Journey Into Space Read Online Free

of the crew.”
    For the first time I realized he was dead serious. “But to build a rocket that will reach the Moon in one jump is an engineering impossibility. The fuel tanks alone would have to be as tall as skyscrapers.”
    “With conventional rockets, that’s true. But I thought I made it clear, Doc, this is something new--revolutionary.”
    “It’s little short of a miracle.”
    “It might be at that, but all it comes down to in the end is an atomic motor.”
    “Atomic?”
    “You’ve heard of Stephen Mitchell?”
    “Wasn’t he the engineer who designed the first atomic marine motor for the British Navy?”
    “Yes. His latest creation is a rocket motor.”
    “How does it work?”
    “That I can’t tell you, not at the moment. All I can say is that it’s small enough and powerful enough to do the job.”
    I now began to fire enthusiastic questions. Apparently Mitchell’s rocket motor, in spite of its compactness, built up sufficient thrust to carry a ship almost to the Moon direct from the Earth’s surface. Almost, but not quite. It needed a little assistance.
    The free orbit rocket launched from Poker Flats had, as I have said, been a three-stage affair. When it took off from the Earth it was more than 300 ft tall and left its launching platform under the power of its first and largest stage. In less than two minutes its load of more than 5000 tons of fuel had been burnt and the ship had reached a height of just over 23 miles and was travelling at more than 5000 mph.
    The first stage then dropped away and the second came into action to carry the lightened ship even higher and faster. Two minutes later the 2000 tons of fuel carried by the second booster had burnt itself out and the ship had reached a height of 40 miles and a speed of nearly 15,000 mph.
    Finally the third stage, the smallest of all, carrying the telemetering equipment in its nose, automatically cut in its motor. The second stage, having been discarded, parachuted down to Earth while the ship (now less than a third of its original size) reached a final speed of some 19,000 mph and a height of 750 miles, sufficient to allow it to reach free orbit and enter an ever encircling course round the earth.
    19,000 mph was the highest speed ever reached by a man-made vehicle of any kind, but it was still 6000 mph less than the speed required to escape entirely from the Earth’s gravitational pull.
    According to Jet, Mitchell’s ship was only of two-stage construction. The first stage worked on exactly the same principle as I have just described but, once its fuel had been used up and the booster had been disconnected, the motor of the second stage, the long-sought, small atomic motor, had the power to increase the speed to more than 27,000 miles an hour, giving the ship sufficient velocity to reach the Moon and a little to spare.
    I must have questioned Jet for more than an hour and would have kept up the barrage had we not landed just north of Lake Eyre to refuel. The ‘airport’ consisted of one small, two-roomed building, an underground fuel storage tank and two mechanics. They ran out to meet us as we taxied in and greeted Jet with a hearty, if coarse, Australian greeting. We climbed out of the cockpit, glad to stretch our legs, and, as stepping outside was rather like stepping into an oven, immediately sought the shade of the white wooden building.
    “Make yourself at home,” said Jet as he helped himself to a drink from a bottle on the table.
    “Is this a private airport?”
    “Airport is a fancy name for it, Doc. But we have to refuel somewhere. We’re hardly halfway to Luna City yet.”
    “Luna City?”
    “That’s what the boys call the launching ground. We have a regular little town there. We’re almost completely self-supporting. Fuelling squads come down here on a rota to refill the helicopters that fly between Luna City and Adelaide. When their week is up, they go back to base and their place is taken by somebody else.”
    We