"Jerry Oltion - Abandon in Place (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oltion Jerry)

and everyone knew it. The aging shuttle fleet was all America had, and all it
was likely to get for the foreseeable future. Even if NASA could shake off the
bureaucratic stupor it had fallen into and propose a new program, Congress would
never pass an appropriations bill for the hardware.
Rick looked away, but a flicker of motion drew his attention back to pad 34,
where brilliant floodlights now lit a gleaming white rocket and its orange
support tower. Rick blinked, but it didn't go away. He stepped closer to the
railing and squinted. Where had that come from? Over half of it rose above the
dawn line; Rick looked over the edge of the AtlantisтАЩs gantry and made a quick
guess based on his own height. That rocket had to be over three hundred feet
tall.
Three hundred and sixty-three, to be exact. Rick couldn't measure it that
exactly, but he didn't need to. He recognized the black-striped Saturn V


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instantly, and he knew its stats by heart. He had memorized them when he was a
kid, sitting in front of his parents' black-and-white tv set while he waited for
the liftoffs. Three hundred sixty-three feet high, weighing over three thousand
tons when fueled, the five F-1 engines in its first stage producing seven and a
half million pounds of thrust--it was the biggest rocket ever built.
And it had also been over thirty years since the last of them flew. Rick closed
his eyes and rubbed them with his left hand. Evidently Neil's death had affected
him more than he thought. But when he looked to the south again he still saw the
brilliant white spike standing there in its spotlight glare, mist swirling down
its side as the liquid oxygen in its tanks chilled the air around the massive
rocket.
Rick was alone on the gantry. Everyone else was inside, arguing about the
payload insertion procedure. He considered going in and asking someone to come
out and tell him if he was crazy or not, but he abandoned that thought
immediately. One week before his first flight, he wasn't about to confess to
hallucinations.
It sure looked real. Rick watched the dawn line creep down the Saturn's flank,
sliding over the ever-widening stages until it reached the long cylinder of the
main body. The spectacle was absolutely silent. The only sound came from closer
by: the squeak and groan of the shuttle gantry expanding as it began to warm
under the light.
Then, without warning, a billowing cloud of reddish white smoke erupted from the
base of the rocket. The eye-searing brightness of RP-1 and oxygen flame lit up
the cloud from within, and more exhaust blasted sideways out of the flame
deflectors.
Rick felt the gantry vibrate beneath him, but there was still no sound. The
exhaust plume rose nearly as high as the nose cone, roiling like a mushroom
cloud over an atomic blast, then slowly the rocket began to lift. Bright white
flame sprayed the entire launch pad as the thundering booster, gulping thousands
of gallons of fuel per second, rose into the sky. Only when the five bell-shaped
nozzles cleared the gantry--nearly ten seconds after liftoff--did the solid beam
of flame grow ragged at the edges. A few final tongues of it licked the ground,