in orbit, it was felt we had plenty of redundancy f
or the two life support modules.”
Mom said, “So they went ahead and expanded?”
Denise answered, “There’s a lot of pressure on all of the lunar outposts to support the work being done in cislunar space. To do that we needed workers and by relaxing the need for hydroponic bays the Habitat was able to add living space we wouldn’t have had otherwise. They were able to push the number up where it is currently so now the limiting factor is how much food we can produce.”
Mom thought about it for a minute and then asked, “So if they want more workers, why don’t they just ship up more food?”
Denise replied, “Because of the cost. Not just the cost of getting the food here, but because a launch bringing food here is a launch that can’t be used to bring supplies to some other project in cislunar space. Launch facilities on Earth are all at max capacity. If you can get the vertical farming going you will be a hero to the bean counters on Earth. Well, if you get the vertical farming going and can get us a greater variety of food to eat here, there will probably be more than a few people here ready to call you a hero. By the time you have that going we should be just about ready to unwrap the Grand. Once we have that in place we should be good for both food and living space for quite some time. ”
We had just sat down for breakfast when Sandy came up.
He said “Good morning Burns family.” We said good morning to him and he continued, “So, uh, Desmond and Bryce, I’m glad to hear you got your certifications. Bryce, I was hoping to get you started tonight at Mussconny Machine but I have a load of paperwork to go over with your mom and dad. I imagine you’ll want to be there too, so would you mind coming by the shop before school in the morning? If you could be there at 7:45 that’ll give us an hour to get you going. If you can handle it, I think I’d like you to come in for an hour in the morning every day and then an hour or so in the evening. Just let me know if it becomes too much for you. Your school work has to come first.”
