Читать книгу Time - Stephen Baxter - Страница 36

Yes, they threw me out of the Flying Mountain Society. Screw them.

And screw Reid Malenfant. Malenfant is a wimp.

Yes, he got his bird off the ground. But to continue to launch with 1940s-style chemical rockets is at best a diversion, at worst a catastrophic error.

People, you can’t lift diddley into space by burning chemicals.

There has been a solution on the drawing boards since the 1960s. Project Orion.

You take a big plate, attach it by shock-absorbers to a large capsule, and throw an atomic bomb underneath.

Your ship will move, believe me.

Then you throw another bomb, and another.

For an expenditure of a small part of the world’s nuclear stockpile you could place several million pounds in orbit.

I believe in the dream. I believe we should aim to lift a billion people into space by the end of the century. This is the only way to establish a population significant enough to build a genuine spacegoing industry infrastructure – and, incidentally, the only way to lift off enough people to make a dent in the planet’s population problem.

Yes, this will cause some fallout. But not much, compared to what we already added to the background radiation. What’s the big deal?

Malenfant is right; we are facing a crisis over the survival of the species. Hard times make for hard choices. Omelettes and eggs, people.

Anyhow, those bombs aren’t going to go away. If America doesn’t use them, somebody else will …