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I'm trying to find a story I remember about humans inventing hyperspace travel. I think it was written by Isaac Asimov, but it's not Escape!.

It follows a government(?) project over years as it tries to develop a ship capable of hyperspace travel. It also focuses somewhat on the leader of the project whose strong personality is a big reason it succeeds. I think he dies before the first test flight.

This part is a lot more fuzzy, but I remember something about how the math failed to account for either momentum or rotation in some way and the crew have to fix it during the test flight.

Details:
It was written in English. I read it 5-10 years ago on some random site which I've long since forgotten that had a bunch of other classic sci-fi short stories.

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  • Hi, welcome to SF&F. Do you have any idea when you read this, or where?
    – DavidW
    Commented Feb 28, 2024 at 18:47
  • In what country and what language did you read this? Remember to edit details into the question itself rather than adding another comment.
    – Spencer
    Commented Feb 28, 2024 at 23:22
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    I vaguely remember a Golden Age story where the crew testing the new drive jump out then jump back only to find the Earth is not there. They had forgotten to allow for the Earth moving during the jump. Could this be the story? They have to return to Earth using a series of short jumps.
    – John Rennie
    Commented Feb 29, 2024 at 7:50
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    I remember this being a subplot of a en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(Asimov_novel), if not a short story. The issue was with gravity being repulsive force in hyperspace, so they had to change the gravity constant to negative number for hyperspace jump calculations in order to accommodate for this. (hyperspace gravity repulsion also helped to solve the one of the major plot points of the novel, if I remember it correctly).
    – p4ulie
    Commented Feb 29, 2024 at 22:42
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    @p4ulie That's it! I can't believe I somehow separated the two in my mind. Post this as an answer, and I'll accept it. Thanks!
    – isikkema
    Commented Mar 7, 2024 at 17:38

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I remember this being a subplot of a Nemesis_(Asimov_novel), if not a short story. The issue was with gravity being repulsive force in hyperspace, so they had to change the gravity constant to negative number for hyperspace jump calculations in order to accommodate for this. (hyperspace gravity repulsion also helped to solve the one of the major plot points of the novel, if I remember it correctly).

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