The story “Lost Near Vesta” was written by Isaac Asimov a year before its publication - in 1938. Its plot became characteristic of many of Asimov’s works and was based on a person’s ability to honorably get out of seemingly dead-end situations, often very difficult and deadly. The Silver Queen spaceship unexpectedly collides with a meteorite (a technique used in science fiction by so many writers and so many times, which can never happen in reality, even in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter). On the miraculously surviving wreck of the ship, which has retained its tightness, three members of the ship's crew remain alive: Warren Moore, Mark Brandon and Michael Shea. A supply of food for a week, air for three days, but so much water that you could swim in the pool for at least a whole year, refilling it every day. Their fragment circled in orbit near Vesta, at a distance of four hundred miles from the planet, but was so small that researchers working on this asteroid could not detect it. Their only escape would be to force the debris out of orbit and towards Vesta. But how to do that? In the face of inevitable death, Warren Moore finds a way out. In a tank of water, he burns a hole with a beam thrower, from which, due to the pressure difference, a stream of water, like a jet engine, began to move the ship fragment closer to Vesta’s orbit. They moved towards their salvation. To life!