Seveneves

The schemes envisioned by the Arkitects, as Dinah and Ivy started calling them, ping-ponged back and forth between those two extremes, and seemed to reflect the existence of at least two factions. The centralizing faction pointed to the dangers of prolonged zero-gee existence as a reason for rotating people through the torus. The decentralizers came back a couple of days later with a sketch of the so-called bolo scheme, wherein a pair of arklets would co

None of this really mattered in the short term, because, even on a hysterically accelerated schedule, it was going to take weeks to design and manufacture even a single arklet. And it would take longer to ramp up the production lines for the giant heavy-lift rockets needed to boost them into space. What Izzy’s crew would be seeing in the meantime was a hodgepodge of preexisting spacecraft, mostly Soyuz capsules, being sent up using the existing stock of rockets. These would carry “Pioneers” whose job would be to build new extensions onto Izzy’s Integrated Truss Assembly: for docking many arklets at a time, for storing material, and for making it all run. The Pioneers would spend most of their time in space suits performing EVAs: extravehicular activities, a.k.a. space walks. There would be something like a hundred Pioneers all told. They were being trained now, and their space suits were being hastily manufactured.

But Izzy in her current form couldn’t support anything like a hundred new people. She didn’t even have the spacecraft docking ports needed to berth their vehicles when they arrived. So in order to accommodate the Pioneers who would begin arriving in a few weeks, the Arkitects sent up Scouts. The qualifications for being a Scout seemed to be a shocking level of physical endurance, a complete disregard for mortal danger, and some knowledge of how to exist in a space suit. All of them were Russian.

There wasn’t room for them on the space station. Actually, to be precise, there was plenty of physical space to accommodate them, but the support systems weren’t there. The CO2 scrubbers could only handle the output of so many lungs. The entire space station had only three toilets, one of which was almost twenty years old.

The Scouts were going to live most of the time in their space suits. This made sense as far as it went, since their mission was to work to exhaustion every day. Sixteen hours in a space suit meant sixteen hours that the Scout was not imposing a direct burden on Izzy’s life support systems.

At Zero, the total number of functioning space suits in the known universe had been something like a dozen. Production had been ramped up since then, but they were still a scarce resource. In its most common form, the Orlan space suit used by the Russians could only function independently for a couple of hours, which was fine since normal people were completely exhausted by that point anyway. Beyond that, its internal reserves were used up. So, the Scouts would mostly be working on umbilicals. Their suits would be co

During the few hours they were allowed to rest, the Scouts needed a place to go and to climb out of their space suits.

Whoever was ru

In the best traditions of Russian technology, Luk was straightforward. Take a cosmonaut. Enclose him in a large plastic bag full of air.

With any normal plastic bag material, the cosmonaut will suffocate or the bag will pop, because plastic bags aren’t strong enough to withstand full atmospheric pressure. So, fill the bag with only as much air as it can handle—some fraction of one atmosphere—and then place another bag inside of it. Inflate that bag with air at slightly higher pressure. That’s still not enough air to keep a cosmonaut alive, so put a third bag inside of the second bag and inflate it to higher pressure yet. Keep repeating, like with Russian nesting dolls, until the i

The scheme had many advantages. It was cheap, simple, and lightweight. Deflated, a Luk could be pleated and rolled up for storage in a backpack-sized container.

Of course, the air inside the i

Heat produced by the occupant’s body would build up in the atmosphere of the i

Getting in and out of the Luk could be problematic. The Russians had somehow determined that just about anyone—or at least anyone capable of meeting the physical standards of the cosmonaut program—could force their body through a hole forty centimeters in diameter. Accordingly, each Luk included a flange—a forty-centimeter ring of fiberglass with bolt holes spaced around its periphery. All the layers of plastic converged on it, further enhancing its onionlike appearance. This became the onion’s cut-off stem. To keep the air from rushing out through that forty-centimeter hole, it was equipped with a stout diaphragm of much thicker plastic that could be put into place after the cosmonaut had climbed inside.

So, the general procedure for using the Luk was to unfold the bag and find the flange, then pull it over one’s head, squirm through it until the shoulders and pelvis had passed through, draw the feet up inside of it, then find the diaphragm and lock it into place, sealing oneself inside. At this point the Luk was still a giant wrinkled mass of plastic hanging around the occupant like a sleeping bag.

Once the Luk was free in the vacuum of space, it was okay to open the valve that flooded air into its many interstitial layers. Whereupon it would expand to the size of a mobile home, and drift around aimlessly until a rescue vehicle could get to it.

On its outer hatch, the rescue vehicle would need to have an adapter with a bolt pattern made to engage with the holes on the Luk’s flange. Once an airtight co

The Orlan suit was built around a hard upper torso, or HUT: a rigid shell for containing the wearer’s trunk, with co

Roskosmos had constructed a number of Vestibyul modules, this being a newly invented thing that they had cobbled together from existing parts in about two weeks. Its purpose was to serve as a jury-rigged bridge co