"Lee Edgar - The Andromeda Trial" - читать интересную книгу автора (Edgar Lee)

his hand at docking a shuttle in space.
She sighed. ‘Okay, we’ll try again next week. Might I suggest you take a little more
notice in Professor Akherd’s class. What he tries to teach you may only be the theory
side of things, but a knowledge of basic cosmology and the laws of stellar motion will
one day save your lives.’ She sighed again. ‘Now can any of you tell me where Paul went
wrong?’
A hand at the back shot up. ‘He did it too fast.‘ The young woman giggled. ‘Typical
Man.’
Cassi sighed. ‘Thank you, Carla. Will someone just tell me where everyone is going
wrong? Not one of you has completed the simple task of docking a shuttle. If you cannot
dock at Orion, how do you expect to get to Luna Base in one piece?’
No-one spoke.
She wiped her hand across her forehead. ‘All right, let’s go back to basics. Can
anyone tell me how fast Orion is moving?’
‘It doesn’t move,’ grinned Robin Merry. ‘It’s geostationary.’
‘It may not move in relation to Earth’s surface, but it is still moving. How fast?’
A girl of seventeen nervously put up her hand.
Cassi smiled. ‘Yes, Janine.’
‘Just over eleven thousand kilometres per hour, Miss.’
‘Well done. And what is the escape velocity of Earth?’
‘Eleven point one eight kilometres per second to the power of minus one.’
‘And how far from the surface is a geosynchronous object, such as Orion?’ She looked
round the class.
‘Thirty-five thousand, nine hundred kilometres.’
‘Good, so assuming a shuttle has reached escape velocity, how fast will it be
travelling when it reaches geostat?’
There was a delay before a man of almost thirty muttered: ‘Thirty thousand kilometres
per hour.’
‘Thank you, Neil.’ She started to pace the area at the front of the class. ‘So can
any bright individual please tell me what that means, in ordinary English?’
‘You’ve got to slow down,’ said Paul, back in his place next to Janine.
‘Good grief, that’s an understatement. You’ve just spent an hour getting up from
Europoort and you’ve got a half-kilometre wide space station in the forward viewer.
Taking off is now automatic. Launch Control on Mount Aigoual keeps you on a parabolic
course through the atmosphere and steers you through the satellite window so you don’t
collide with one of the thousands of bits of junk in orbit over the mid Atlantic. It
then pulls you round over the equator and into a geostatic corridor behind Orion. All
you have to do is guide the shuttle in for the last hundred kilometres without ramming
the flaming thing up the backside.’
A titter went round the room and Cassi silently cursed herself for dropping to their
level and using semi-vulgarities to make her point.
She stared at them till she got their attention once more. ‘I know Orion looks pretty
small from a hundred kilometres away, but a hundred kilometres away is when you start
to retrobrake. If you don’t..’ She shrugged and waved her hand toward the simulator
screen: ‘This happens.’
‘Can’t we guide the shuttle right in by remote control?’ asked a laid-back young man,
friend of the lout at the front. Cassi sighed. Where did the Directorate find some of
these promising student astronauts? She said nothing for a long time. Gradually, an
uncomfortable silence fell over the group. When it had lasted thirty seconds, she sat
down on the edge of her desk.