The major systems of spaceships will need to he made with special- purpose nanotechnological mechanisms, and indeed with such mechanisms pushed much closer to their true capacities than anything we have talked about heretofore. In the spaceship’s cabin, however, will be art acceleration couch. When not accelerating, which is most of the time, we’d prefer something useful, like empty space, there. The Utility Fog makes a better acceleration couch, anyway. Fill the cabin with Utility Fog and never worry about floating out of reach of a handhold. Instruments, consoles, and cabinets for equipment and sup plies are not needed. Non-simulable items can be em bedded in the fog in what are apparently bulkheads.
The Fog can add great structural strength to the ship itself; the rest of the structure need he not much more than a balloon. The same is true for spacesuits:
Fog inside the suit manages the air pressure and makes motion easy; Fog outside gives extremely fine manipulating ability for various tasks. Of course, like the ship, the suit contains many special purpose non-Fog mechanisms.
Surround the space station with Fog. It needs radiation shielding anyway (if the occupants are long-term); use big industrial Foglets with lots of redundancy in the mechanism; even so they may get re cycled fairly often. All the stock problems from SF movies go away: humans never need go outside merely to fix something; when EVA is desired for transfer or recreation, outside Fog provides complete safety and motion control. It also makes a good tugboat for docking spaceships.
Homesteaders on the Moon could bring along a batch of heavy duty Fog as well as the special-purpose nanotech power generation and waste recycling equipment. There will be a million and one things, of the ordinary yet arduous physical task kind, that must be done to set up and maintain a self- sufficient house hold.
