Europa

June 17, 2048

"If you do that up there, you're dead. We all wake up six years later to find your thawing, drowned corpse. Do you hear me? Do you hear me? Look at me when I speak to you, Rodrigues! What the fuck is wrong with you." I'm back in my room now but I can almost still year Commander Hunt yelling in my face. The events of today's training session keep playing in my head over and over.

I fucked up, I know I did, but that didn't mean it was okay for him to treat me like a damn child. I've never worked with a cryofreezing chamber before. I tried my best to replay the instructions the instructor gave to us when it was my turn to practice setting myself up for a sleep. In the process I got ahead of myself and forgot to connect the breathing tubes to my face before I pressed the button to begin the freezing process.

It's a mistake. That is why we practice these things. The way he yelled at me in front of the team was completely humiliating. I'm just glad I didn't break down sobbing.

I realize this is a serious job, but I already know being an astronaut on this mission is dangerous. Yelling like that just makes the process more stressful.

I thought a facetime call with my family would help me relax after today, but even seeing my son's face on the other line could not ease my stress. If anything, it just added to it. "You're dead," I heard Commander Hunt's voice shouting in the back of my head.

I started imagining what it would be like for Diego to get the news that I had died aboard my mission for something stupid like forgetting to put in my breathing tube before I froze myself. I would have been dead for six whole years, and he wouldn't have the slightest clue.

On this mission, any stupid mistake could be life threatening. Even a simple trip could put my life in danger when we were on Europa. This whole time I was worrying about making it home alive. I was mostly thinking about all the stuff I couldn't control, like a catastrophic launch failure. It hadn't even dawned on me the number of mistakes or misjudgments I could make that would prove fatal. I was somewhat a clumsy person on Earth, with gravity I'd had decades to get comfortable with. Just thinking about the risk that clumsiness could put me in the zero-gravity space station or Europa where the gravity is one twelfth of the gravity we experience on Earth.

I ended up having to hang up the call. All the potentially life-threatening mistakes I had made during training so far kept playing in my mind and I kept zoning off in the middle of Diego's stories. With each memory I felt this weird sensation of fearful guilt.

The one thing that did make me feel better was when Jennifer came to my room to check on me. Apparently while I had done a good job of holding back tears when Commander Hunt yelled at me, she could tell it had phased me from my detached gaze. I hope she was really good at seeking these things and it wasn't completely apparent.

Somehow, she'd managed to get her hands on a bottle of wine, and she thought it would be the perfect way to take some of the edge off. She was right.

After we started drinking, she told me about some of the mistakes she had made in training, and about how on their mission to Mars she had almost driven one of the Humvees into the spacecraft.

She even told me about a major mistake Commander Hunt had made at one point, before making me swear I'd never tell a soul. Apparently on the Mars mission when a sleep deprived Captain Hunt misread coordinates on the map and took the crew's expedition thirty miles in the wrong direction. They actually had to set up a temporary camp to wait while the sun recharged the batteries on the Humvees so they could finish the trip back to the basecamp.

Jenifer jabbed me in the arm and said "all it would have taken that night was a sandstorm and we're dead. Everyone makes mistakes. The important thing is we learn from them and don't make them twice.

That really resonated with me. I still had Commander Hunt's voice yelling "you're dead," in the back of my head but it wasn't as loud anymore.

What I liked about what Jenifer said was it didn't sugarcoat the reality of how dangerous mistakes can be in space, but it was meant to build me up rather than tear me down. Knowing that even the experienced astronauts on the crew have made mistakes makes me feel like I'm a part of this team, rather than an imposter that was chosen by accident.