L4 Station - Chapter 1

 

L4

STATION

Remembered Earth Universe

Volume 17

L4 Series

Book 1

D.W. PATTERSON

Copyright © 2025 D.W. Patterson

All rights reserved.

First Printing – March 2025

Future Chron Publishing

Cover – Copyright © 2025 D.W. Patterson

Cover Image – ID 159616182 © limbitech | Dreamstime(dot)com

No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission, except in the case of brief quotations for the purpose of review. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are products of the author's imagination and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events and people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Hard Science Fiction – Old School

Human Generated Content

To Sarah

“But for Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet with its winds and ways, and then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him and at last out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning.”

― H.G. Wells

Chapter 1

History of Mare Frigoris – Dr. George Pohl – Planet Publications

By the middle of the 21^st century commercial settlements were being established on the Moon. Two Earth companies, Luna Limited and New Lunar Corporation, were busy developing settlements in Mare Frigoris, which was a lunar sea stretching almost two thousand miles across the face of the Moon roughly 30 degrees south of the north lunar pole.

All these settlements had one thing in common, they were all founded just south of a lunar crater, which because of the latitude, had a south wall and floor that was always in darkness. And there in the dark, was a supply of water-ice which could supply the needs of the adjacent settlement for hundreds of years to come.

By the eight decade of the century twelve settlements had been established (from west to east); Markov, Babbage, Robinson, Horrebow, Fontenelle, Tima, Archer, Sheepshanks, Demos, Thales, Hayn, and Dugan. Almost always the settlement was named after the nearby crater.

Power was provided by a nuclear plant in the south of the mare and solar farms at the far east and west. The solar farms were separated at such a distance as one or the other was always receiving sunlight. From farthest eastern settlement to farthest western, was a distance of over 1700 miles.

2070 A.D.

My name is Raymond Jones, but I'm usually called Ray, and I think growing up on the Moon was a great experience. At thirteen I had been on the Moon for eight years and I had seen a lot of changes. The population of the great settlement complexes had tripled in that time. My family’s settlement, Markov, located in the western part of Mare Frigoris had thirty thousand residents and was growing.

My parents had brought me here from Earth several years after it became apparent that children could develop just fine on the lunar surface. At the time I was the youngest person to ride a rocket to orbit, but I don't think that's still true. And now, not counting the few astronauts on Mars, I was about to leave the Moon with my parents and my younger brother for the farthest of human settlements, located at the Earth-Moon Lagrange point L4, nineteen million miles away.

And there we were going to establish a homestead in the space habitat that was an ongoing robotic build for the past three years. We would get there aboard the company’s latest fusion powered spaceship, The Latinum. A passage of sixteen days, instead of the hundred a chemical rocket would take. Once there, many of the others going would begin the job of mining the asteroids caught at L4.

Though usually found in the Asteroid Belt or in their own orbit between planets, there were a few asteroids trapped where we were headed. To understand why, it is necessary to study Newtonian physics and Lagrangian dynamics, which I haven’t. But my dad explained it in this way, imagine space to be a fluid, like water. Now as large bodies pass through that water, they can leave behind swirling eddies. We’ve all seen it. Something similar happens when the Earth orbits the Sun. The combined gravitational lines of force of the Sun and Earth have an eddy-like structure at these, the Lagrange points like L4, and things tend to stay there if they wander into the area in just the right way. And over billions of years several asteroids were in that eddy.

One of them, Caelucus 46, at 13 kilometers in length was thought to have over forty trillion dollars in nickel, iron, and cobalt, not to mention the expected bounty of water, nitrogen, and ammonia. Dad said that was equivalent to ten percent of present world GDP.

My Dad wasn't a mining engineer, he was going to be the head chef at the station. We would be living in the first O’Neill like cylinder built in space, though it wouldn’t be one of the huge ones that twentieth-century physicist Gerald O’Neill envisioned. It would actually be just a bit larger than some of the stations orbiting the Earth. That's why they called it a space station and not a space habitat. However, it would be the first to have protection from radiation the way O’Neill envisioned. That is, it would have several feet of asteroid material along the outer wall of the outermost level and the inner wall of the innermost level. And banked high enough at the sides to protect each level. My Dad said we wouldn’t get anymore radiation than someone living in Denver, Colorado back on Earth.

My Dad had shown me drawings of the station. It was a squat tire shape without the wheel, nine levels not counting the outermost and innermost levels, which were partially occupied by the asteroid material.

The outer level was three hundred feet from the center of rotation. And the width of each level was two hundred feet. The floor space would be from two hundred thousand square feet on the innermost level to nearly four hundred thousand square feet on the outermost level. My Dad said it would have over two million square feet in all, which sounded like a lot to me.

The highest level, which because of rotation and the resultant direction of the gravitational force was the inner layer, level 11, was a hundred and fifty feet from the center of rotation. It had an artificial gravity almost equivalent to the Moon. We would be staying there or on the next level. At the center, accessed through any of six “spokes” from the lowest level, was the spaceport. There, in zero gravity, ships could dock, and the crew and material could transfer to the station and take an elevator “up” to their destination.

