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

the Gecko said. "That's huge. We can cut corners, leave behind the redundancy,
get rid of the marginтАФwe can do it for a quarter of the launch mass."
There's an obscure law, you probably haven't heard of it, said that scrap
government property can be claimed for cost by any company which has a
legitimate business use for it. Far as I know, it's still on the books.
At the end of the Apollo program, NASA scrapped three complete Saturn rockets.
You can see them, rusting away on display, one in Huntsville, one in Houston,
one at the Cape. Lousy thing to do with a rocket, my opinion. We couldn't get
themтАФthe damn museums at the Space Centers refused to declare them excess. But
we found out that the engines and avionics for Apollo 21тАФthe long-lead-time
parts, all the important stuffтАФhad been manufactured before the mission was
canned. They were still there, in perfect shape, stashed in climate-controlled
warehouses in Alabama and California. We got dibs on them.
The Gecko was a tall gangly guy with an unpronounceable Polish name. You've
never heard of him, but he was an orbital mechanics wizard, which was really
something back in those days when a computer was a big hunk of temperamental
iron that took up a whole air-conditioned room. I had never seen him wear
anything other than a white button-down shirt, not even to the beach. Somebody
called him the Gecko because he moved like one, stock still for minutes, and
then suddenlyтАФblurтАФhe was somewhere else. The name stuck, even if the guy who
tagged him couldn't hack it and left the program.
Mr. Rich, that's Ricardo Capolongo. He was short, dapper, and always wore a
suit with a vest, even when vests were out of style. It was Mr. Rich tracked
down the spare Apollo parts, and Gecko who said, with no trace of drunkenness
in his voice, that if we could find backing, he could land us safely on the
moon, no problem.
We'd all read Heinlein. "The Man Who Sold the Moon," great story. It was our
inspiration. We could do it. There was money could be made in space, and the
entertainment industry was the place to make it.
So we made a pact. We were solemnly sober about it. We pledged to the project
everything we had: our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
We bought tickets west, and hit the streets of Hollywood. I had our financial
statements all worked out, knew how to talk knowledgeable about gross, net,
up-front money, shooting ratio. We were ready to show how the venture could
make money: just give us a billion dollars to put together a mission to the
moon, I could guarantee a profit: if not on television and first-run film
rights, then on the plastic models and Vue-Master and product endorsements. We
had all our T's dotted and our I's crossed, and we started right at the top of
the list.
We got laughed at. Kubrick we couldn't even talk to. Altman was too busy to
talk, this week and for the rest of the next decade. We moved down the list.
Once word started getting around Hollywood about the three nerds with their
wacko pitch, we had problems even getting in the door. Roddenberry told us to
shove off. We kept on pounding the pavement, moving down the list. Roger
Corman loved it, couldn't get the money together. Then further down yet.
Finally we scraped the bottom of the barrel, and when that didn't work, we
went lower yet.
We ended up with Danton Swiggs.
No, I don't doubt that you never heard of him, although he produced two, maybe
three hundred feature movies. He's known well enough in Hollywood, though.