"Paul J. McAuley - How we Lost the Moon - A True Story by Frank W. Allen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

the rim, was being evacuated; the radio telescopes of the Big Array,
scattered across the far side in a regular pattern, were to be kept running by
remote link. Most of the personnel had already de-parted by shuttle, and
although there were still large amounts of equipment to be taken out, the
railway which linked Korolev with Clavius had been cut by a rock slide. After
a couple of spooky daysтАЩ rest in the almost deserted yet fully functional
station, Mike and I went out with a couple of other GLPs to supervise the
robots which were clearing the slide and re-laying track.

It was a nice ride: the pressurized railcar had a big observational
bubble, and I spent a lot of time up there, watching the heavily cratered
highland plains flow past at two hundred kilometers an hour. The Orientale
Basin dominated the west side of the Moon: a fissured basin of fractured
blocks partly flooded with impact melt lava and ringed round with three
immense scarps and an inner bench like ripples frozen ,in rock. The
engineers had cut the railway through the rings of the Rook and Cordillera
Mountains; the landslide had blocked the track where it passed close to
one of the tall knobs of the Montes Rook Formation, a ten-kilometer-high
piece of ejecta which had smashed down onto the surrounding plain тАФthe
impact really was very big.

A slide had run out from one of its steeply graded faces, covering
more than a kilometer of track, and we were more than a week out there,
helping the robots fix everything up. When we finally arrived at the station in
Clavius, it was a day ahead of the Mendeleev eruption and the beginning of
the evacuation of the Moon.

****

The whole floor of the Mendeleev Crater had fractured into blocks in the
biggest quake ever recorded on the Moon, and lava had flooded up through
dykes emplaced between the blocks. Lava vented from dykes beyond the
crater rim, too, and flowed a long way, forming a new mare. Other vents
appeared, setting off secondary quakes and long rock slides. The Moon
shivered and shook uneasily, as if awakening from a long sleep.

Small teams were sent out to collect the old Rangers, Lunas,
Surveyors, Lu-nokhods, and descent stages of Apollo LEMs from the first
wave of Moon explo-ration. Mike and I went out for a last time, to Mare
Tranquillitatis, to the site of the first manned lunar landing.

When a permanent scientific presence had first been established on
the Moon, there was considerable debate about what to do with the sites of
the Apollo land-ings and the various old robot probes and other debris
scattered across the surface. There had been a serious proposal to dome
the Apollo 11 site to protect it from damage by micrometeorites and to stop
people from swiping souvenirs, but even without protection it would last for
millions of years, and everyone on the Moon was tagged with a
continuously monitored global positioning sensor so no one could go
anywhere without it being logged, and in the end the site had been left