Rocket Ship Galileo Read Online Free PDF

one made a speech starting, “On this historic occasion—” Instead they held their breaths, waiting for him to go on.
    “Oh, I’m not going into details now. You’ll find out all about it, if we work together.”
    “We will!” “Sure thing!”
    “I hope so. I tried to interest the company I was with in the scheme, but they wouldn’t hold still.”
    “Gee whillickers! Why not?”
    “Corporations are in business to make money; they owe that to their stockholders. Do you see any obvious way to make money out of a flight to the moon?”
    “Shucks.” Art tossed it off. “They ought to be willing to risk going broke to back a thing like this.”
    “Nope. You’re off the beam, kid. Remember they are handling other people’s money. Have you any idea how much it would cost to do the research and engineering development, using the ordinary commercial methods, for anything as big as a trip to the moon?”
    “No,” Art admitted. “A good many thousands, I suppose.”
    Morrie spoke up. “More like a hundred thousand.”
    “That’s closer. The technical director of our company made up a tentative budget of a million and a quarter.”
    “Whew!”
    “Oh, he was just showing that it was not commercially practical. He wanted to adapt my idea to power plants for ships and trains. So I handed in my resignation.”
    “Good for you!”
    Morrie looked thoughtful. “I guess I see,” he said slowly, “why you swore us to secrecy. They own your idea.”
    Cargraves shook his head emphatically, “No, not at all. You certainly would be entitled to squawk if I tried to get you into a scheme to jump somebody else’s patent rights—even if they held them by a yellow-dog, brain-picking contract.” Cargraves spoke with vehemence. “My contract wasn’t that sort. The company owns the idea for the purposes for which the research was carried out—power. And I own anything else I see in it. We parted on good terms. I don’t blame them. When the queen staked Columbus, nobody dreamed that he would come back with the Empire State Building in his pocket.”
    “Hey,” said Ross, “these senior prizes—they aren’t big enough. That’s why nobody has made a real bid for the top ones. The prize wouldn’t pay the expenses, not for the kind of budget you mentioned. It’s a sort of a swindle, isn’t it?”
    “Not a swindle, but that’s about the size of it,” Cargraves conceded. “With the top prize only $250,000 it won’t tempt General Electric, or du Pont, or North American Atomic, or any other big research corporation. They can’t afford it, unless some other profit can be seen. As a matter of fact, a lot of the prize money comes from those corporations.” He sat up again. “But we can compete for it!”
    “How?”
    “I don’t give a darn about the prize money. I just want to go!” “Me too!” Ross made the statement; Art chimed in.
    “My sentiments exactly. As to how, that’s where you come in. I can’t spend a million dollars, but I think there is a way to tackle this on a shoestring. We need a ship. We need the fuel. We need a lot of engineering and mechanical work. We need overhead expenses and supplies for the trip. I’ve got a ship.”
    “You have? Now? A space ship? ” Art was wide-eyed.
    “I’ve got an option to buy an Atlantic freighter-rocket at scrap prices. I can swing that. It’s a good rocket, but they are replacing the manned freighters with the more economical robot-controlled jobs. It’s a V-17 and it isn’t fit to convert to passenger service, so we get it as scrap. But if I buy it, it leaves me almost broke. Under the UN trusteeship for atomics, a senior member of the Global Association of Atomic Scientists—that’s me!” he stuck in, grinning, “can get fissionable material for experimental purposes, if the directors of the Association approve. I can swing that. I’ve picked thorium, rather than uranium-235, or plutonium—never mind why. But the project itself had me