The God Experiment

Chapter No.44. Freefall.

Chapter No.44. Freefall.

The next day, Janet received the call, but she handed the phone to her husband. "It's NASA . . . again."

Robert received the phone. "Yes?"

"We'd like to discuss a new project with you," a woman's voice said.

"Okay, we'll be there." He gave the phone back to his wife to hang up. "They want to discuss a new mission."

Both his wife and son didn't verbally react to his statement. They prepared to teleport.

The Steris family appeared in the JPL mission room in their uniforms.

Jason gestured to an older woman with grey hair. "This is Janice Webber. She's in charge of the US operation of the ISS."

Janice looked over the three superheroes before she began "As you may know, the ISS has been abandoned because of several damaging object collisions. The International coalition has decided that it's time for a new space station, and it's scheduled to be constructed in one of the Moon-Earth Lagrangian points. The ISS's orbit is slowly degrading and it's only a matter of time until it burns up in Earth's atmosphere, a process that could be dangerous from falling debris."

"What do you want us to do, move it back into a proper orbit?"

Janice smiled. "Actually, we had something more interesting in mind."

Robert gave her a curious expression.

"What we would like to do is bring it back to Earth and mount it on display in Arizona."

"Wow!" James exclaimed. "That's cool!"

Janice smiled at him before continuing. "The ISS has a mass of nearly a million pounds and is traveling at 17,000 miles per hour. Do you think that you could slow it down to a thousand miles per hour and then bring it down to the ground without serious damage?"

Robert exchanged glances with his wife and son before replying. "I think we could, but there are no guarantees. However, we will need a complete list of all of the satellites and space junk in orbit below the ISS. We will need to know their trajectories and masses."

She smoothed her hair back with her hand. "There are probably more than ten thousand objects in that category. I can display them, but it would take days for you to consider all of them."

"We can memorize them in the time it takes to display them," Robert boasted. He looked at his wife and son. "Right?"

"No problem, Dad," James said with a grin.

Both Jason and Janice looked at them as if they were just kidding, but they realized that they weren't. Janice typed requests into the main computer system to display the data that Robert wanted. The superheroes watched the data scroll past at a rate that a normal person would never be able to absorb.

"Okay," Robert said. "We're ready, but we'll need Sparky to help guide us to back through the atmosphere."

"Sparky?" Janice said, with confusion showing in her eyes.

"Yeah, it's our dog."

Sparky suddenly appeared wearing his super dog costume. He announced his recognition with a bark.

Janice turned to Jason with a smirk, He replied with a shrug.

"Show us where you want the ISS in Arizona," Robert said.

Janice turned to Jason again, and he rubbed his jaw. "NASA owns Meteor Creator." He turned to Robert. "The US finally purchased it from the family that owned it. I think that would make a great location for an ISS exhibit. There's plenty of land around the crater and it's already a tourist attraction. However, we don't have the proper infrastructure to hold something that large."