AIAA San Francisco Section Newsletter
March 1996


The Heliophiles Lament
Dreaming of Orbital Sunshine

by
Brenda Forman
drbforman@aol.com



It is January in Washington, D.C., and as ever, the weather is grey,
rainy, cold, dismal, dispiriting and depressing.  In a word, yechhh.
If this town had a decent climate, it would be the niftiest city in the
world.  Unhappily, it doesnt.

The result is that Im coming down with SAD -- Seasonal Affective
Disorder, that dreary siege of The Dismals that afflicts chronic
sun-worshipers like me when the clouds roll in and park their fat
fannies overhead for days on end.

As they say in Mudville, though, somewhere the sun is shining and
somewhere hearts are light.  Break through the cloud cover and by Jove,
there is Old Sol, shining with all his might.  Get even higher into a
nice stable orbit and you could bathe in continual sunshine. Just
thinking about it makes my heart go pittypat.  Forget a White
Christmas.

Im dreaming of being shamelessly pampered in a luscious resort and spa
in a sun-synchronous orbit where I can float in a big, zero-g solarium,
soaking up my fill of some suitably filtered rays.  No sand in my
suit.  No raggedy beach blanket to launder.  Just warmth and light and
weightlessness.  Ahhh.

And why not a seaside on orbit too?  Next door, well put a cylindrical
module, add enough water to make a circumferential ocean, rotate the
whole thing on its long axis, and go swimming underwater with all that
sun shining through the glass.  Ohhh, yeahhh...

Hey, Im on a roll.  After sun and swim, what more logical than a
massage, eh?

Now that could be a challenge in zero-g.  Prod those lats ever so
gently and you and your masseur carom apart against the walls like a
couple of billiard balls.  So maybe you have to spin the whole module
with a tether or two for some artificial gravity.  Or maybe you have to
dream up some weird sort of Rube Goldberg exoskeleton to hold both
parties in place while you get deliciously pummeled.  (Uncomfortable?
Kinky?  Both?)  What the hell, as my friend Peter says, "Given a
choice, take both."  Let the customers choose, say

I.  (All choices kept strictly confidential.)

Then theres the bar.  Now, I dont know about you, but I absolutely will
NOT contemplate putting my best single malt Scotch in those NASA
general issue plastic squeeze bottle affairs.  I just know that the
Baccarat or Waterford folks can design us some classy combination of
crystal retort and pipette to enable us to sip our libations with
style, not to mention free of the taste of polyvinyl chloride.  Getting
your martini olive in and out might be a problem, but hey, thats just a
little challenge for Yankee ingenuity.  Come on, folks, we can DO
this!

So what do we do for honeymooners and other deserving patrons deeply in
lust?

A spacesuit built for two, of course!  The ultimate togetherness:
smooching under a dual helmet at the end of your safety umbilical while
contemplating the beauties of the planet from the depths of space.
Trust me, you will definitely be able to say that the Earth moved.

And finally, I figure that if this idea catches on, market pull will at
long last solve that most burning of all space questions:  how do you
build a dependable zero/low-g toilet?  Delicacy forbids a true
description here of what shuttle astronauts must put up with but trust
me, no sybaritic resort patron is likely to tolerate it for an
instant.  Theres nothing like the profit motive to fuel invention,
though, so if theres serious money to be made, human ingenuity will at
long last figure out a way to make pooping orbit easy and comfortable.

In the meantime, here I sit, grumping about the weather and waiting for
some mega-corporation (Marriott?  Hyatt?  Shimizu?) to get this ball
rolling.  I hope they hurry.  That sky looks like the sun aint never
gonna shine on me again.