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Mostly Harmless
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Finally getting the act together here. Here is:
SEP-010, Chapter 3
Pilot Jamie Cunningham climbed the last rungs of the ladder leading up to the aft deck, feeling remarkably irritated with how exhausted she felt. She took the hand offered her, and used it to pull herself up, setting a firm foothold on the decksole.
"This feels like déjà vu," Brandon Harris noted as he released his handhold, and Jamie nodded stiffly to him.
"And yeah, I know the way," She said. Crossing over through the threshold into the cockpit, she paused for a moment to let Adkinson and his assistant catch up.
"Need any help?" Harris asked, and Jamie snorted.
"As usual," She admitted. She lifted her right foot over the center console, set it onto the chair, grabbed a handhold set into the ceiling with her left hand, set her right hand on the headrest, and hoisted herself up.
The pivoting motion in her ACES suit still felt unnatural to her, and this time she didn't care much how much noise she was making while getting into the chair.
"Here's your five-point, Jamie," Harris said as he slipped the shoulder belts over, and she pulled the circular buckle up and wordlessly clicked each belt buckle in.
"Good luck, Jamie," Harris said, and she smiled at him as they shook hands.
She watched Adkinson as he strapped himself in and went over to his left-side panel as he activated his communications panel, and she went over her own switches as Harris and Myers left the cockpit to attend to the crew behind them.
"Constitution, OTC. Comm check. CDR, do you read, over?" She heard.
"OTC, CDR. Loud and clear," Adkinson said.
"PLT, OTC, do you read, over?"
"OTC, PLT, loud and clear," Jamie said.
"MS-1, OTC. Do you read, over?"
"OTC, MS-1, loud and clear," She heard Anthony Downs announce.
"MS-2, OTC. Do you read, over?"
"OTC, MS-2, loud and clear," Sienna Morrison replied.
"MS-3, OTC. Do you read, over?"
"OTC, MS-3. Loud and clear," Svetlana Zaytseva answered.
"CDR, OTC. Stand by for an abort advisory check."
Jamie looked at her front panel at the ABORT light, which started blinking at her. She counted the iterations, and noted that the light extinguished after eight seconds as advertised.
"OTC, CDR," Adkinson said. "Abort advisory is satisfactory, over."
"CDR, OTC. Copy."
They spent the next few minutes in silence as they un-stowed their cue cards, pasting them firmly on the velcro strips where they needed to go. Jamie noticed the sudden pressure change inside the orbiter, followed by a mechanical click.
"CDR, Flight Control. Side hatch is closed and locked," She heard.
"Flight Control, CDR. Roger that," Adkinson replied.
"CDR, OTC. Go for cabin leak check."
"Roger, go for cabin leak check," Adkinson replied. He flipped the switches at his left panel, and punched the Master Warning System button as it blinked, silencing the warning buzzer. Jamie watched the cabin pressure indicators spike, and return to normal as she went about her own checklist.
"OTC, CDR. Cabin leak check is satisfactory, over."
"Roger, CDR. Standby for rollout."
* * *
"OTC, PLT. IMU alignment complete," Jamie said as the sound of the fuel rushing into Constitution's holding tanks roared behind her. "We show twenty-eight degrees, thirty-five minutes, fifty-five point two niner seconds north latitude . . . and eighty degrees, forty-one minutes, one point two five seconds west longitude."
"PLT, OTC. Roger. Load OPS 101."
"OPS 101, roger," Jamie replied. Her hand waffled over the keypad as she worked to quell the last vestige of irritation from her mind.
"Let's see . . . OPS 101 PRO . . . SPEC 99 PRO . . . RESUME." She looked at the screen at her left, which showed the ascent profile monitor, and she nodded to herself.
The instrumentation in Constitution's cockpit borrowed heavily from the Space Shuttle era, and it wasn't strictly out of necessity. Half of the flight deck was a glass cockpit, but the other half was traditional 'gauge and switch' arrays that could be used in the event of a failure of some sort.
The software that drove the spaceplane emulated the same flight control software that the Shuttle used, though it was more powerful. The multifunction displays were easier to use, employed side buttons that could be situation-specific, didn't 'require' toggle-switches for operating modes, and tended to be a little more 'moron-friendly' than its predecessor. The keypads at the Center-Three console tended to be the most convenient method to enter precision data into the flight computer.
"OTC, PLT. OPS-1 is loaded."
