12 January 2014
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George: From the heartland of the nation, the Gateway to the West, Good Morning, Good Evening, wherever you may be across the nation, around the world listening on cyberspace. For the next two hours, maybe three, we'll be talking with Captain James Atkinson high above us on the Lunar Orbiting, L-1 Space Station. A quick note to everyone listening, what you're hearing right now, I actually said fifteen minutes ago. No you're not listening through a time warp, but we began pre-recording this to compensate for the time delay that will be present throughout the night. Those of you wishing to call, we're going to ask that you act like a trucker, using the word "over" when you're done. Just so the Captain isn't tripping over your questions. We'll be right back with Captain Atkinson!
****Break****
George: Welcome back. As I'm sure many of you know, we've been following the construction of the L-1 Space Station since it began last June, and we've been trying to get Captain Atkinson to come on the program for the last six months. Now, we have him, Captain, Welcome aboard.
James: Thanks for having me George, I'm sorry I've been so hard to get a hold of, and call me James, please.
George: It's a pleasure. Can you give our listeners an explanation for the unique situation that we have here in this conversation? The time delay, specifically.
James: Of course. Communications technology is limited right now by the fact that we cannot exceed the speed of light with any consistency. I know some of your listeners are aware of the existence of things like Tachyons, particles that can exceed the speed of light, but we can't duplicate their creation reliably. They are almost accidents, and we have yet to figure out a way to encode information on these things. So we're limited by the fact that I am currently on the L-1 station, I'm actually sitting in my temporary office under the promenade while the Walkers are building my permanent office off of Operations. L-1 is situated in an orbit that we call Lagrange Point one. It's an area of dead gravity, the gravitational forces of the Moon and Earth cancel each other out. This area allows the station is float freely in space, with minimal attitude adjustments required to maintain a stable orbit.
George: Just how far away are you?
James: We are approximately three-quarters of the distance between the Earth and the Moon. Our exact distance depends on whether the Moon is in its Apogee or Perigee position of its orbit. You're looking at anywhere from two-hundred and seventy-one thousand to three-hundred and four thousand kilometers away. To put that in terrestrial terms, that is the distance between New York and Los Angeles, sixty-nine times. If you think that flight is long, you're right. And even Light can't do it very fast. In fact it takes anywhere from three-quarters of a second, to just over a second for light to make that trip. Since all our forms of communications are limited by the speed of light, it's taking just under a second right now for what I'm saying to make it to your headphones, George.
George: What would happen if you could exceed the speed of light?
James: Well there's some that theorize that exceeding the speed of light will allow you to travel backwards in time. That's not a theory that I subscribe to. I think the big flaw in that theory is that they don't take into account distance traveled. If we could even just send a message faster than light, it still won't get to you on Earth any sooner than I said it. We still perceive things at light speed. If say, I sent a file FTL to a critical piece of the electrical grid in the United States, that accidentally shut it down, they believe that if I sent the file faster than light, I would be able to see the shutdown of the grid before I sent the file. But I haven't sent the file yet, so, how did I shut it down? What really would happen, in my opinion, is that I would send the file, it would arrive instantaneously, and shut the grid down, one second later, I would notice it. Now an observer on Earth might notice, say if the FTL transmitter flashed when I sent the file, that the file arrived before I sent it. But only from their perspective, not in actuality. You and I could talk in real-time, but not much more than that.
George: Fascinating. One more question before we open up the phone lines, How goes the current phase of construction?
James: We're on schedule, the freighter will remain docked here for another day as it completes the transfer of its Extended Cargo Module, or ECM as we call it, to our Cargo Bay three position. Our Space Walking Construction People, or just Walkers as we call them, have already begun work on the command section for the station, they will also pull out the other half of the promenade and put that together, but not for another two days.
George: Once done, what will you have complete?
James: Operations, the Promenade will be completely finished. The Promenade will have the Infirmary, as well as a temporary kitchen. Beneath the Promenade we'll have temporary living quarters. Further down, but only accessible by EVA will be the one of six reactor cores, and the main battery storage. All that stuff will be controllable from Ops. In the Command sections, in addition to Operations, will be my office, the ward room, and three other offices. Two of those offices will serve as science labs, although they won't be fully equipped as such. The other office will belong to the Walker Leader. On the next mission up here, the Freighter will bring up part of our Gravity Deck, then we'll move all of our living arrangements into there, along with kitchen facilities.
