Explore "Thunder in Space" by Lester Del Rey on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The ferry was a sausage-shaped structure of thin metal and plastic with an airlock at the front and a small reaction motor at the rear. It had been modified to hold either solid or liquid cargo and to operate off the monopropellant fuel instead of the lox and kerosene used when the station was built. There was even a plastic pipe between the cargo tank and its fuel tank to save separate filling, and no further modification was needed.
Blane took it out after checking the stowage of the mercury cans. He was slightly rusty, but he steadied down as he jockeyed into position beside one of the three lunar ships. He'd picked a balloon on the sunward side, and the warm fuel was soon flowing into his tank, forced through a long tube by a tiny, built-in pump. When he took off again, the ferry was overloaded and sluggish, but it showed no evidence of weakness. Of course, if they ran into a meteoroid of any size, they'd be ruined -- but the chances of that were very slight.