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But it can be done. Armstrong and Aldrin did it right the first time. (No
second chances!) But despite all their careful mathematics it turned out there
was one hell of a big rock in their way. Sheer virtuosity and a hatful of fuel
bought them a landing they could walk away from. (If they had not had that
hatful of fuel left, would space travel have been delayed half a century or so?
We don't honor our pioneers enough.)
There is another way to land. Stop dead right over the spot where you want
to touch down. Fall like a rock. Brake with your jet so precisely that you kiss
the ground like a juggler catching an egg on a plate.
One minor difficulty- Right-angled turns are about the most no-good
piloting one can do. You waste delta vee something scandalous-your boat probably
doesn't carry that much fuel. ("Delta vee"-pilot's jargon for "change in
velocity" because, in equations, Greek letter delta means a fractional change
and "v" stands for velocity-and please remember that "velocity" is a direction
as well as a speed, which is why rocket ships don't make U-tums.)
I set about programming into the Volvo's little pilot computer the sort of
synergistic landing Armstrong and Aldrin made but one not nearly as
sophisticated. Mostly I had to ask the piloting computer to call up from its
read-only memory its generalized program for landing from an orbit circum
Luna
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