Part One Summary

In chapter one, Dr. Dmitri Moisevitch and Heywood Floyd are inside the astromony lab at the Thousand-Foot Telescope. Dmitri wants Heywood to explain the Tycho monolith, and the signal it sent to Jupiter years ago. Heywood, or "Woody," on the other hand, is concerned that America's new space shuttle, Discovery II, will be at least a year behind Russia's new shuttle Leonov, that is nearly prepared for launch. Dimitri is concerned about the Russian cosmonauts, because the crew of the original Discovery went missing while in orbit around Jupiter ten years prior, and the same thing might happen to the crew of the Leonov. Dmitri asks after Discovery's data transmissions, and Heywood realizes that his friend is asking for an American astronaut to be sent with the Russian shuttle in order to extract the data from Discovery's computer once Leonov intercepts...