Finally, the day arrived when we were to board the fusion ship already in orbit around the Moon. I dressed in my pressure suit and carried my helmet with rebreather. Both were just a precaution. We wouldn't be exposed to a vacuum even boarding the lunar personnel lander, the LPL, that would take us to orbit.

Once in the LPL I was assigned a seat next to my eight-year-old brother, Roger. My Mom told me I was supposed to keep him occupied during the trip up. I knew it was going to take about four hours to rendezvous with the Latinum. That was a long time to keep a little kid like Roger occupied. But at least he had his Annie, his personal AI, to play games on. That should keep him occupied for a while, I was planning to follow the launch over the in-flight video monitor and radio.

The sound of rockets beneath the LPL wasn't loud but signaled our departure from the surface. Located under the middle carriage of the three cylinders that made up the lander, the four small rockets gave the ship the upward momentum it needed. Then the ship rotated nose up and the big rockets in back fired. Again, almost no sound but I felt their ignition as a force that was pressing me into the back of my seat. I was thankful that Roger was wild-eyed and giggling, not afraid.

The monitor showed a shot looking down toward the Moon and the launch pad was in the center of the screen, dwindling in size. It wasn't long until the Moon became an apparent sphere, and we were almost at the sixty-two miles altitude that would take us to a docking with the Latinum. Eventually at a speed of almost thirty-six hundred miles an hour, I knew from my reading, we would catch up to the ship.

Now that the excitement of launch was over, Roger was getting restless. But mom didn't want him out of his seat because she was afraid, he might get hurt in the zero gravity. So, I had to play the kid's game of name that animal with him. There were a few animals on the Moon, and I would pull up a picture on my Annie of one to let him guess the name. He knew some of the animals on sight because he had seen them in our habitat. Animals like guinea pigs, rabbits, chickens, pigs, assorted birds, and fish had been brought to the Moon and thrived. But other animals, especially those only found on Earth, were a little harder for him to name and I had to help.

That kept him occupied for about half an hour before he became bored again. For some reason he then started fidgeting and kicking the seat in front, which was occupied by one of the miners, Mr. Arnold. I have to admit he put up with the kicking longer than I would have but Mr. Arnold eventually turned and asked Roger to stop.

Of course, that caused Roger to start crying and that got me in trouble with mom for not keeping him properly occupied. Somehow, no matter what mischief Roger got in, it always ended with me in trouble. A quick visit from Mom, and Roger settled down and I determined to keep him quiet until the rendezvous.

I was starting the third story when the pilot came on the intercom and said we would be docking with the ship shortly. I was glad, Roger was getting on my nerves, asking me so many questions about the stories I was reading him. I was glad to find the fusion ship on the monitor view and show Roger where we were going. But that just started him asking more questions about the Latinum.

We were chasing the fusion ship from behind. The LPL would dock to one of the large spheroidal modules midship. The large crew wheel was powered down during docking to minimize any station keeping problem that might be caused by its spin.

We would be living in that wheel for the next sixteen days. Like our space habitat the big wheel would be spun up until the artificial gravity on its outer level was the same as Moon gravity. As the LPL maneuvered to approach the docking port, I got a good look at the Latinum.

According to my Annie the ship was seven hundred feet in length and the crew wheel radius was one-hundred fifty feet. The spine of the ship was made of interlinked girders of a carbon composite that was strong but flexible. The composite is wrapped in a particle shield, inside of which is an x-ray shield. This design prevents most fast-moving interstellar particles from impacting the frame and weakening it over time. The same shielding is used on the crew wheel which sits about a third of the way from the front.

Closer to the fusion engines the shielding also prevents any radiation damage. At the front is another massive particle shield to deflect particles when the ship is at speed. A magnetic field generator complements the particle shield by turning away charged particles.

The ship's engines use the deuterium helium-3 fusion reaction. The advantage of this reaction is the large amount of energy it produces with an absence of neutrons. The lack of neutrons allow a much longer engine life due to the reduced materials damage and activation levels (radioactivity) when compared to other fusion reactions.

Even though the fusion engines are aneutronic they still can give off some radiation, mostly in the form of various fast-moving particles or gamma rays. These collide with the reactor shielding leaving only soft x-rays. But even with this lesser radiation a crew member would not want to remain in their vicinity too long.

The tanks containing the deuterium oxide pellets are located at the back of the ship just in front of the engines on the left. The tanks containing helium-3 gas are similarly located on the right.

During the one-tenth Earth gravity acceleration and deceleration phases of a journey the wheel section would not be spinning, and the living quarters would be turned, like beads on a string, so that the applied force is in the proper direction. The top speed was nearly a tenth of the speed of light.

By the time I finished reading we were almost ready to dock.