"Michael McCollum - Thunderstrike" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCollum Michael)

Luna, The RockтАЩs closest passage in more than a century.

The asteroid might have escaped notice even then had its discovery been left to the optical
astronomers. They had their instruments focused far beyond cislunar space, indeed, outside the Solar
System altogether. Their interest lay in exploding galaxies and distant quasars. They left the mundane
business of adding yet another minor planet to the list of known Earth-approaching asteroids to others.

Luckily, the volume of space between Earth and Moon had long been saturated with traffic control
radars. As The Rock made its approach, one such radar suffered a breakdown in its ranging circuits.
Rather than report only those signals it had been designed to see, the radar began registering everything in
sight. When it announced a swiftly moving object two million kilometers beyond Luna, the traffic control
center at Luna City quickly took notice. The center tracked the rogue asteroid for more than an hour
before it drifted below their local horizon. The traffic controllers computed the path of the mystery
object. They reported the information to the System Astronomical Union, where it languished for two
decades.

There had been schemes to mine the mineral wealth of the asteroids as far back as the mid-twentieth
century, and actual attempts early in the twenty- first. All had failed. The time and distance involved in
travel to and from the Asteroid Belt had made the mines too expensive to operate.

In the year 2060, a graduate student by the name of Halver Smith chose asteroid mining for his doctoral
thesis in Business Economics. Smith concluded that there was nothing inherently uneconomical about
such operations. Indeed, a cubic kilometer of asteroidal metal delivered to Earth was worth more than
the combined gross domestic products of the three largest nations. The problem remained the delay
inherent in shipping supplies to the Asteroid Belt and returning product to Earth.

Smith suggested a solution to the problem. Instead of traveling to the Asteroid Belt, he reasoned, why not
move an asteroid into orbit about the Earth. This he dubbed the тАЬMountain to Mohammed Method.тАЭ
Such a plan would require the discovery of the proper asteroid in the proper orbit. To buttress his
arguments, Smith searched the Astronomical UnionтАЩs data banks for likely candidates. It was during this
search that he came across the report of the close approach of 2037.

Halver Smith was rewarded a Ph.D. in Business Economics. His proposal had not, however, been
thought very practical. After graduation, he used a small inheritance to invest in a new process for
extracting rare earths from low-grade ore. It had proven a once-in-a-lifetime investment. Halver Smith
had quickly earned a fortune. As his wealth grew, he began to seriously consider putting his thesis into
practice.

Tom Thorpe was a newly minted graduate of the Colorado School of Mines when he answered Halver
SmithтАЩs advertisement for vacuum qualified mining engineers. The job, he soon learned, was the
exploration of an Earth-approaching asteroid. He and a dozen other young vacuum monkeys had
clustered around the viewports of the Prospecting ShipSierra Madre as it made its final approach. At
first sight of their destination, Perry Allen, the most vocal of the group, exclaimed: тАЬItтАЩs nothing but a
goddamned rock!тАЭ The name might as well have been applied with quick drying adhesive.

They spent the next month swarming all over the asteroid. They drilled deeply into its surface and
assayed the purity of their samples. They probed even deeper with powerful sonic beams. Their
analyses confirmed that The Rock was a treasure trove, a nearly pure chunk of nickel-iron seamed with
copper, silver, and gold. Ten months later, Thorpe had found himself back on The Rock, this time in the
company of a full crew of mining specialists and a shipload of heavy equipment.