"Davis, Jerry - Abandon in Place" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davis Jerry)

along with half a dozen other people from the vehicle assembly building. When
she saw him she jogged across the concrete to his side and said, "Did you see
it?" Her face glowed with excitement.
"Yeah," Rick said. "I was up on the gantry at thirty-nine."
She looked up at the contrail overhead, her straight blonde hair falling back
over her shoulders. "Wow. That must have been a hell of a sight. I felt it shake
the ground, but I didn't get outside until it was already quite a ways up." She
looked back down at him. "It was a Saturn Five, wasn't it?"
"That's what it looked like," he admitted.
"God, this is incredible." She turned once around, taking in the entire launch
pad. "A moon rocket! I never expected to see anything like it ever again."
"Me either," Rick said. He struggled to find the words to express what he was
thinking. "But how could we possibly have seen anything? There's no tower here,
no fuel tanks, nothing. And the launch pedestal is too small for a fully fueled
Saturn V. This complex was for the S-1B's."
She grinned like a child at Christmas. "I'm sure whoever --or whatever--staged
this little demonstration was able to make all the support hardware they needed.
And take it away again when they were done with it."
Rick shook his head. "But that's impossible."
Tessa laughed. "We all saw it." She pointed upward. "And the contrail's still
there." Suddenly her eyes grew even wider.
"What?" Rick asked.
She looked across the rolling hummocks of palmetto toward the fifty-story-high
vehicle assembly building--and the launch control center at its base. "I wonder
if it's sending back telemetry?"
#
It took a while to find out. Nobody remembered what frequencies the Apollo
spacecraft broadcast on or what protocols the data streams used, and the ground
controllers had to dig through archived manuals to find out. It took still more
time to set up the receivers to accept the signals, but when the technicians
eventually tuned into the right frequencies they found a steady information
flow. They couldn't decode most of it, since the software to do that had been
written for the old RCA computer system, but they did at least establish that
the rocket had not vanished along with its ground support structures.
Rick and Tessa were in the launch control center now, watching the overhead
monitors while programmers in the central instrumentation building frantically
attempted to adapt the old programs to the new machines. What they saw was
mostly a lot of numbers, but every few minutes one of the programmers would
patch in another section of translated code and another display would wink into
place on the screen. They had already figured out cabin temperature and
pressure, fuel level in the upper stage tanks, and a few of the other simple
systems.
By this point in a normal flight the whole project would rightfully belong to
Mission Control in Houston, but there was nothing normal about this launch. When
the Houston flight director heard what the Kennedy team was doing, he wanted
nothing to do with it anyway. He intended to keep his own neck well out of the
way when heads started rolling after this crazy debacle was over.
But the spacecraft stubbornly refused to disappear. Radar tracked it through one
complete orbit and part of another, when its altitude and velocity began to
rise. At the same time, the fuel levels in the third stage tanks began to drop.