"Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

simulations. These took place on the back-up bridge in Torus B, which
had the latest in image synthesizers; the simulations were so sophisticated
that there was little visible difference between them and the act itself. This
did not necessarily make them interesting: the standard orbital insertion
approach, simulated weekly, was dubbed "The Mantra Run," and became
quite a bore to every conceivable flight crew.
But sometimes even boredom was preferable to the alternatives;
Arkady was their training specialist, and he had a perverse talent for
designing problem runs so hard that they often "killed" everybody. These
runs were strangely unpleasant experiences, and did not make Arkady
popular among his victims. He mixed problem runs with Mantra Runs
randomly, but more and more often they were problem runs; they would
"approach Mars" and red lights would flash, sometimes with sirens, and
they were in trouble again. Once they struck a planetessimal weighing
approximately fifteen grams, leaving a large flaw in the heat shield. Sax
Russell had calculated that their chances of hitting anything larger than a
gram were about one in every seven thousand years of travel, but
nevertheless there they were, emergency!, adrenalin pouring through them
even as they poo-pooed the very idea of it, rushing up to the hub and into
EVA suits, going out to fill the pothole before they hit the martian
atmosphere and burned to a crisp; and halfway there, Arkady's voice came
over their intercoms: "Not fast enough! All of us are dead."
But that was a simple one. Others…. The ship, for instance, was
guided by a fly-by-wire system, meaning that the pilots fed instructions to
flight computers which translated them into the actual thrusts needed to
achieve the desired result. This was how it had to be, because when
approaching a gravitational mass like Mars at their speed, one simply could
not feel or intuit what burns would achieve the desired effects. So none of
them were flyers in the sense of an pilot flying a plane. Nevertheless,
Arkady frequently blew the entire massively redundant system just as they
were reaching a critical moment (which failure, Russell said, had about a
one in ten billion chance of happening) and they had to take over and
command all the rockets mechanically, watching the monitors and an
orange-on-black visual image of Mars bearing down on them, and they
could either go long and skip off into deep space and die a lingering death,
or go short and crash into the planet and die instantly; and if the latter, they
got to watch it right down to the simulated hundred and twenty klicks per
second final smash.
Or it might be a mechanical failure: main rockets, stabilizing rockets,
computer hardware or software, heat shield deployment; all of them had to
work perfectly during the approach. And failures of these systems were
the most likely of all—in the range, Sax said (though others contested his
risk assessment methods), of one in every ten thousand approaches. So
they would do it again and red lights would flash, and they would groan,
and beg for a Mantra Run even as they partly welcomed the new challenge.
When they managed to survive a mechanical failure, they were
tremendously pleased; it could be the high point of a week. Once John
Boone successfully aerobraked by hand, with a single main rocket
functioning, hitting the safe millisecond of arc at the only possible speed.
No one could believe it. "Blind luck," Boone said, grinning widely as the