(Page 1 of 2) The SheepOne Solution by Dan BiegerSUMMARY: Atmospherics on Space Station SheepOneTry to remember the summers of your youth, what the air felt like, how the sun toasted your skin, how afternoon baseball games lasted for such a short time as the heat drove you indoors. Try to remember what it smelled like. Folk I know from the Midwestern U.S., they have aromas to remember, strawberry field, corn fields, wheat fields. Those of us from the Sonoran desert can't compete. Oh, there are succulents with flowers that if you get close enough, you can't catch a whiff of sweetness but getting too lose to Sonoran succulents is not something to be recommended. The thorns hurt.
Still, remembering summer is a perennial exercise, particularly when your home is now SheepOne, the station in L5 orbit to earth. Always following the earth around the sun, a wag in a position of influence decided the ancient nursery rhyme applied. So, one of Mary's little lambs became SheepOne.
A space station has an interior atmosphere regulated by complex machinery. On SheepOne the machinery was programmed to provide a semblance of earth's atmosphere, chilling off when earth was in winter, warming when earth found her way to summer. One of the better continuous debates was why SheepOne wasn't programmed to be two months behind earth for its change of seasons. We were, afterall, two months behind her in her orbit. We were following earth, not orbiting it.
Shipping costs from earth to SheepOne made the transfer of fresh food an economic dead end. Therefore, SheepOne has its own agriculture. In former days, folk referred to this as hydroponics but we are not in the former days. SheepOne is home to 5000 people requiring an agricultural footprint of 4000 acres for sustainability. That's seven square miles of the inner ring devoted to growing food. There's another seven square miles devoted to livestock. Fortunately, the livestock area is partitioned off from the rest of the station. Well, so is the ag area. So, the pungent aromas associated with either or both never make it into the living areas of the station.
Problem solved, eh? Not so fast. Have you been around human type persons for any extended periods of time? Take 5000 individual persons, each with their own thoughts on personal hygiene. After a few years, the complex machinery with its complex filters reaches its performance limits, mechanically throws up its hand in despair, and simply does the best it can from there on out.
We're at the there on out phase.
We're not happy about that. Most nights in the pub, the conversation runs to the stench in the air. The place is beginning to smell lived in. What does lived in smell like? Go back to the days of your youth. Remember your secondary education and the mandatory physical education classes. Remember the locker rooms, either girls or boys, it doesn't matter. They both had a reek unmistakeable and unforgettable. SheepOne is beginning to resemble those locker rooms.
Management's position was and is predictable. New filter systems can be ordered, shipped, and could arrive within six months. At a cost. A very high cost. At a too high cost? Management is working that problem.
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