I Dream of Rockets

by Lupe Fernandez

I dream of rockets blasting into space. I dream riding a rocket to another planet. I dream of fitting in to environmental suit, riding the gantry up to command module, slipping into my couch, hearing the hatch slam shut, going to a check list until all systems are go.

The rockets rumbles and the force of acceleration squeezes me into my couch while Mission Control voice rattle out numbers and abbreviations, the jargon of spaceflight.

I dream of the great blue globe of Earth passing beneath me as my spacecraft circumnavigates the globe every 94 minutes, at a speed unheard of by Ferdinand Magellan in his five sailing ships.

Then the bell of the spacecraft's engine fires and injects me into a trajectory bound by Newtonian Physics and celestial mechanics.

Traveling at tremendous velocities, in space nothing seems to move, and yet I am hurtled away from Earth, everything I've known and that there is in human experience. Oceans. Sand. Trees. Grass. School. Girls. Cookies. Pizza. Comic books. Blue sky. 

I survey the stars and look backward in the time. After several slingshots around the planets, I decelerate at my destination. A new world with continents unknown and seas unheard. What crawls and swims on this world? Are they like us? Is it a desert? Am I the only one alive?

But I'm not alone.

Everyone who labored, loved and launched the spacecraft is with me. Their million prayers and calculations are comfort me. I report my findings and the Earth waits as I descend through the foreign atmosphere. Gravity greets me as an old, portly friend, squatting on my body. Dust settles and the engine shuts off as I land.

I see the horizon trimmed with mountains, a pinkish sky and another sun.

Dare I step out onto this new frontier? Crunch my boots in this new dirt.

Maybe I should fire the ascent module and go home, and pretend it was all a dream.

What would you do?

I dream of rockets and I'm going to write about them.