George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt

by Lucy Hawking

  The Future

  In 2010 the space shuttle will go out of service and the ISS will receive supplies and crew from the Russian Soyuz and Progress spacecraft.

  NASA is developing a new type of spacecraft, called Orion, which it hopes will take us back to the Moon and possibly beyond—to the red planet, Mars.

  But a totally new type of space travel is also becoming a reality. In the future, space tourists may be able to take short, suborbital flights. One day, perhaps, we will all be able to take vacations on the Moon!

  * * *

  The agency had departments in several places in the United States, each one responsible for different aspects of spaceflight. Here in Florida, they ran the launch of space shuttles and robotic probes into the cosmos. In Houston, Texas, they took over control of the manned spaceflights once they had taken off, and in California there was another mission control for the robotic spaceflights. Sometimes Eric went to visit these other offices, but he had decided to base his family in Florida, so they wouldn’t have to move around all the time.

  Annie told the others that they had to get inside the main building at the Global Space Agency to get their space suits, which Eric had stored there, so that, like the shuttle, they could leave the Earth and travel into space. They couldn’t go without their suits because it would be too cold, and they needed air to breathe and a way to communicate with Cosmos.

  However, it was pretty much impossible for kids to get into the Global Space Agency by themselves: They had to have special passes, and Eric had to drive them there. They intended to put the master plan into action the minute Eric took his eyes off them.

  “When no one is looking—,” continued Annie.

  “What do you mean, ‘when no one is looking’?” interrupted George. “I think your dad will notice if we suddenly disappear.”

  “No he won’t!” said Annie. “He’ll be too busy staring up at the spaceship in the sky. So that will be the moment I give the command for us to run. All we need to do is find the space suits, put them on, open up Cosmos, and go through the doorway into space. It’s simple, really,” she told them. “The greatest plans always are. Just like Einstein said.”

  “I think he was talking about scientific theories,” said George gently. “Not kids traveling around the Solar System by themselves.”

  “If Einstein was here now,” insisted Annie, “he’d be saying, Annie Bellis, you are the coolest cat that ever wore pajamas.”

  Emmett’s face had clouded over. “Am I going into space?” he fretted. “I mean, I really want to, but I’m very allergic to lots of things and I might—”

  “No, Emmett,” said Annie. “You are the controller of the cosmic journey. You’re going to stay on Earth with Cosmos and direct us. So you don’t have to worry about meeting a peanut in space. It isn’t going to happen.”

  “Oh, phew,” said Emmett with relief. “My mom would never forgive me.”

  “And what are we going to do?” asked George.

  “We,” said Annie, “you and me, that is, are going to Mars. The truth is out there, George. And we are going to find it.”

  Standing on a wide balcony high up on the Global Space Agency’s main building, George, Annie, and Emmett could see all the way across the swampland to where the space shuttle sat waiting, patiently and quietly, for takeoff. Around it was the scaffolding that had been holding it upright—a steel cat’s-cradle of joists and supports for the enormous spacecraft. Two railway lines led away from the launchpad to the largest building that George had ever seen.

  “You see that place?” said Eric, pointing to the building. “That’s where they get the spaceship ready to send it into space. It’s called the Vehicle Assembly Building, and it’s big enough to stand the spaceship up inside it. It’s so tall that it has its own weather systems—sometimes clouds form inside.”

  “You mean it can rain inside there?” said Annie.

  “That’s right,” Eric told her. “You have to take an umbrella if you work in that building! When the orbiter—that’s the spacecraft part of the shuttle—is ready to go, it leaves that building by train and travels to the launchpad, where it’s prepared for takeoff.”

  With its black-and-white nose pointing upward, the orbiter looked quite small against the giant orange fuel tank underneath it. The fuel tank was flanked on either side by two long white rocket boosters, waiting for ignition.

  “See, they’ve taken the arms of the scaffolding away now,” said Eric. “That means they’ve closed all the hatches, and the crew who’ve readied the shuttle for launch have left the area.”

  “Just like on my computer game,” boasted Emmett, “which teaches you how to fly the shuttle.”

  “I’d like to try that,” said a voice from behind him. George turned around. A woman in an all-in-one blue Global Space Agency suit stood behind him. George knew this outfit meant she was a real astronaut.

  “Okay!” said Emmett happily. “I can let you do that. If you come over to our house this evening, I’ll show you how it works.” He caught Annie’s eye. “Or another day,” he added hastily. “We’re a bit busy right now, and I might not have time. You could come over tomorrow, if you like. If we’re back, that is. Not that we’re going anywhere, but—ouch!”

  Annie had nudged him quite hard.

  “I was just trying to be friendly!” he whispered to her. “I thought you said that was a good thing to do!”

  “I did!” she hissed. “But making friends with people doesn’t mean you have to tell them everything we’re up to the minute you meet them!”

  “Then how do I make friends?” asked Emmett plaintively.

  “Look, let’s just get the planet saved, all right?” said Annie. “And tomorrow I’ll teach you about being friends with people and how it works? Okay? Deal?”

  “Deal,” said Emmett solemnly. “This is turning out to be a mega-cool vacation.”

  “But don’t you know how to fly the space shuttle already?” said George, asking a question to deflect attention away from Emmett. “Aren’t you an astronaut?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” she said. “I am an astronaut. I’m what’s called a mission specialist. That means I’m a scientist who goes up into space to perform experiments, do space walks, and help build parts of the International Space Station. I am trained to fly spacecraft, but that isn’t really my job. The commander and the pilot fly the shuttle and dock it at the International Space Station. When we get there, that’s when my work begins.”

  “When you’re in the space station,” said Annie, “are you all just floating around?”

