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, turned away, and got into my own jumpsuit.
We boarded the shuttle on the mark, and a bored checker
read the countdown for us. I'll never quite get used to it,
even though everyone else seemed to. That bone-crushing take-
off, over three minutes of agony while the shuttle gets up to
speeds of eight miles per second, and climbs to the 225,000
mile orbits of the geosynchronous satellites. Once we were
up to speed, though, I checked our flight plan, and then saw
to my dismay that we were below speed. We would make the
rendevous (those satellites don't really move in that orbit,
at least relative to us and the Earth), but were going to
approach it slower than planned.
"Bloody hell." was Cyril's only comment. We had twelve
hours to kill.
Fortunately, even the small shuttles are designed to let
you stay up a while if necessary. Behind our pilot station
was a sizeable room, a crew lounge. It had chess boards,
sleeping stations (in free fall you don't need a mattress,
just a place to strap in), food for two weeks, and so on. So
once we learned how
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