The "steampunk" propulsion system had basically worked as planned—though not without a lot of tinkering and head scratching—on the first "burn" that had put it on the course back to L1. There had, however, been some problems with the augers that were used to feed ice into the reactor chamber. The augers received their inputs of ice from hoppers that had to be filled up by "mining" solid ice from the inside of the shard, a process for which robots were well suited, and so nothing worked at all without the assistance of a small army of robots conveying flakes of ice from mine head to hopper like ants dismantling a loaf of sugar. This part of it had actually worked. But some of the pieces of ice being mined by the robots had little rocks in them. These jammed the augers. Jams could often be repaired by operating the auger in reverse for a short time, but sometimes a robot, or even a person in a space suit, had to be sent to pry a rock out of the mechanism. An auger accident had led to the death of one member of the crew.