"PLT, OTC. Roger. CDR, OTC. Load OPS-1 into the backup flight system."
* * *
"Constitution, this is Flight Control. One minute to launch. Visors down; initiate suit O2 flow. Stow all loose articles."
Jamie Cunningham reefed her visor down and the seals whuffed tightly as she began to tremble. The countdown had proceeded perfectly up until this point. Constitution was fully fueled; her string of six APUs hummed normally behind them, and the main propulsion system was enabled and showing normal pre-flight query responses.
Her instrumentation showed her exactly the same thing she saw the last time she was sitting in her seat, and the nagging notion that something was about to go wrong galled her. She tried her best to shake the feeling off, and get back to the task at present.
"Thirty seconds."
She waited the time out in her head, forcing herself into that calm zen-like state she'd found only a few times in her life. She felt her endorphins kicking in once more, and she settled into a calm breathing rhythm.
"Fifteen seconds . . . ten seconds. Nine . . . eight . . . seven . . ."
She heard the dull roar of the thrusters kicking in. Six good engines. Six good APU's. Eleven percent. Twenty-five. The vehicle began to vibrate as she watched the numbers rise more sharply now. Thirty-eight percent. Forty-four percent. Sixty-one percent. Her seat began to vibrate with the power being unleashed behind her, and she bit her lip in nervousness.
Eighty-nine percent. Ninety-six percent. The illuminated light in the corner of her center display extinguished, and she slammed into the back of her seat as the brakes released.
"Woo!" Jamie Cunningham cried out in sheer, sudden ecstasy as Constitution lunged forward, and her blood filled with adrenaline. Being able to actually see everything happening around her did strange things to her . . . and her heart pounded within her chest as she watched the blurry airspeed indicator on her HUD roll the numbers up. Eighty knots. One hundred twenty knots. One hundred sixty knots.
Two hundred knots. Two hundred thirty knots. She knew V1, the imaginary airspeed where a takeoff abort was no longer feasible, was rapidly approaching. But where was it? She watched the trees whip past on either side of her as Constitution screamed down the runway. Her vision rapidly tunneled as she gasped for breath . . .
And then it hit her.
Two hundred eighty six knots. That's it!
"That's vee-one!" She cried out.
She felt Constitution surge as the nose rotated upward. She felt the abrupt disorientation hit her as she lost sight of the horizon. The acceleration continued to crush her against the back of her chair, and she allowed the sensation to permeate her core.
They were doing it again, she thought with a sudden grin -- they were really doing it.
* * *
"Houston, heading alignment program is complete!" Brian Adkinson called out as Constitution rolled out of her shallow thirty-degree climbing bank to the right. Jamie fought to read the numbers on her flight computer's display as Constitution burned through the sky, and her six main engines throttled back for passage through 'Max-Q'; the period of greatest aerodynamic stress on the vehicle. She couldn't see much; the windows were shrouded in the wispy white mist of condensation from the air as it passed over the nose of the spacecraft.
Her positional data told the story: Constitution was arcing high over Mosquito Lagoon, and would be roaring over Shiloh Beach in a heartbeat.
She knew there wouldn't be anybody camped out on that beach now. For thirty years, it used to be a prime spot to observe Shuttle launches; now the flight path of the Shuttle-Derived Orbiter took them directly over that beach, leaving a restricted section during orbiter departures (with the lone exception being a small grotto and monument to the Space Transportation System program and the beach's role thereof near the shoreline).
She checked her displays as Constitution pivoted, bucking softly with the lower air turbulence, and the ship angled her nose high into the sky. Fifty degrees up-angle, and the vertical speed indicator shot upward. Thirty thousand feet in altitude. Five hundred eighty knots indicated airspeed. Forty thousand feet. Fifty thousand feet. Then the nose began to fall back Earthward, and the engines started to roar back to wide open throttle on their own.
"Constitution, go at throttle-up."
"Roger, go at throttle-up!" Adkinson replied.
Constitution, her nose now nearly level with the horizon, began to build up forward velocity. Jamie Cunningham watched the numbers tick up as she stole a second to look at the horizon. The Atlantic Ocean lay underneath her, glowing brilliantly blue-white underneath her, in contrast to the navy-blue, almost black sky above her. Constitution was now passing sixty thousand feet, on her way to eighty thousand, and the sky grew darker still as the main engines fired their propellant furiously out the back.
