I read “The Cold Equations” in high school. At the time, it struck me: it was science fiction about people, whereas almost everything I’d read up to that point (Arthur C. Clarke being a notable exception) was emphatically not.
But it lost a lot of its luster for me when I realized it was basically an inferior version of Jack London’s classic short story, only in space. I always wondered why the pilot couldn’t have thrown out something that might be essential to the functioning of the spacecraft in the long term but not the short (say, maintenance panels, or his bed.)
