INTO THE BLACK

FAN FICTION

 There was Earth or what was left of it. What would come to be known as 'Earth that was' by future generation as yet unborn. Choking air, poison rain, acid oceans. We needed to find a new home. A new place for the human race to survive. A new hope for mankind and a new beginning for those un-birthed..

The day to begin my deep space mission has come. I am nervous but in a good way, ya know. Excited and scared at the same time. Hell, I don't know what I'm feeling. Maybe I'm feeling everything all at once. Mom and Dad would have been proud of me. I wish they had lived long enough to see me get where I am. They had me late in their lives. Mom was a theoretics engineer and Dad was a professor at a ivy league college. Seems like they hardly had time for sex, let alone a child. There were lots and lots of nannies and babysitters I can tell ya. Till Mom got me an au pair. Dad passed away last year at the age of 102, Mom went shortly thereafter at 99. They never could stand to be very far apart except where their academics separated them. But 102 and 99 you're thinking? That's nothing special now what with the anti aging drugs that had been developed. Hell, people are living to be as old as 115 years and that's the oldest yet. However these are first generation users who were already along in life. The new generation, like me, well....there's no telling how long we might live. This is what makes all of this, this whole operation of going deep space exploring possible. Everyone was or had been trying to crack the code of the mystery of how to get a human through the depths of space and back to earth again in the same lifetime as everyone else. I mean, what good is it to send out a mission that reports back in 150 years and the people who cared about the mission are long dead and there's no one left who give's a s**t? Faster than light travel was a bust. Turns out Albert Einstein was right after all. Warp fields, ion engines, solar sails, nothing ever seemed to work or at least work right. So many failures resulting in so many deaths. To many people thinking externally.

It took a tiny little wisp of an Hindu man who happened to hold Doctorates in microbiology, herbology, entomology, nuclear physics and botany, to think internally and crack the code. He held a 3rd degree black belt in Karate as well and was a firm practitioner of Yoga. Oh sure, the data collection and information retrieval system wouldn't lose one scrap of technical telemetry but it's the human factor which is the main driving force behind all of mankind's endeavors now and the reason for our multi-cultural/national crew. Factor number two in making all this possible. Most of Earth's governments finally saw the long term effects of where current events were leading. The recycling technologies came to late for it to make any difference. The world was in the crapper and the governments of the world knew it. Most of the public brushed it off as conspiracy theories dreamed up by some crazy attention getters but it was a conspiracy, from the start. If the general world population knew what the truth was...well all that's just better left unsaid. It's was really to late to repair the damage done, so that's why we are reaching out. Outward, out there among the stars, into the Black.

Counting down, we're almost there! The board is green. Go for launch from all earth command centers, Huston, Rio and Beijing. I can hear the pumps for the liquid tanks fueling. There were hundreds of missions launched into LEO (low earth orbit) to build, supply and maintain everything necessary for the 14 year mission of building the craft that would hold the hope of all mankind but this last LEO launch was what the techs call a 'heavy'. Six big, red external liquid fuel tanks, 12 SRB's (solid rocket boosters) and 32 main engines.
After the solid rockets are jettisoned, the thirty two Main Engines provide the thrust to lift the Craft off the ground for the initial ascent. The main engines continue to operate for 8.5 minutes after launch, the duration of the Craft's powered flight. The main engines provide thrust which accelerates the Craft from 4,828 kilometers per hour (3,000 mph) to over 27,358 kilometers per hour (17,000 mph) in just six minutes to reach LEO. They create a combined maximum thrust of more than 34.8 million pounds. As the Craft accelerates, the main engines burn millions gallons of liquid propellant provided by the large, red external fuel tanks. The main engines burn liquid hydrogen -- the second coldest liquid on Earth at minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 252.8 degrees Celsius) -- and liquid oxygen. The engines' exhaust is primarily water vapor as the hydrogen and oxygen combine.

As they push the Craft toward LEO, the engines consume liquid fuel at a rate that would drain an average family swimming pool in just under .2 seconds generating over 394 million horsepower. Their turbines spin almost 130 times as fast as an automobile engine spins when it is running at highway speed. The main engines develop thrust by using high-energy propellants in a staged combustion cycle. The propellants are partially combusted in dual pre-burners to produce high-pressure hot gas to drive the turbo-pumps. Combustion is completed in the main combustion chamber. Temperatures in the main engine combustion chamber can reach as high as 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit (3,315.6 degrees Celsius)....
And that my friends is a god awful lot of power under the hood and why launches of this type are done from deep underwater mission sites. A land launch of this magnitude would be like setting off a nuclear explosion and would destroy everything for miles and miles. Much preparation is needed to heard various aquatic life forms out of harms way, even still a stray crustacean and a fish or two are evaporated or boiled in the process.
"Station 4 go for authorization?"
I am station 4, only one of 30 crew members in neat little rows behind the pilot and co-pilot.
"Station 4 go for launch." I say, as calmly as I can, but my mouth is so dry and the words almost stumble out. My mind goes blank for a moment and there is a horrible pain in my head. Then suddenly a bright flash and I recall every moment of my life up till now. This is now, isn't it? I mean this is really happening, right now?

"Station 30 go for launch." The last station checked in, we're ready. I am ready. The SRB's are firing and the main engine is on-line. There is an immense pressure but the suits we are wearing are designed to keep the blood and our pieces parts where they are supposed to be. The chairs we are fitted in are designed as well to absorb pressure, even still I feel like I got punched in my eyeballs. All of fiery hell and chaos busts loose underneath us in one great clap of an explosion that I think would compare to the trumpet of God sounding the second coming. We have cleared the tower. Five seconds to feet dry. 3, 2, 1, we have breached. Cleared the water threshold and it evaporates hundreds of thousands of deciliters of sea in an instant, venting steam in all directions for thousands of meters. We are airborne. Higher and higher we climb ponderously, inexorably toward LEO.
"LEO one-zero go for roll over." I hear Houston through my headset and feel the gentle slide of our pre-orbit roll.

"Roll over completed Houston." That would be Mike Wiligar our captain and pilot.

"LEO one-zero go for throttle up." barked through the earpiece.

"Roger that Houston, throttle up is a go." I could hear the dryness in Mike's voice as well. Remember the punch in both of my eye's I was talking about? Well it just turned into an elephant sitting it's enormous a*s right on my chest. I could literally feel my insides starting to go places they should not be. Then.....it was gone. the crushing pressure was gone, lifted as if someone had simply thrown a switch. The SRB's had just separated. I could hear Mike in my head set again,

"Main engine at 100 percent." Slowly the blue and white blur on the view screens became a dark blur and everything was becoming much more focused for me. Time for me to start providing one of the functions that I was here for. There were several things that needed attention all at once but that was OK because I was good at multitasking.

"Houston we have LFC (liquid fuel cell) sep, continuing main engine burn for 32 more seconds."

All of my immediate problems taken care of, I took a breath. It was the first breath I could remember taking in the last 20 minutes and it was my first breath in space, which is kind of an oxymoron now that I think about it!
A small plastic cap off of someone's unsecured pen came floating by my right eye. I watched it for a moment mesmerized and then snatched it out of the air, angry that some idiot could have gotten someone killed and thinking that I was going to write up a report as soon as I got the chance but then thought against it and shoved the cap into my zippered sleeve pocket. Funny how sometimes during the most intense moments of your life you think of the most mundane things but it was at that exact moment the pen cap went into my pocket that I realized where I was. We were there. Our first tiny step into the Black. The world just got a lot smaller in the rearview mirror.

© 2015 RayFed

Author's Note