God Must Die

chapter 10

For Kyle who had been working hard to be the person that she dreamed to be, knowing that she was one of the top candidates for Caeles felt as if she was closer to her dream than she ever had in her entire life.

Happiness was an understatement to explain what she felt at that moment, and she didn't want anything bad to happen.

Everything was working quite well. The Caeles mission was promising, and she couldn't wait to be part of the discovery that would surely change how the world would look at the skies.

She was meant to spend months in the ISS as per requirement since the spacecraft that they would be using to send men in the outskirts of the solar system was needed to be assembled in orbit, and it wouldn't be completed yet during their launch. It would be impossible, if not, costly, to build the spacecraft on the ground, and launch it into space in one go. It would take big and powerful rockets to do that, not to mention the amount of fuel it would take just to power those rockets up. And if they were to use the same propulsion system that was meant to power the spacecraft, then it would generate enormous amounts of energy with possible lethal doses of radiation.

The construction of the spacecraft was costly enough. The collaborating states could no longer afford to spend more money to cater with the costs. That was why they needed to plan wisely in order to spend money as low as possible, and to ensure the safety of the people.

Caeles wouldn't be possible without the brilliant idea of Valentin Hautzig, a rocket scientist and a propulsion physicist and the former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Programme. He worked with this idea for a rocket that made the travel to the outskirts of the solar system attainable in a shorter period of time.

As an aerospace engineer, Kyle found his idea utterly visionary. And his idea had been a topic for several debates ever since then, saying that rapid acceleration and deceleration could be lethal to human organisms due to inertia.

The fastest manned vehicle that broke the records of Apollo 10 was the Orion with the maximum velocity of 40,000 kilometers per hour. The Caeles spacecraft was just beyond ordinary with a theoretical speed of almost 0.8% the speed of light or approximately 8.6 million kilometers per hour. With that speed, they would reach Neptune and their destination in 1.5 to 2 years, considering some variables that would make the speed slower.

The propulsion system of the Caeles spacecraft was based on fission and fusion concept. Fission involved splitting of atoms in a controlled chain reactions, as was done in commercial nuclear reactors. In the second process, fusion combined atoms into heavier atoms to release energy, the same reaction that powered the Sun, and the hydrogen bomb.

The concept had been a fantasy for some rocket scientists even way back in the 1950s, not until Hautzig and his group made it possible by successfully building a fusion reactor that produced more energy than the initial energy that was put in. That gave birth to even revolutionary ideas.

The design team chose a form of nuclear-pulse rocket for Caeles, a propulsion system that had already been used during Project Orion, but with alterations. The engineers opted to power the spacecraft with internal confinement fusion.

To protect the crew from the immense radiation, Caeles had a clever placement, and clever engineering.

Truth to be told, Caeles wasn't Commander Dalmian's original proposal, but his father's. Hindi masiyadong alam ni Kyle kung anong talagang nangyari noon dahil itinago ng agency ang issue na iyon pero ang alam niya'y may nahagip na kakaibang data si Dr. Dalmian na hindi kailanman ipinaalam sa publiko.

It was kept a secret even from the agency's employees. Whatever that was, it was either a nonsensical object or an utterly important one. The latter was much more terrifying