The Thirty-Third Launch

It took them decades of hurling metal into the stratosphere to realize women were best suited for space travel. With every launch, the men from the lab sent two rats, a male and a female, to test what the influence of space could do to a body. With every landing, the female returned alone, her partner a lifeless lump, fur all gone and flesh dappled with dark circles humming with radiation. This radiation was everywhere in space, they found. It came from everywhere and if it could ravage the rodents, it could ravish their astronauts and that wouldn’t do. But the moon was out there, winking at them from the sky, and they had to reach it. Progress had to be made.

They then started sending women to space. Every year, on the clearest morning in December, they would fire off a rocket carrying a female pilot selected by the men from the lab. They were sent with food, water, tools, and materials tested against radiation from Radon, from Polonium, from Uranium. These would be the materials for the new settlement, the new homes, the new labs. 

The first launch went up with just enough to erect a shelter and start a crop of Yukon Gold potatoes. The second went up with parts to assemble moon rovers. The third had a synthesizer to generate fresh water from the hydrogen in the air. Each woman was a puzzle piece. They left earth, streamers and celebration in their wake, to put together what was to be the Lunar Dome, a safe and sealed outpost. The first human foothold on the moon. 

That year was to be the thirty-third and final launch in the Lunar Dome Project. It would be this pilot’s task to rise with the rocket and with the other twelve still living on the base, begin construction of the Dome. The ultimate goal of the project. The men in the lab spent the thirty-three years leading up to this launch feverishly testing and developing and progressing. They bent particles, discovered new ones, turned Earth inside out searching for any element or mineral that could withstand the churning of space. The public called them heroes, said they’d be remembered forever if they just kept going.

The product of all the searching now waited in the hull of a rocket ship. Its selected pilot’s name had been all over the news since she’d been selected earlier that year. The men in the lab had chosen carefully. After three decades and countless taxpayer dollars swallowed by their projects, the public was in need of a reason to reinvest in the concept of space travel. The woman they selected was the daughter of the pilot from the second launch. The public would love that. All the positive news stories would write themselves.

The day before the launch, the men from the lab found the pilot huddled and shaking in a utility closet after a training session. She’d cursed and shouted at them, so they had her escorted to the small dormitory building on the other side of the compound and allowed her a phone call to calm herself down. She called her father. 

“I can’t imagine what you must be feeling,” he told her. “But what you’re about to do is incredible. What you’ve done will be remembered forever.”

He pointed out how her mother and the other women were working so hard, how proud she should already be to be her daughter, how lucky she was to be part of progress. She sat at the edge of the small twin bed, staring into the muddy yellow wallpaper as she listened. He was right, she was proud of her mother. The day she’d been selected as a pilot, she bought a plush butterfly to bring as her personal item and give to her when she arrived on the moon. They’d raised them together every summer before her mother’s launch. She thought it would be nice for her to see one again. 

She hoped it would be. She hadn’t heard from her mother since the launch. All communications with the base were limited to a select few men from the lab who kept meticulous track of all progress with the settlement and reported it to the public. According to them, they now had roads up there. Running water. A greenhouse with two fully-grown apple trees. They produced images constructed by the women that mapped out all the area surrounding the base, photos of vast ranges of mountains and craters, recordings of them explaining how their day-to-day lives unfolded. 

The pilot wondered how she would fit into it all. Beyond surviving the flight, beyond getting the Dome up and running, she would have to learn to live up there on the moon. She’d spent the last several months going on several camping trips to prepare. She’d gone deep into the woods. To the Bonneville Salt Flats. To the Rockies, climbing until the air was still and thin and freezing. She’d handled it all with only what she could carry in a backpack and find in the environment, but she’d been alone. The women on the base had been there together for decades. There was no way to train or plan for what it would be. 

It was that thought that cracked the universe open for her. She was at the precipice of everything. She could die alone in space. She could survive. Both of those things carried implications too vast for her to contain.

