Dean Charles Ing's "Tight Squeeze" (short story, free): Maintenance aboard supply shuttle to space station

Plot concept is very similar to Arthur Clarke's "Special Delivery": a supply rocket to first ever earth-orbit space station misses its rendezvous target. Clarke's version has an unhappy ending; this one a happy one. In Clarke's version, a rocket fires slightly longer than necessary; here it doesn't fire at all when needed.

Ace mechanic Major Edward MacNamara, one of the 3-crew aboard the shuttle, will fix the problem - though with much drama.

Fact sheet.

First published: Astounding, February 1955.
Download full text from Project Gutenberg, Manybooks, Feedbooks.
Download audio read by Jerome Lawsen from LibriVox.
Rating: B.
Among the stories edited by John Campbell for Astounding/Analog.
Related: Space station fiction; space shuttle fiction.