There is an Apollo Base on the Moon and an unstaffed Euratom research satellite, Galileo, orbiting the Moon. The three Americans who had been to Mars and back were flying around the Moon in a test flight of the Yankee which was intended for the Venus expedition and therefore had been equipped with Swanberg screen generators (fictional?) to deflect solar flares.
Their last message began:
""'Struck by large meteorites.'" (p. 87)
I understood that meteors became meteorites only by striking the Earth's surface. Wiki makes this distinction but says "meteoroids" instead of "meteors." See here.
We are not yet finished with "Escape from Orbit" but I am for tonight.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
"Escape From Orbit," along with "The Innocent Arrival" and "The Moonrakers," belongs to that category of stories I have not read often. Anderson wrote so many stories there will almost inevitably be some I've read only once or twice. I'll make a point of soon rereading these stories.
Sean
Swanberg screen generators (fictional?)
Some sort of magnetic field would usefully screen the flare radiation away from the spaceship & its occupants. However, Googling doesn't get a reference to a Swanberg who did work on any such thing.
Kaor, Jim!
And we should hope a real world device like that soon becomes practical.
Ad astra! Sean
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