But it's harder to fly backward. Usually, with such an orbital maneuver it is as if they are "bouncing", going up to a higher and slower orbit and letting the targets catch up with them. But here, on the far edge of the system of a small red dwarf, the orbital speed was very low, even by circumplanetary standards, and even more so for such spaces. It was possible to wait until the lagging Catapult Exodus-23-Prim would catch up with Universe for several decades.
Therefore, the trajectory of "Universe X" in this flight was much more complicated, included two intermediate orbits, but was much faster. Still, on the other side, in the Terra-Nova system, they should have already been waiting for refueling - and therefore almost all three thousand tons of the working body could be thrown out through the nozzles of the plasma engines.
But even so, it took the earthlings more than a year to fly this flight.
However, this period has almost come to an end. There was less than a light minute to the catapult, just ten million kilometers away. Two weeks of flight, taking into account the fact that the ship was now successfully accelerating. Or slowed down, depending on the point of view.
From Floyd's point of view, the ship was now cozy.
He and two other awake astronauts were now undergoing a mandatory recovery period after several months of hypersleep. The Indian, who preferred to be called Chandra, and Victor Willis.
Another conversation between rehabilitation procedures and exercises came up about the first space events. Floyd, as the person who caught the First Interplanetary, was asked to tell us how it was.
- When they started, I wasn't even three years old," he laughed. - When we got back, we just turned six. So I, like you, studied their flight in the recordings.
- Still," Willis kept up. - Tell us.
- Okay, then.
I'll start with the environment in which Soyuz-11 started.
The first decade, and even more, of the space age was then called the "space race. And this race was led by the Soviet Union time after time. The first satellite, the first living thing in space, the first lunar launch, the first interplanetary, the first man in space, both in and out of space.
Thanks to President Kennedy, America knew what it would say at once - a moon landing.
And after the mid-sixties, the Russians' rare successes gradually disappeared behind the flurry of American victories. Orbital maneuvers, record flights in orbit of the Earth and to the Moon, landing in 69th, even the success of "Apollo 13", which first turned from a routine into a disaster, and then - into another victory ...
The Russians were fond of "barrel building", as TV presenters and journalists joked. Their first, tiny and unguarded orbital stations periodically circled over the Earth, and they did not pay attention to the Moon. Well, almost. Their robots flew there on a regular basis, and they did their own flights over the Moon.
As I was told by the analysts studying the Union in those years, they could not understand why. After all, it was on the Moon that the alien artifacts were found - both the Calcium City and the Crystal Dome.
And here is the seventy-first. Waiting for the Russians to surprise us again, nobody thought, Great America was ahead in all matters...
When the next "barrel", not too much different from the previous ones, suddenly turned out to be an interplanetary ship that flew to Mars, the gentlemen from NASA realized that they again underestimated the competitor.
As the presidents and senators of the day said, the prestige of the United States was once again under the question the catfish, and you can't miss your influence in space.
The daily reminder of this doubt was the programs from "Salut". Three astronauts, who were supposed to live in an iron barrel for three years, cheerfully told Union viewers, and later the world, how they survive there. A fire onboard, faded potatoes in a greenhouse, flew by an asteroid... You know, all the films before and after for me will not be equal to one series of their broadcasts. For example, when Volkov was hanging at the window and showing in it dull white dots, saying that this is Earth, this is Venus, and Mars is now on the other side, and at this point, something closed the view for a second. He didn't even have his eyebrow on him - he just shouted to the side: "Commander, look through the telescope, there's a stone flying by, so huge.
Journalists and politicians said that this is another challenge, that America accepts and will expand and deepen space programs... Then I learned that there were no plans to reduce it - the findings on the Moon were very suspicious and promising.
But it turned out to be possible to reach an agreement with Soviet comrades. By the time "Salut" returned, an agreement had already been formalized, allowing the Soviet Union to participate at least a little in the search for lunar treasures, and the Americans to get a partner who can build orbital stations and interplanetary ships.