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Updated: June 12, 2025
They hang on to the Platform and heave. They go up with it, pushing. When they get it as high as they can, they'll shoot their jatos, let go, and come bumbling back home. So they have to practice getting back home and landing. For practicing it doesn't matter how they get aloft.
Then the transport leaped forward with a force to stop one's breath. The jatos were firing furiously, and the ship jumped. There was a bellowing that drowned out the sound of the engines. Joe was slammed back on the rear wall of the cabin. He struggled against the force that pushed him tailward. He heard the pilot saying calmly: "That plane shot rockets at us. If they're guided we're sunk."
The purpose of the pushpots and the jatos and the ship's own take-off rockets had been to give it a speed at which it would inevitably rise to a height of 4,000 miles the orbit of the Space Platform and stay there. It would need no power to remain 4,000 miles out from Earth. But it would take power to come down.
"Six hundred from the pushpots," murmured Haney, frowning, "an' three hundred from the jet stream, and then there was the jatos that all let go at once, an' then there was eight hundred from the earth rotatin' " "They had ten per cent of their rockets unfired when they got into their orbit," said Mike authoritatively.
Then the space tug roared skyward. Her take-off rockets here substituted for the pushpots. Her second-stage rockets were also of the nonpoisonous variety, because she fired them at a bare 60,000 feet. They were substitutes for the jatos the pushpots carried. She was out in space when the third-stage rockets roared dully outside her hull.
A man exposed to emptiness at that height will die just as quickly as anywhere between the stars. But it wasn't quite empty space for the pushpots. There was still a very, very little air. The pushpots could still thrust upward. Feebly, now, but they still thrust. Mike said: "Communications says get set to fire jatos, Joe." "Right!" he replied. "Set yourselves."
The jatos made ready for firing. They were the jet-assisted take-off rockets which on a short or rough field would double the motors' thrust for a matter of seconds. In straightaway flight they should make the plane leap ahead like a scared rabbit. But they wouldn't last long. "I don't like this," said the co-pilot in a flat voice. "I don't see what he could do " Then he stopped.
Together, they would lift the Platform off the ground and get it as high as their jet motors would take it traveling east at the topmost speed they could manage. Then they'd fire their jatos simultaneously, and in doing that they'd be acting as the second booster stage of a multiple-stage rocket.
Its start was just like the one Joe's ship had made. Pushpots lifted it, jatos hurled it on, and then the furious, flaming take-off rockets drove it valiantly out toward the stars. Joe's ship had been moved out of the landing lock and was moored against the Platform's hull. The second ship made contact in two hours and seventeen minutes from take-off.
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