"Constitution, Houston. Go at four minutes, forty five seconds. Passing four thousand seven hundred feet per second; press to MECO-1."
"Copy all, Houston," Adkinson replied as he flipped a switch at his left panel. On the exterior underside, a clamshell door opened, lifting up to expose the intake of Constitution's SCRAMjet array.
"Mark! MECO-1."
Jamie Cunningham felt the sudden lack of acceleration throw her forward as the six main engines cut out, leaving the cockpit momentarily quiet. The jolt was momentary, but strikingly powerful, and a shrill whining noise replaced the dull roar as the SCRAMjet array came to life.
"Houston, Constitution, SCRAMjet is online. Dynamic pressure at three-two point three kilopascals and maintaining. Flow rate is at niner-seven pounds per second. Thrust rate is one Mike, six-two-six Tango and rising."
One Mike, six-two-six Tango was an abbreviation, and it meant a simple figure: The thrust Constitution's auxiliary engines output was the equivalent to just over one and a half million pounds of thrust.
"Copy that, Constitution, and you are go at interstage."
It didn't take long for peak thrust to develop. Jamie watched the numbers carefully, noting the smooth feel of Constitution's 'afterburners'; then again, they were in the upper atmosphere, above the region of the sky dominated by the jet stream. By Mach 5, Constitution began the slow climb up into the outer atmosphere, passing a hundred thousand feet in altitude. The g counter leveled off at 1.31g of acceleration.
"Jamie, what's our flash evap outlet temperature?" Adkinson prompted conversationally. She looked.
"Thirty six degrees and holding."
"Good," he replied. The flash evaporator circuit was one of the primary means to cool both the avionics inside Constitution, and to cool the flight deck and other areas that were human-rated. The system was rated to provide strong cooling power for approximately two hours after lift-off, when the cooling duties of the spacecraft would be supplemented by the system radiators in the back of the vessel, as well as the auxiliary radiators located on the inside of the cargo bay doors.
She stole a second to look at the orange sky outside the window, and did a quick double-take as her eyebrows narrowed. The sky was, indeed, orange . . . and she checked her repeater screen. The hull temperature at the nose of the spacecraft was peaking at three thousand degrees, and it took her a second to equate the heat readings with what she was seeing out the windows.
Constitution was being bathed in a shower of ionized gas as it poked along the upper atmosphere.
"Cool!" She said to herself.
"Nope, it's quite hot!" Adkinson replied cheerfully.
* * *
"Constitution, you are go at twelve minutes. Standby for SECO."
SECO meant 'secondary engine cut-off' for this spacecraft, and it meant another jolt of 'non-acceleration' followed by 'wide-open throttle' for the crew of Constitution. Jamie looked at her repeater displays as Adkinson rogered the transmission. The SCRAMjet diffuser array was reaching the temperature red-line, and the efficiency projection had already dropped to well under half of its original output at ninety thousand feet.
They were already almost two hundred fifty thousand feet above the ocean now, almost a thousand miles downrange from the Kennedy Space Center, and they were traveling at just over twenty five thousand feet per second.
Adkinson threw the switch to close the SCRAMjet array's clamshell doors as the array went idle, and a second blast of acceleration hammered them back into their seats as the six main engines fired back to life.
The sky was completely blackened now, speckled with stars as they rode out the last two minutes of frenetic acceleration, and MECO-2 came uneventfully.
Brian Adkinson took his helmet off first and let go of it. He grinned broadly as it floated in front of him, and he whapped Jamie Cunningham playfully on her left shoulder.
She was busy adjusting her own insides to the strange, yet familiar feeling -- that feeling of falling forever, mixed with the vertigo of seeing the clouds pass impossibly quickly underneath her. Having a ringside seat to the spectacle of low Earth orbit did strange things to her stomach, and she shut her eyes briefly as a wave of nausea assaulted her senses.
She reached for, and slid her helmet lock aside as the intruding earthquake in her stomach subsided, and it popped gently. Lifting her own helmet up, she breathed a sigh of relief as Adkinson took off his flight gloves and let them float with his helmet.
"Welcome to space, boys and girls," He said triumphantly as he worked to gather his gloves. Stuffing them into his helmet, he nodded to Jamie.
"Alright, let's get that post liftoff checklist going, and then we're off to the moon!"
"We just got shot out of a cannon; how can you be so damned cheerful after that?" Jamie demanded softly.
"I just gotta be me," Adkinson shot back with a grin.
