Robotics
The Crew That Never Leaves the Ground
The first people to build a space station will clock in on the ground and drive home for dinner. Why geosynchronous orbit, why robots, and why the operator’s seat is a brand-new trade.
Picture a shift change. A welder pulls into the parking lot at six in the morning with his lunch pail and a thermos, badges in, and sits down in a control room. He puts on a headset and grips two hand controllers. When the screen comes up, he's looking at a steel truss hanging in black space, 22,000 miles above the Pacific. For the next ten hours, he'll be building a space station. At four thirty, he'll drive home for dinner.
That's the job I want to talk about, because I think it's the real beginning of the space industry. It isn't astronauts. It's operators.
Why so high
The International Space Station sits about 250 miles up. That sounds close, and it is, but it whips around the planet every 90 minutes or so. 1 A control room on the ground only has it in view for a few minutes at a time before it drops over the horizon. You can't run a construction site where the radio cuts out every few minutes.
So we go higher, all the way out to geosynchronous orbit, about 22,000 miles up. At that height, one trip around the Earth takes exactly as long as the Earth takes to turn once. 2 To a control room on the ground, anything parked there just hangs in the sky in the same spot, all day, every day. Your communications satellites and TV dishes have relied on this for fifty years. Point the antenna once, and the link never drops. That's what a construction site needs.
The lag
There's a delay. A radio signal takes about an eighth of a second to get up there and another eighth to come back. So when the operator moves his hand, he sees the robot move about a quarter of a second later, maybe half a second if the signal goes through a relay. If you've ever talked long distance on a bad line, you know the feel. It takes a little getting used to, but a skilled hand adapts, the same way a crane operator learns how his rig swings. Compare that to the Moon, where the round trip is closer to three seconds, or Mars, where it can be forty minutes. Geosynchronous orbit is close enough to work by hand.
Why robots
Geosynchronous orbit is a rough neighborhood. It sits out near the edge of the Van Allen belts, where radiation is hard on people and hard on electronics. 3 Spacewalks are dangerous, slow, and expensive, and every hour a person spends outside is an hour they're exposed. A robot doesn't need air, food, or sleep, and if one gets cooked by radiation, you send up another. It's the same rule we use on the North Slope: put the machine in harm's way, not the man.
None of this is science fiction. Ground controllers already drive the space station's big robotic arm from Earth. 4 And in 2020, a spacecraft built by Northrop Grumman flew out to geosynchronous orbit, latched onto an aging communications satellite, and gave it years more life. 5 The pieces are already flying.
What the robots do
The robots do the same work any construction crew does: haul material, set it in place, bolt it, weld it, and inspect it. They'll work in shifts, because a station in geosynchronous orbit never goes out of contact. One crew hands off the controls to the next, and the work never stops.
A new industry
This is the part that gets me excited. Every one of those robots needs an operator, and every operator needs training. That means schools, certification, shift supervisors, maintenance techs, and quality inspectors watching the welds through a camera. We'll need the people who already know how to build: welders, ironworkers, riggers, and electricians. Their skills don't change. Only the distance does.
That's a brand-new industry, with real paychecks, in real towns, starting on the ground.
Everybody builds it
I've said it before: anybody who wants to go should be able to go. But not everybody can, or will, at least not at first. This is how everyone gets a hand in it anyway. A grandmother in Ohio, a kid out of trade school in Anchorage, or a retired pipefitter in Texas could all go home at night and say, “I built part of that.”
When the station is finished, spinning up there with people living inside, every one of them will be able to look up and know they helped build it. That's how you build something for everybody. You let everybody build it.
It sounds like a daunting task, and it is. But we are the ones who will make it happen.
From one explorer to another, we appreciate you reading this far. We are excited about what this endeavor brings, and we would like you along for the rest of it.
Come join us. Because we are Star Bound.
John LangEditor
Ideas in Star Bound are published open — take them, build them better. Our open proposal.
A note on where this comes from. I am not a metallurgist, a spacecraft engineer, or a degreed engineer of any kind. But I am a practical one, with more than forty years in heavy industrial construction: welding, millwright work, hydraulics, mining, and thirty-three years of electrical construction and commissioning on the North Slope of Alaska, in a place that punishes anything built wrong. Much of that time I have worked as a field engineer, which means I am the one standing in front of the equipment when the drawing turns out to be wrong, and the fix has to be made on the spot, with what is on hand, and has to work the first time. Anyone who has done that long enough learns that a lot of engineering gets corrected in the field by people with more experience than the people who drew it. That is the eye I bring to these subjects: not what should work on paper, but what actually gets built, and what breaks. The facts I take from other people are footnoted so you can check them and read further. The ideas built on top of those facts are my own, and I would rather see them knocked down by somebody who knows better than left standing because nobody looked.
