"James E. Gunn - Station In Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gunn James E)

"If there is any inefficiency, if there is any blame for what has happened, it lies at the door of those who
lacked confidence in the courage and ability of their countrymen to fight free of Earth to the greatest
glory. Senator, how did you vote on that?"

But I am not writing a history. The shelves are full of them. I will touch on the international repercussions
only enough to show that the event had no more respect for national boundaries than Rev's orbiting ship.

The orbit was almost perpendicular to the equator. The ship traveled as far north as Nome, as far south
as Little America on the Antarctic Continent. It completed one giant circle every two hours. Meanwhile,
the Earth rotated beneath. If the ship had been equipped with adequate optical instruments, Rev could
have observed every spot on Earth within twenty-four hours. He could have seen fleets and their
dispositions, aircraft carriers and the planes taking off their decks, troop maneuvers.

In the General Assembly of the United Nations, the Russian ambassador protested this unwarranted and
illegal violation of its national boundaries. He hinted darkly that it would not be allowed to continue. The
U.S.S.R. had not been caught unprepared, he said. If the violation went onтАФ"every few hours!"
тАФdrastic steps would be taken.

World opinion reared up in indignation. The U.S.S.R. immediately retreated and pretended, as only it
could, that its belligerence had been an unwarranted inference and that it had never said anything of the
sort, anyway.

This was not a military observer above our heads. It was a man who would soon be dead unless help
reached him.

A world offered what it had. Even the U.S.S.R. announced that it was outfitting a rescue ship, since its
space program was already on the verge of success. And the American public responded with more than
a billion dollars within a week. Congress appropriated another billion. Thousands of men and women
volunteered.

The race began.

Would the rescue party reach the ship in time? The world prayed.

And it listened daily to the voice of a man it hoped to buy back from death.

The problem shaped up like this:

The trip had been planned to last for only a few days. By careful rationing, the food and water might be
stretched out for more than a month, but the oxygen, by cutting down activity to conserve it, couldn't
possibly last more than thirty days. That was the absolute outside limit.

I remember reading the carefully detailed calculations in the paper and studying them for some hopeful
error. There was none.

Within a few hours, the discarded first stage of the ship had been located floating in the Atlantic Ocean. It
was towed back to Cocoa, Florida. Almost a week was needed to find and return to the Proving
Grounds the second stage, which had landed 906 miles away.