* * *
SEP-010, Chapter 3
Pilot Jamie Cunningham climbed the last rungs of the ladder leading up to the aft deck, feeling remarkably irritated with how exhausted she felt. She took the hand offered her, and used it to pull herself up, setting a firm foothold on the decksole.
"This feels like déjà vu," Brandon Harris noted as he released his handhold, and Jamie nodded stiffly to him.
"And yeah, I know the way," She said. Crossing over through the threshold into the cockpit, she paused for a moment to let Adkinson and his assistant catch up.
"Need any help?" Harris asked, and Jamie snorted.
"As usual," She admitted. She lifted her right foot over the center console, set it onto the chair, grabbed a handhold set into the ceiling with her left hand, set her right hand on the headrest, and hoisted herself up.
The pivoting motion in her ACES suit still felt unnatural to her, and this time she didn't care much how much noise she was making while getting into the chair.
"Here's your five-point, Jamie," Harris said as he slipped the shoulder belts over, and she pulled the circular buckle up and wordlessly clicked each belt buckle in.
"Good luck, Jamie," Harris said, and she smiled at him as they shook hands.
She watched Adkinson as he strapped himself in and went over to his left-side panel as he activated his communications panel, and she went over her own switches as Harris and Myers left the cockpit to attend to the crew behind them.
"Constitution, OTC. Comm check. CDR, do you read, over?" She heard.
"OTC, CDR. Loud and clear," Adkinson said.
"PLT, OTC, do you read, over?"
"OTC, PLT, loud and clear," Jamie said.
"MS-1, OTC. Do you read, over?"
"OTC, MS-1, loud and clear," She heard Anthony Downs announce.
"MS-2, OTC. Do you read, over?"
"OTC, MS-2, loud and clear," Sienna Morrison replied.
"MS-3, OTC. Do you read, over?"
"OTC, MS-3. Loud and clear," Svetlana Zaytseva answered.
"CDR, OTC. Stand by for an abort advisory check."
Jamie looked at her front panel at the ABORT light, which started blinking at her. She counted the iterations, and noted that the light extinguished after eight seconds as advertised.
"OTC, CDR," Adkinson said. "Abort advisory is satisfactory, over."
"CDR, OTC. Copy."
They spent the next few minutes in silence as they un-stowed their cue cards, pasting them firmly on the velcro strips where they needed to go. Jamie noticed the sudden pressure change inside the orbiter, followed by a mechanical click.
"CDR, Flight Control. Side hatch is closed and locked," She heard.
"Flight Control, CDR. Roger that," Adkinson replied.
"CDR, OTC. Go for cabin leak check."
"Roger, go for cabin leak check," Adkinson replied. He flipped the switches at his left panel, and punched the Master Warning System button as it blinked, silencing the warning buzzer. Jamie watched the cabin pressure indicators spike, and return to normal as she went about her own checklist.
"OTC, CDR. Cabin leak check is satisfactory, over."
"Roger, CDR. Standby for rollout."
* * *
"OTC, PLT. IMU alignment complete," Jamie said as the sound of the fuel rushing into Constitution's holding tanks roared behind her. "We show twenty-eight degrees, thirty-five minutes, fifty-five point two niner seconds north latitude . . . and eighty degrees, forty-one minutes, one point two five seconds west longitude."
"PLT, OTC. Roger. Load OPS 101."
"OPS 101, roger," Jamie replied. Her hand waffled over the keypad as she worked to quell the last vestige of irritation from her mind.
"Let's see . . . OPS 101 PRO . . . SPEC 99 PRO . . . RESUME." She looked at the screen at her left, which showed the ascent profile monitor, and she nodded to herself.
The instrumentation in Constitution's cockpit borrowed heavily from the Space Shuttle era, and it wasn't strictly out of necessity. Half of the flight deck was a glass cockpit, but the other half was traditional 'gauge and switch' arrays that could be used in the event of a failure of some sort.
The software that drove the spaceplane emulated the same flight control software that the Shuttle used, though it was more powerful. The multifunction displays were easier to use, employed side buttons that could be situation-specific, didn't 'require' toggle-switches for operating modes, and tended to be a little more 'moron-friendly' than its predecessor. The keypads at the Center-Three console tended to be the most convenient method to enter precision data into the flight computer.
"OTC, PLT. OPS-1 is loaded."