George: Alright, when we come back, your calls with Captain Atkinson.
****Break****
Bumper Music: 'Gimmie Gimmie Gimme! (A Man after Midnight)' by ABBA
George: Welcome back, we'll open it up to some calls for this segment, and we'll start out with Mike, East of the Rockies, In Tennesee, You're up on Coast to Coast AM, with Captain James Atkinson.
Caller: George, Captain. How are you doing tonight?
George: Very Well, Mike. What's on your mind?
Caller: My question to the Captain is, you spent a couple of days in lunar orbit, did you see any sign of possible inhabitants? Over.
George: Very good, Captain?
James: Well Mike, we spent about four days in lunar orbit during the Coronal Mass Ejection just hiding from the worst of the storm. We spent a lot of time on the back side, or the dark side of the moon. Now it's not dark there, its just the side of the moon that you never see from Earth because it's always facing away. I can tell you with certainty that there is no one currently living on the Lunar Surface. There are no structures, aside from what was left behind by either the Apollo Astronauts, or the various unmanned missions that have left rovers, capsules, ecetera over the last sixty years. There's just nothing there that can support life. Could there be something hiding beneath the surface? Possibly, but I would figure the chances of that being extremely remote. But my exec and science officer, Captain Carter, is planning on taking a launch craft out there sometime next month to do some SONAR soundings. I will tell you something that is interesting though, we found a peculiar formation on the Dark Side of the Moon, we don't think it's natural, but sometimes Nature can do some tricky things.
George: Do you have any clue as to what it could be?
James: A number of things comes to mind, George. My current favorite theory is that this was a landing area for an alien ship. If we were to be observed by extra-terrestrials, this would be the most logical way to do so. Land on the dark side of the moon, and just listen. We send out enough radio chatter that if you were to be out here, you could glean a lot of good information. We pick up strong radio signals even way out here. If you wanted to take a peak, you could put up a small observatory satellite and it would be much harder to find than a starship.
George: Interesting, what kind of radio do you get up there?
James: AM radio. FM just doesn't make it up here, but there's five AM radio stations that we get almost as good as if we were in the intended listening area. KCKN out of Roswell, WXYT out of Detroit, WDCD out of Albany, WRKO out of Boston, and KTRH out of Houston. We get another ten to fifteen stations, but we need to filter out distortion and interference. Those five are simply the most powerful stations in the United States. When we're over Europe and Asia we get a set of stations that's comparable to those in the US.
George: What can you make out of those stations?
James: Well, like I said, those five stations are just as good as if we were situated in their listening area. The rest of them, with some filtering, you can get it to the point where it would be if you were just on the fringe of the area. It's good solid audio, if we're in the sports mood, we've got one baseball flagship station, KTRH for the Houston Astros. WRKO, WXYT and KTRH are pure news and talk stations, KCKN is a country music station, WDCD is a Christian talk station. This program, ironically, can be heard on the three news talk stations.
George: Nice, up next is Susan, First Time Caller Line. You're on Coast to Coast with Captain Atkinson.
Caller: Thank you George, long time listener, first time caller.
George: Thank you.
Caller: Captain, what's it like living in space? How is it different than living on Earth? oh... uh... over.
James: It's quite a bit different at times. For example, I've been kinda floating here during this entire conversation. It's really quite relaxing once you get over the fact that you aren't touching anything solid. We've been so engrained in our psyche that we need to be in contact with something, usually ground, but once you get past that, you can start to learn to just relax. There's no tension on your muscles. Now that makes things rather difficult too. You'd be surprised at just how many things you need some type of gravity for. Eating is difficult without it, as is releasing waste. It's also sort of dangerous to our muscular system. The old adage if you don't use it you lose it comes into play out here very fast.
George: How do you combat that?
James: The Muscular problem is not hard, we'll all spend about three hours on the Freighter's Grav Deck before it leaves tomorrow. We'll be lifting weights, doing some running, and other stuff like that to keep ourselves in shape. Our Bones will be de-calcifying. We think that we might have a way to combat that, but we won't be able to even try our experiment until the station's grav deck is installed.
George: We're going to take a break here, back with more from Captain Atkinson!
****Break****
Topic: L1 Intermission (Read 2638 times)