I'm considering more fun with Farrukh Balsara's favourite metal. Once in a safe orbit we're storing the beast. But as the Japanese tell us in AGILE training, storing is boring. In less poetic translation: inventory is waste.
It turns out that mercury has uses in deep space. It's hydrodynamic. George O Smith considered a space-station in Venus Equilateral, that is the SVL4 trojan halo. Smith wanted quicksilver as a power-generation mechanism. This, because although writing after the photoelectric effect he despaired of photovoltaic technology.
To restore Smith to his well-earned glory as a Grand Master of his art, instead of massive vats of propellant, which just sit there taking hits from micrometeors, we'd store the mercury in the power-generator. It could work alongside solar-panels, especially when those panels are being taken down for repair. Also the heat-transfer could serve as a radiator to keep the inside cool.
The quicksilver gets drained to supply interplanetary missions but those happen at specific launch-windows, giving plenty of time for resupply. And all that 19th-century amalgamation we don't do on Earth anymore can be done out there.
If someone has a hankering for an extra telescope, like as a hobby, there's also the mercury mirror. Although we might want a gravity-well for those.
UGH 12/10/23: In 2022, I should have been able to ctl-F on the text. I'd just worked from hazy memory, here. Smith, of course, did exactly the opposite of this poast; he'd used an "atomic pile" (until he digs out Martian tech in "The Long Way"). Lester Del Rey was the man who considered mercury.
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