"PLT, OTC. Roger. CDR, OTC. Load OPS-1 into the backup flight system."
* * *
"Constitution, this is Flight Control. One minute to launch. Visors down; initiate suit O2 flow. Stow all loose articles."
Jamie Cunningham reefed her visor down and the seals whuffed tightly as she began to tremble. The countdown had proceeded perfectly up until this point. Constitution was fully fueled; her string of six APUs hummed normally behind them, and the main propulsion system was enabled and showing normal pre-flight query responses.
Her instrumentation showed her exactly the same thing she saw the last time she was sitting in her seat, and the nagging notion that something was about to go wrong galled her. She tried her best to shake the feeling off, and get back to the task at present.
"Thirty seconds."
She waited the time out in her head, forcing herself into that calm zen-like state she'd found only a few times in her life. She felt her endorphins kicking in once more, and she settled into a calm breathing rhythm.
"Fifteen seconds . . . ten seconds. Nine . . . eight . . . seven . . ."
She heard the dull roar of the thrusters kicking in. Six good engines. Six good APU's. Eleven percent. Twenty-five. The vehicle began to vibrate as she watched the numbers rise more sharply now. Thirty-eight percent. Forty-four percent. Sixty-one percent. Her seat began to vibrate with the power being unleashed behind her, and she bit her lip in nervousness.
Eighty-nine percent. Ninety-six percent. The illuminated light in the corner of her center display extinguished, and she slammed into the back of her seat as the brakes released.
"Woo!" Jamie Cunningham cried out in sheer, sudden ecstasy as Constitution lunged forward, and her blood filled with adrenaline. Being able to actually see everything happening around her did strange things to her . . . and her heart pounded within her chest as she watched the blurry airspeed indicator on her HUD roll the numbers up. Eighty knots. One hundred twenty knots. One hundred sixty knots.
Two hundred knots. Two hundred thirty knots. She knew V1, the imaginary airspeed where a takeoff abort was no longer feasible, was rapidly approaching. But where was it? She watched the trees whip past on either side of her as Constitution screamed down the runway. Her vision rapidly tunneled as she gasped for breath . . .
And then it hit her.
Two hundred eighty six knots. That's it!
"That's vee-one!" She cried out.
She felt Constitution surge as the nose rotated upward. She felt the abrupt disorientation hit her as she lost sight of the horizon. The acceleration continued to crush her against the back of her chair, and she allowed the sensation to permeate her core.
They were doing it again, she thought with a sudden grin -- they were really doing it.
* * *
"Houston, heading alignment program is complete!" Brian Adkinson called out as Constitution rolled out of her shallow thirty-degree climbing bank to the right. Jamie fought to read the numbers on her flight computer's display as Constitution burned through the sky, and her six main engines throttled back for passage through 'Max-Q'; the period of greatest aerodynamic stress on the vehicle. She couldn't see much; the windows were shrouded in the wispy white mist of condensation from the air as it passed over the nose of the spacecraft.
Her positional data told the story: Constitution was arcing high over Mosquito Lagoon, and would be roaring over Shiloh Beach in a heartbeat.
She knew there wouldn't be anybody camped out on that beach now. For thirty years, it used to be a prime spot to observe Shuttle launches; now the flight path of the Shuttle-Derived Orbiter took them directly over that beach, leaving a restricted section during orbiter departures (with the lone exception being a small grotto and monument to the Space Transportation System program and the beach's role thereof near the shoreline).
She checked her displays as Constitution pivoted, bucking softly with the lower air turbulence, and the ship angled her nose high into the sky. Fifty degrees up-angle, and the vertical speed indicator shot upward. Thirty thousand feet in altitude. Five hundred eighty knots indicated airspeed. Forty thousand feet. Fifty thousand feet. Then the nose began to fall back Earthward, and the engines started to roar back to wide open throttle on their own.
"Constitution, go at throttle-up."
"Roger, go at throttle-up!" Adkinson replied.
Constitution, her nose now nearly level with the horizon, began to build up forward velocity. Jamie Cunningham watched the numbers tick up as she stole a second to look at the horizon. The Atlantic Ocean lay underneath her, glowing brilliantly blue-white underneath her, in contrast to the navy-blue, almost black sky above her. Constitution was now passing sixty thousand feet, on her way to eighty thousand, and the sky grew darker still as the main engines fired their propellant furiously out the back.
"Constitution, Houston. Go at four minutes, forty five seconds. Passing four thousand seven hundred feet per second; press to MECO-1."
