Ferry Rocket by Edmund Cooper

Author:Edmund Cooper [COOPER, EDMUND]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2020-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

THE SECOND POWER MANŒUVRE

THE voyage began to develop its own routine. Time passed slowly for the crew, whose work consisted chiefly of supervising the combination of electronic brains, which was in complete control of the moonship. Once or twice the engineers and the captain donned their headpieces and made external examinations of the hull and its light meteor-bumpers. But there was little for them to do. An automatic radio contact had been established with Lunar City; and once, Sir Fabian Scott looked up the captain of the moonship on the visulator. But his conversation was confined entirely to questions relating to the flight, together with a formal enquiry after Claire’s well-being. He did not ask to see her, and Wilson thought it best not to mention the fact that Sir Fabian had been in contact, to the passengers.

Early on the fifth “day,” the moonship passed the gravity frontier—the point between Moon and Earth where the gravitational pull of each body is perfectly balanced. By this time the unpowered momentum-velocity of the space-ship had dropped to four hundred miles an hour. But from then on, it would begin to accelerate, as the lunar gravity became stronger and stronger, while the Earth-pull proportionately decreased.

The moon, now only twenty thousand miles away, stared up with a bright, baleful stillness—all its craters, its lava plains, its high volcanic mountains thrown into weird relief by the green earth-light. Presently the sun would rise, to change that greenish desolate moonscape into a fierce, burning wilderness whose equatorial temperature would be above boiling-point. But the lunar day—as long as fourteen earth-days—would not begin until after the moonship had touched down.

Having passed the gravity frontier, the moonship began to pick up speed, racing to the point, only six hours away and five hundred miles above the lunar surface, when the second power manœuvre would begin. By that time, the moonship would have gathered a velocity of nearly six thousand miles an hour; and unless something was done to retard this headlong flight, it would smash into the face of the moon like some vast meteor.

The second power manœuvre, which was designed to make zero velocity and zero altitude coincide, consisted in its first stage of turning the space-ship round. This was technically known as reversing the altitude; and it was the trickiest part of the whole manœuvre, since a successful landing could be turned into a disaster if the altitude of the ship was the slightest fraction of a degree out. As soon as the altitude had been reversed by means of the gyro-manipulator, the rocket motors, now pointing directly at the moon, would begin firing. Hundreds of tons of hydrazine and nitric acid would be translated into a blast of green flame bearing down to the moon’s surface. In this way, firing against the thrust of the ship, the rocket motors would begin to knock off speed until, as on previous trips, the sleek monster settled as gracefully as a ballet dancer. The accurate correlation of velocity/altitude decrease was a problem too large for the human brain to tackle.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.