“That’s a small fear,” her father told her. “Once you get in the rocket, everything will come into focus.” 

When the time came for the launch, the men from the lab all shook her hand and thanked her. They told her how grateful they were, how when she was finished and the Dome was stable, they would follow her up and she could come home. The idea gave her comfort as she lowered herself into her seat. As the door sealed behind her for the last time, she imagined where she’d go to eat first when it was over. 

The men in the lab stared up as the rocket disappeared into the folds of the atmosphere. Once they were certain takeoff was successful, they turned back to their tests and computers. Up in space, the pilot held the plush butterfly between her boots to keep it from floating about the cockpit as she left gravity behind. Part of her wanted to let it go. To see it fly. 

There came a point when having thoughts was a liability. She had to become pure intention, pure calculation. She couldn’t make time to understand what was happening, only make the right decisions. There was a moment in which she accidentally entertained the concept of floating like this forever. Of all the knobs and flashing screens going dark, leaving her to the empty shadows. She let herself start to feel that kind of nothingness, let herself sink into it. She almost missed the feeling of her craft touching solid ground. 

The first steps were uneventful. She had no clever words, though she supposed maybe they would have been warranted. The air inside her mask was heavy as she looked gently around, moving cautiously. It was like the moment she stepped to the edge of Blanca Peak. Just open space before her, the view stretched so wide you’d think it could tear. 

She checked her coordinates on a screen built into the wrist of her suit. She’d missed her designated landing space by less than an Earth mile. She knew she could walk that. 

In a small way, the moon was underwhelming. She wondered if she’d ever marvel at anything again after tumbling untethered through the void of space. It thrilled her, but only now that she’d made it. It felt like the end of one long hurdle through gravity, one that began the moment she’d been chosen to walk the moon. She felt more certain here than ever on earth, finally able to see all things, all the greatness, all the progress that everyone spoke of. She would be the one to finalize the Lunar Dome. Afterwards, she decided, she’d finally go to that Thai place on Main Street that her father had mentioned the last time they spoke face-to-face.

She arrived at the top of a small hill and didn’t see what she was supposed to see. From here, she should have been able to see comms towers, roads, the tops of the cylindrical dwellings she’d seen in the photos from the men in the lab. She could make out a shape in the distance, clearly a structure. She took a heavy breath and started toward it. 

She recognized it from the simulations as a starter shelter. They were large, constructed of piping and tarp then sealed and hooked up with oxygen generators. Not knowing what else to do, she knocked on the airtight hatch built into the side. Before the silence became too heavy, she pulled and twisted the knob to get it open. She listened for the hum of oxygen generators, but there was nothing. 

Once she entered the main space inside, she could see all the little tears in the tarp. There was equipment inside--computers, oxygen tanks--but they were all covered in a thin layer of dust. She pushed a few buttons, nothing. The ground on the far half of the shelter looked different from the rest--not the thin, silvery dust of the moon. It was dirt, dark and overturned in an intentional way.  She took a fistful of it and kneaded it between her fingers. Hard, dry. Something was sticking out of the ground nearby, something paper. She picked it up--an empty packet of Yukon Gold potato seeds. It seemed that nothing had grown. 

She stepped back outside through a large tear in the tarp. Staring out over the moon this time was like swallowing mud.  She reached into one of the large pockets on her space suit and pulled out the plush butterfly, needing something to hold, something to squeeze. When she let go, she finally let it fly. In the emptiness it drifted, and all she could do was cry out. 

Back down on Earth the men from the lab were announcing to the public that the mission had failed, that they had lost contact with the pilot but hope could not be lost. She, like her mother, had known what she was signing up for. That she had been a vital tool for their work. 

They could not be finished yet. They were at the precipice of everything. There was so much they had found and so much left to find. The project was so close to being realized, they would only need a little more time, a little more innovation, a little more support.  In memory of their valiant pilot, they would be continuing their good work. Progress had to be made.