tracks to position equipment and provide a logistics capability to transport supplies and operating personnel. The base also acts as a receiving depot for OTV traffic and it provides personnel housing. Also considered as construction support equipment (CSE), are manned remote work stations as illustrated in concept in figure A-36. This concept provides close contact with work to be performed while maintaining the crew in a controlled environment. A variety of remote manipulators will be needed ranging from short precise ones to space cranes to accomplish tasks at over 100 meters from facility supports. Some CSE tasks are the assembly of automatically fabricated beams into the deep trusses needed for the primary structure, servicing deployment machines, and installing equipment modules. The task of construction of very large lightweight structure resulted in the concept of a "beam builder". This is construction equipment which takes preprocessed flat strip material, forms the strip into a structural shape for the cap member of a triangular truss, and attaches cross members to the cap to complete the structural truss (figure A-37). An alternative approach is a automatic beam assembler which builds the lightweight truss structure from prefabricated structural elements. The solar cell blankets are to be stretched in membrane fashion between bays of the structural truss. The blankets can be densely packaged in a container which is loaded into construction equipment which performs the deployment. If concentrating reflectors are used in the configuration, deployment directly from the shipping container by the construction equipment is a conceptual approach. The reflector will require tension support to achieve the required flatness. This requirement complicates the installation by the need to join the packaged strips at the edges and to apply a lateral stretching force within each structural bay. The power busses are thin flat strips several meters wide to permit
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