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Updated: June 3, 2025
But it had the Platform's 12,000 miles per hour of orbital speed. If the bonds of gravitation could have been snapped at just the proper instant, that speed alone would have carried the Moonship all the way to its destination. But they couldn't. So the Moonship blasted to increase its orbital speed.
He found himself resenting, even as he experienced, the humbling which had been imposed upon him by the cosmos itself. Presently the other passengers returned, and the moonship was maneuvered out of the lock and to emptiness again, and again presently rockets roared and there was further feeling of intolerable weight. But it was not as bad as the take-off from Earth.
On one historic occasion, Brown walked clanking into a storeroom where a dozen men were preparing supplies for transfer to the Moonship. A voice cried, "Shun!" And instantly twelve men went floating splendidly about the storeroom, turning leisurely somersaults, all rigidly at salute, and all wearing regulation poker faces. An order abolishing salutes in weightlessness followed shortly after.
The result was infuriating. The Moonship had taken off for the Moon on the other side of the Platform's orbit, when it had a velocity of more than 12,000 miles an hour in the direction it wished to go. The Platform and of course the space tug was now on the reverse side of the Platform's orbit.
Joe said nothing. He ached a little inside. But he reflected that the men who'd guided the Platform to its orbit had been overshadowed by himself and Haney and the Chief and Mike. A later achievement always makes an earlier one look small. Now the four of them would be forgotten. History would remember the commander of the Moonship. Forgotten? Yes, perhaps.
"I've reported to your father," said Joe carefully, "and the Moonship has reported to the Navy. In a couple of hours Haney and the Chief and Mike and I will be taking off to go back to the Platform. We got rockets from the stores of the Moonship." Sally's voice was surprisingly clear. It wavered a little, but there was no sound of static to mar reception. "Then what, Joe?"
But the point is, Joe, that just one day before the Moonship does take off, the United Nations will be informed that it is a United States naval vessel. The doctrine of the freedom of space like the freedom of the seas will be promulgated. And the United States will say that a United States naval task force is starting off into space on an official mission.
It's planned for the space tug to take off a few minutes after the Moonship and blast along underneath. We'll dump guided missiles out like drones and if anything comes along we can start their rockets and fight our way through. And we four have had more experience than anybody else. We're needed!" "You've done enough, surely!" Sally cried.
He was considered to be prepared for command of the Moonship by that experience. So now he turned over command of the Platform to Brent he made a neat ceremony of it and took over the ship that would go out to the Moon. He made another ceremony out of that. In command of the Moonship, his manner to Joe was absolutely correct.
And they were plunging on after the Moonship which was very, very, very far on before them. It was actually many hours before they reached it. They couldn't afford to overtake it gradually, because they had to have time to work in after contact. But overtaking it swiftly cost extra fuel, and they hadn't too much.
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