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The one that sticks with me is called "the cold equations", and it's about a pilot flying a ship through space and discovering he has a young girl stowing away on board. Since he only has enough fuel to get to his destination if the ship weighs a very specific amount, he has to decide whether or not to jettison the girl out the airlock. I remember liking it, but I've never forgotten how emotional it was to read.
Does he eject her?
!Yes. She goes willingly after learning her brother is on the colony that the pilot is sent to bring supplies to. The pilot allows her one last video call to him before she is jettisoned.!<
If she's onboard and the ship is running that tight with fuel, then they already missed.
Oh believe me, even though I thought it was a good read, I have a lot of criticism for the story. God forbid literally any kind of emergency happens and additional fuel is needed to avoid catastrophe. I get wanting to maximize space for supplies, but the risk far outweighs the benefits of operating on such tight margins.
Sometimes teachers field stories like this to foster critical thought and encourage insightful book reports. It's stimulating material even with a flawed premise, and that's the point.
My teachers always seemed to be the type that had these stories in the curriculum, but weren't the type to follow up with the thinky-thinky bits. This had rather predictable results.
Seems like if jettisoning weight was the issue dumping some of the less essential supplies would work just as well...
The ship was built as simply as possible and fueled with the precise amount needed for it's weight, there was nothing else to jettison besides the young woman. The plot was intentionally structured around an impossible scenario because the editor of the magazine the story originally appeared in wanted to subvert the "engineer action hero saves the day with a clever idea" trope that was common when it was written. The heavily contrived scenario is the weak point by most people's estimation, but overall the writing is well done and characterizations are very good.
The story bugs a lot of people due to the total lack of any safety margin for such an important mission as delivering emergency medical supplies. A guy named Don Sakers even wrote a rebuttal called The Cold Solution that was meant to point out a few things the original story overlooked without the idea of a bare minimum ship being changed.
Space OSHA really fucked up on regulating this vessel.
Nah, in the future we'll have Space Force and no OSHA