Sources
- NASA, "International Space Station Facts and Figures" — orbital altitude of roughly 250 miles and about 16 orbits a day, one every 90 minutes or so. ↩
- "Geostationary orbit," Wikipedia — about 35,786 km (22,236 miles) above the equator, orbital period equal to one turn of the Earth. ↩
- "Van Allen radiation belt," Wikipedia — the outer belt and its effect on satellites near geosynchronous altitude. ↩
- "Mobile Servicing System (Canadarm2)," Wikipedia — the station arm is routinely operated by flight controllers on the ground. ↩
- "Mission Extension Vehicle," Wikipedia — MEV-1 docked with Intelsat 901 in geosynchronous orbit in February 2020 and extended its service life. ↩
The signal-delay figures are my own arithmetic from the speed of light and the distances involved, and are offered to be checked. The ground-operator industry is my own idea.
More from Star Bound
- Top of the Loop, Bottom of the LoopThe two animals nobody budgets for, and what happened the last time we forgot them
- Light Is the ThrottleWhat a mine in Idaho and a garden in Alaska taught us about growing things fast — and what continuous daylight does to a plant that never gets to sleep
- Commission It FirstWe have already run phase one. It cost one man 150 million dollars of his own money, and it very nearly killed the people inside.
- Life in the BarrelO’Neill gave us the barrel in 1976 and got very little of it wrong. What he did not finish was the inside — and the standard the inside has to meet isn’t twenty years. It’s forever.
- Worms: The Backbone of CivilizationWhy the first Martians will need a bucket of worms more than another rocket
- Send the Robots FirstWhy the road to Mars runs through the moon, and why the first lunar miners will never leave Earth
- Wet the Ground and WaitA passive water generator for the desert, and why we should build one before we need one on Mars
- Send the Refinery, Not the OreWhy the belt gets mined by factory ships, and why that is the one job we cannot run from a chair
- Grind the Asteroid, Print the PartWhy there will never be a steel mill in space, and what replaces it
- A Thousand GaragesBefore there is a printer in space, there has to be a shipyard on the ground, and the shipyard does not have to be in one place
- Powder or WireThe two ways to print metal, why neither one is ready for the Belt, and the questions somebody has to answer first
- Bones Don't Travel WellThe one problem no rocket solves, and why Gerard O'Neill worked out the answer in 1976
- Blow the Rock Like GlassMy father's answer to how you build something big enough to spin, and the man who worked it out in 1963
- Built for Earth, or Built for Something Bigger?The tools a colony needs are being perfected right now, by people who say they are building them for us
- Mission Watch: September 2026What private enterprise and the agencies actually did this summer, in the order that matters
- The Question I Asked Buzz AldrinIn 1996 I asked the second man on the Moon what part private enterprise would play in space. Thirty years later, the answer is checkable
- Sixteen Inches of SteelThe number that breaks the mile-wide barrel, four ways around it, the one we would bet on, and a file you can print tonight
- Launch the Parts, Not the ShipYou cannot launch a habitat big enough to spin. So you launch a shipyard, and you let the robots build it.
- Fish, Salt, or DirtThree ways to feed a habitat, what each one costs you, what each one can't survive, and a question for the reader.
- Thirty Thousand Volts and a Piece of Tin FoilI drove an hour and a half to call a man a liar. He turned on a computer monitor instead, and I have been thinking about it for twenty years.
- The Box Nobody TestedIn 1991 eight people were sealed inside three acres of glass to prove a closed world could keep them alive. It nearly didn't, and the reason was sitting in the walls the whole time.
- Out the Side of the MountainTwenty miles of vacuum tube under a Hawaiian volcano, and a freight train that never comes back down. What a ground-based mass driver would actually take, and why it exits the flank instead of the summit.
- That’s Not a Rocket, It’s a Freight TrainHow I wired the one on my bench in 1994, the one I drew and never built, and why a mass driver runs on railroad logic, not rocket logic.
- Cold, Vacuum, and a Hundred Thousand JointsWhat geosynchronous orbit does to the ten-inch panels in "A Thousand Garages," starting with the question every steel man asks first — and one thing that article got wrong.
- One Press or Ten ThousandElon Musk casts a car underbody in one shot with a machine the size of a house. We proposed ten thousand garages. It turns out we may both be right, on different walls — but nobody knows until somebody breaks fifty panels on purpose.
- Cast It or Print ItThree ways to make a hundred thousand habitat panels. What each one buys you, what each one costs you, and where each one belongs. The first entry in a department that exists to write both columns down.
- Powder or PlateThe garages stay. What's in them changes.
- Refuel It or Strip ItThe graveyard belt is the closest junkyard we've got.
- A Message in a Bottle, Thrown HardEvery article in this magazine is about how to build something. This one is about how to pay for it.
- The Long Haul Versus the Quick CallOne road gets six hand-picked astronauts there fast. The other gets everybody there for good. Why Star Bound takes the long one.
- The BackhaulSpace has always run one way and thrown the trailer away. Every trucker knows that’s no way to make a living. Here is the return trip.
Comments
Star Bound is not a forum, so comments run the old way: if you have comments, please write to us at hello@starboundmagazine.com and they will be published here in the next update, with your name on them. Say if you would rather stay anonymous.
No comments posted on this one yet. Yours could be the first.