“Disengage. We’ll pick up mass.”
Vince sighed. “We have ten hours until impact, and we need to change the course higher or we have to change it MORE.”
“Your point being?”
“We have one hour to move this five degrees, and it’ll take half of that to fly back to the surface. The closer we get to impact, the more mass we need. If we take too long it will end up more than the skeeter can carry.”
“So quit stalling,” Nanlee snapped. “Janice, get us to the boulder beds.”
The only sensible source of ready mass was a pile of discarded material from the digging out of the colony itself. There was a downhill side of the colony, a bit of old crater-edge that it sat near, and that was where most stone waste was deposited. Nanlee stayed on the skeeter’s leg, watching the moon fill her vision, eyeing the shadows for a good-size chunk.
“This is better, anyway,” Nanlee said. “Skeeter’s designed to haul these rocks.”
“I’m thinking we need at least a ton of mass,” Vince said. “In lunar basalt, that’ll be something about the same size we are.”
“Good. Easy to estimate.”
“I don’t know if we have the fuel,” said Jan.
“Didn’t you fuel all the way up before we left?”
“Yes. But we spent five minutes at full throttle trying to move that rocket!”
There wasn’t a lot of time to shop around. Nanlee pointed to a lump on the ground as their shadow grew below them. “That one.”
So, from what I'm understanding from this part of the story, the skeeter took off from the colony, went into orbit and matched orbit with the Apollo S-IVB booster, tried to tow it, was unsuccessful, then dropped out of lunar orbit to pick up mass from the lunar colony which it still somehow was still very close to despite having been in orbit, got back into orbit, rammed the booster, and was knocked out of orbit again and crashed maybe half an hour later a mile south of the same colony?
And I also don't understand why the orbital inclination needed to be changed by five degrees, or even at all. And ramming the booster stage wouldn't change the orbital inclination of the stage at all, unless it was rammed with incredible explosive force like from some kind of a missile.
I feel like I'm missing something here.
The moon was swelling beneath them, the colony just a lacy little doily in the center of its crater. Barely a freaking tenth of a percent of the moon’s surface, and this hunk of junk had to choose to land on it!
Wikipedia tells me the moon's surface area is 38 million square kilometers. One-thousandth of that is 38 thousand square kilometers, a little smaller than Switzerland. That's one hell of a colony.
“Metaphorical death or literal?”
“Literal. Two tons of titanium on a crash-course with our dome.” He tapped her desk surface, hurriedly typing in his password and pulling a document, which he rotated with a flick of his hand to point at her.
The S-IVB had a dry weight of about 23,000 pounds (10,000 kg). Thank you, one minute of research on Wikipedia.
I have issues with this story. It's one thing to play a bit fast and loose with physics, but when the whole focus of the story is dealing with physics, then the physics should be within a ballpark of being correct. Otherwise, the story goes from being science fiction to science fantasy. And a story like this doesn't work as science fantasy.
Having said that, I enjoyed the characters in the story, especially Nanlee. It worked on that level. But for the type of story that it is, that's not enough.
