Read "Operation: Outer Space" by Murray Leinster online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The physical sensations of ascending to the ship's control-room were weird in the extreme. Cochrane had just been wakened from a worn-out sleep, and it was always startling on the moon to wake and find one's self weighing one-sixth of normal. It took seconds to remember how one got that way. But on the way up the stairs, Cochrane was further confused by the fact that the ship was surging this way and swaying that. It moved above the moon's surface to get over the tilted flat Dabney field plate on the ground a hundred yards from the ship's original position.
The Dabney field, obviously, was not in being. The ship hovered on its rockets. They had been designed to lift it off of Earth -- and they had -- against six times the effective gravity here, and with an acceleration of more gravities on top of that. So the ship rose lightly, almost skittishly. When gyros turned to make it drift sidewise -- as a helicopter tilts in Earth's atmosphere -- it fairly swooped to a new position. Somebody jockeyed it this way and that.