"Copy all, Houston," Adkinson replied as he flipped a switch at his left panel. On the exterior underside, a clamshell door opened, lifting up to expose the intake of Constitution's SCRAMjet array.
"Mark! MECO-1."
Jamie Cunningham felt the sudden lack of acceleration throw her forward as the six main engines cut out, leaving the cockpit momentarily quiet. The jolt was momentary, but strikingly powerful, and a shrill whining noise replaced the dull roar as the SCRAMjet array came to life.
"Houston, Constitution, SCRAMjet is online. Dynamic pressure at three-two point three kilopascals and maintaining. Flow rate is at niner-seven pounds per second. Thrust rate is one Mike, six-two-six Tango and rising."
One Mike, six-two-six Tango was an abbreviation, and it meant a simple figure: The thrust Constitution's auxiliary engines output was the equivalent to just over one and a half million pounds of thrust.
"Copy that, Constitution, and you are go at interstage."
It didn't take long for peak thrust to develop. Jamie watched the numbers carefully, noting the smooth feel of Constitution's 'afterburners'; then again, they were in the upper atmosphere, above the region of the sky dominated by the jet stream. By Mach 5, Constitution began the slow climb up into the outer atmosphere, passing a hundred thousand feet in altitude. The g counter leveled off at 1.31g of acceleration.
"Jamie, what's our flash evap outlet temperature?" Adkinson prompted conversationally. She looked.
"Thirty six degrees and holding."
"Good," he replied. The flash evaporator circuit was one of the primary means to cool both the avionics inside Constitution, and to cool the flight deck and other areas that were human-rated. The system was rated to provide strong cooling power for approximately two hours after lift-off, when the cooling duties of the spacecraft would be supplemented by the system radiators in the back of the vessel, as well as the auxiliary radiators located on the inside of the cargo bay doors.
She stole a second to look at the orange sky outside the window, and did a quick double-take as her eyebrows narrowed. The sky was, indeed, orange . . . and she checked her repeater screen. The hull temperature at the nose of the spacecraft was peaking at three thousand degrees, and it took her a second to equate the heat readings with what she was seeing out the windows.
Constitution was being bathed in a shower of ionized gas as it poked along the upper atmosphere.
"Cool!" She said to herself.
"Nope, it's quite hot!" Adkinson replied cheerfully.
* * *
"Constitution, you are go at twelve minutes. Standby for SECO."
SECO meant 'secondary engine cut-off' for this spacecraft, and it meant another jolt of 'non-acceleration' followed by 'wide-open throttle' for the crew of Constitution. Jamie looked at her repeater displays as Adkinson rogered the transmission. The SCRAMjet diffuser array was reaching the temperature red-line, and the efficiency projection had already dropped to well under half of its original output at ninety thousand feet.
They were already almost two hundred fifty thousand feet above the ocean now, almost a thousand miles downrange from the Kennedy Space Center, and they were traveling at just over twenty five thousand feet per second.
Adkinson threw the switch to close the SCRAMjet array's clamshell doors as the array went idle, and a second blast of acceleration hammered them back into their seats as the six main engines fired back to life.
The sky was completely blackened now, speckled with stars as they rode out the last two minutes of frenetic acceleration, and MECO-2 came uneventfully.
Brian Adkinson took his helmet off first and let go of it. He grinned broadly as it floated in front of him, and he whapped Jamie Cunningham playfully on her left shoulder.
She was busy adjusting her own insides to the strange, yet familiar feeling -- that feeling of falling forever, mixed with the vertigo of seeing the clouds pass impossibly quickly underneath her. Having a ringside seat to the spectacle of low Earth orbit did strange things to her stomach, and she shut her eyes briefly as a wave of nausea assaulted her senses.
She reached for, and slid her helmet lock aside as the intruding earthquake in her stomach subsided, and it popped gently. Lifting her own helmet up, she breathed a sigh of relief as Adkinson took off his flight gloves and let them float with his helmet.
"Welcome to space, boys and girls," He said triumphantly as he worked to gather his gloves. Stuffing them into his helmet, he nodded to Jamie.
"Alright, let's get that post liftoff checklist going, and then we're off to the moon!"
"We just got shot out of a cannon; how can you be so damned cheerful after that?" Jamie demanded softly.
"I just gotta be me," Adkinson shot back with a grin.
* * *
