Jetsom

The extraction platform Jetsom floats like a hot-air balloon in the atmosphere of Venturi, supported by bags of gas heated by atomic reactors. It does not have a fixed position but is blown around by the planet's winds. It does, however, maintain a constant altitude. Jetsom has a distillation tower which extracts crude forms of Cys-DE and Meta-TI from the atmosphere. The platform is manned by two crews of four (the Alpha and Beta teams) who work 38-day tours of duty with 38-day rest periods on the Moneyspider. The crew is aided by a number of robots and several sapes provided as part of a developmental project by Renouf Associates. Venturi's stormy atmosphere makes normal radio transmission impossible, and so Jetsom has a subspace radio for communicating with the Moneyspider.  The automated shuttles have normal radios and so lose touch with Moneyspider once they enter the atmosphere.