Details about Holdout by Jeffrey Kluger
Holdout by Jeffrey Kluger ePub PDF free download – Walli Beckwith had no way of knowing that she probably had just under an hour to live. If she had known, she likely could have calculated exactly how much under an hour it was. By now she understood well-nigh all there was to know about how a spacecraft at a particular distance with a particular mass moving at a particular speed behaves, so she could also understand precisely when the one coming at her would arrive and what it would do when it hit. But the spacecraft was, at the moment, keeping all that a secret from Beckwith, as well as from the other two crew members aboard the International Space Station. If a mindless machine with no one aboard could be said to be acting with devious intent, this one was—and its intent was to kill them all.
The machine that was threatening to end the crew’s lives would also make a mess of an experiment Beckwith was conducting, one that she’d rather looked forward to completing but now probably never would, what with death all at once on the day’s menu of events. For most of the morning, she had been working in the station’s Zarya, or Sunrise, laboratory—one of the five modules the Russians had contributed to the football-field-size, fifteen-module station. Lost in the experiment, she jumped when a voice suddenly called out to her over the station’s intercom system for a routine status check. Most communications aboard the station were conducted publicly, over speakers and microphones arrayed throughout the modules, sparing the crew from having to wear headsets all day