Sundancer's heart was the PB-4 automatic camera. The mission was to make close-in, high-speed telescopic observations of the surface and corona of the sun. The PB-4 ran at twenty-thousand frames per second: at top speed, the film runs through the camera well over the speed of sound. That's fast. We could kill a kilometer of film in just about the time it would take you to sneeze. The film itself was a cross-linked carbide polymer. It had to be, to take the stress of feeding through that camera.
I looked back at Antaeus station. It was unlikely and beautiful, a spindly, three-armed white octopus studded with antennae, docking ports, windows, and manipulator arms. Humans don't absolutely need gravity, but it is convenient for many industrial operations--try pouring molten steel in zero gee, for example--and it is useful to do your exercising under gee to avoid space adaptation: bone calcium loss and reduction of muscle mass. To simulate gravity, you make the station radius large and spin it slowly; otherwise the spin causes dizziness and disorientation whenever you stand up or turn your head. Antaeus consisted of one-gee living quarters on the ends of twenty-kilometer cables, with lower-gee stations dotted up and down the cables and a large spherical manufacturing station at the hub counterspun for zero gee. Two-person emergency re-entry pods clung in bunches like grapes around the living quarters.
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