"Geoffrey A. Landis - Shooting The Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

Shooting the Moon
by Geoffrey A. Landis

Yeah, kid, I've heard of you, or, anyway, I've heard of your organization. So
you're going to do a moon-flight, are you. No, I'm not laughing at youтАФI
believe that just maybe you can do it. The technology is there. It's been
there for thirty years, we both know that.
How'd you hear about me, anyway?
Really? That old son of a bitch.
Okay. Maybe you can. It's not the technology that's going to trip you up,
though. The technology is a piece of cake. I mean, it will be hard, it will be
harder than anything you can think of, but it will be easy in one sense: with
technology you know where you stand, you can figure out what's the best way to
do things.
With people, it's not so simple, kid, take it from an old man: the hard part,
the goddamn hard part, is the people.
You think you know it all, don't you? You think it's going to be easy. You
don't know a goddamn thing.
I'll tell you a story. That's what you came here for, isn't it? To hear a
story from the old man. You heard, somehow, about what we did, about what we
triedтАФor maybe you heard some, and you guessed some. And you heard that we
fucked up, and you want to know why. I can see that you really don't think
anything I can say will apply to you. You think you're golden and you can't
fail, and deep down you're sure that there's nothing that you can learn from
screw-ups like usтАФno, you didn't say that, but I was young once, I know how
you feel. We were young once, too, and we thought we knew what we were doing.
We did the calculations, yeah, the same ones you did.
This was back in the '70's. The Apollo program had come to a dead end, and we
were a bunch of hot-shit aerospace engineers scraping out a living, but we had
a dream. We were going to the moon. Not sending somebody, we were going to go
ourselves. Forget the government projects; we were a little disillusioned with
governmentтАФnothing against NASA, but we were the generation that saw Richard
Nixon cancel the Apollo moonflights, and scrap three working Saturn rockets,
and we didn't exactly trust big spaceflight projects. We were going to the
moon, and we were going to get Hollywood to pay for it.
Yeah, sure you've heard this story before. It's true now, and it was true back
thenтАФthere's enough money in the entertainment business to pay for a space
program out of petty cash. To Americans, spaceflight is entertainmentтАФscience
is just a sidelight, an excuse for the spectacle.
Okay. Shut up. Here's the story.


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Project Moon was going to be the greatest spectacle ever filmed, a spectacle
to out-spectacle Star Wars; a real moon landing, filmed live on the moon.
It was Mr. Rich and the Gecko that thought of it, mostly. They dragged me into
it, and we refined the ideas over more than a few beers at the Thirsty Ear. "I
figure the Apollo spacecraft had a factor of two margin on the lunar surface,"