Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 65 — page 22: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION / would be considerably larger if we took into account the ship’s structural weight! We decide, therefore, to send up three ships, Alpha, Beta and Gamma, all built on the lines of our original ship that could not get space- borne, that is with one ton of payload, the rest fuel. But we make the fuel load in each ship only 229 tons this time. And we use orbital technique. Alpha, Beta and Gamma blast off and reach the 1,000 mile level. They now possess a mass of 23 tons each, having between them 66 tons of fuel. Alpha is emptied of all but 9 tons of her fuel and left circling, while Beta and Gamma, each of mass 29.5 tons, leave the orbit and cross space to the circum-lunar orbit. Beta and Gamma now have masses of 9.83 tons each, of which 17.66 tons is fuel. Beta, with 2 tons of fuel, is left circling while Gamma, weighing 16.66 tons, descends to the lunar surface. It lands with a mass of 4.16 tons. After an interesting stay, Gamma blasts off at the correct time to rendezvous with Beta. She does so with a fuel mass of 0.04 tons in her tanks. Trans- ferring the two tons left in Beta, she abandons Beta to be a lunar satellite and crosses 21 space to the circum-Earth orbit. She reaches it with almost empty.tanks, where she meets Alpha. Alpha’s 9 tons of fuel enable Gamma to land safely. The total cost in fuel is thus 687 tons, a ~ saving of about 13,000 tons — over the previous figure. Not only that, but the ships of initial weight 230 tons have some hope of leaving the ground, whereas a ship weigh- ing 14,400 tons is a fixture on the spaceport. This little excursion in mathematics, ridiculously rough though it is, slams home the power of orbital technique. It is the logical way of crossing space, fuels and gravitational fields being what they are. It also enables different types of space vehicle to be used, namely, the power- ful satellite vehicles that lift loads through strong gravita- tional fields and the relatively weak, unstreamlined space- ships that cross space from an orbit about one planet to an orbit about another. Since the Second World War, astro- nautical thinking has definitely crystallised round the orbital technique. The satellite vehicle has steadily been developed parallel to the development of the true spaceship. The rocket designers of the British Inter- comiclooks.conn