  “We are,” said the astronaut. “It’s a lot of fun, but it’s difficult to do simple things like eat and drink. We have to drink through straws, and our food comes in packets: We open them, dig our fork in, and hope the food sticks to it and doesn’t go flying around all over the place.”

  “Do you ever have food fights?” asked George. “That would be cool!”

  “But how do you go to the toilet?” asked Emmett, looking perplexed. “Isn’t that very difficult in a low-gravity scenario?”

  “Emmett!” squeaked Annie. “I’m so sorry about him,” she said to the astronaut. “He’s really embarrassing.”

  “Oh no!” The woman laughed. “Don’t be embarrassed about your brother’s question.”

  Annie’s face was a picture of horror at the idea that anyone could think Emmett was her brother.

  “Everyone asks about the space toilet,” said the astronaut. “And yes, it is quite tricky at first. We have to do special training sessions to learn how.”

  “You have toilet lessons to be an astronaut!” Emmett’s face had turned pink with delight.

  “It’s just one of the things we have to learn to get by in space,” said the astronaut firmly. “We train for several years, learning the tasks we need to carry out during our two-week missions in space. We have to learn how to cope with being weightless and how to operate the shuttle’s robotic arm and use all th
e other complicated electrical and mechanical equipment. Have any of you thought of becoming astronauts when you grow up?”

  “I might,” said Annie. “It depends.

  You see, I want to be a physicist and a soccer player, so I might not have time for all that extra training.”

  “What about you two?” the astronaut asked George and Emmett. “Would you like to go into space?”

  “Oh yes!” said George. “I’d like that more than anything.”

  Emmett shook his head. “I have motion sickness.”

  “We know,” said Annie. On the drive over, he had nearly been sick in her backpack—the one with Cosmos in it. She’d had to snatch it away and push Emmett’s head out of the open car window to prevent a disaster. Even then, it hadn’t been pleasant.

  Eric appeared next to them, looking worried. “Hello!” he said to the astronaut. “I’m Eric—Eric Bellis from the Mars Science Laboratory.”

  “The famous Eric!” she exclaimed. “I’m Jenna. I’ve wanted to meet you for ages. It’s great, the work you’re doing on life in the Universe. We’re all very excited about Homer and what he might find on Mars. We can’t wait to hear the results!”

  “Ah, well…” Eric frowned. “Um, yes, we’re…excited too.” But he didn’t sound like it. “I see you’ve met the kids.” He was fidgeting with his pager, which let him know if anything important was happening, either on the Earth or on Mars.

  “I have!” said Jenna. “Are they all yours?”

  “Er, no,” said Eric. “Just Annie, the blond one. The rest I seem to have collected somehow.” But he smiled as he spoke. “These are her friends, George and Emmett.” Suddenly his pager beeped furiously in his hand. “Oh, collapsing stars!” he said to himself and looked up. “I’ve been sent an urgent alert,” he told Jenna. “I’ve got to get to the control room immediately.”

  “You can leave the kids with me,” she said. “I’m sure nothing will happen to them.” The kids shuffled their feet and looked rather guilty. “You can page me when you’re done,” she continued cheerfully. “I’ll let you know where to pick them up.”

  “Thank you,” said Eric, and shot off down the stairs. As he left, the clock on the wall that displayed the time to takeoff had started moving again. From time to time it stopped in order to allow more checks—of everything, from the shuttle launch systems, to the computers on the orbiter, to the weather in different locations around the world—to take place. Once all the checks were completed and everyone was happy, the clock moved on again. This time they were just seconds away from liftoff. George gripped Annie’s hand as everyone called out to count down the final seconds together.

  “Five…four…three…two…one!”

  The first thing they saw was a great cloud of dust at the bottom of the spaceship, billowing outward in slow, soft, pillowy folds of grayish white. As the spacecraft rose up from the ground, George and Annie could see a brilliant light under the tail. The spaceship moved upward as though pulled by an invisible thread, and the light beneath it was so bright, it was like seeing the skies ripped open to reveal an angel or some other celestial being appear from within. The spaceship climbed higher and higher, the mighty blast beneath it sending it vertically into the heavens.

  “It’s so quiet,” whispered George to Annie. “It’s not making any noise.”

  Until that moment, the spaceship seemed to be starting its cosmic journey in complete silence, as though they were watching it on television with the sound turned off. But seconds later the noise rolled over the intervening miles toward them. First they heard a strange crackling sound, then the full force of the boom hit them. The sound seemed to swallow them whole. It was so loud, it blocked out everything else. They felt a pounding in their chests so intense that they thought they might be knocked backward by the wave of sound.

  * * *

  HOW SOUND TRAVELS THROUGH SPACE

  On Earth there are lots of atoms close together and knocking one another around. Giving atoms a kick can make them kick their neighboring atoms, and then those atoms kick other atoms, and so on, so the kick travels through the mass of atoms. Lots of little kicks can create a stream of vibrations traveling through a material. The air covering the Earth’s surface consists of a large number of gas atoms and molecules bouncing off one another. The air can carry these vibrations, as can the sea, the rock beneath our feet, and even everyday objects. We call the vibrations that are the right sort to stimulate our ears sound.

  It takes time for sound to travel through a material, because an atom has to pass each kick on to its neighbors. How much time depends on how strongly the atoms affect one another, which depends on the nature of the material and other things like the temperature. In air, sound travels at around one mile every five seconds. This is about one million times slower than the speed of light, which is why the light from a space shuttle launch is seen almost immediately by the spectators, while the noise arrives a bit later. In the same way a lightning flash arrives before the thunder, which is the kick given to the air molecules by the sudden and intense electrical discharge. In the sea, sound travels at around five times faster than it does in air.

  In outer space it is very different. Between stars atoms are very rare, so there is nothing to kick against. Of course, if you have air in your spacecraft, sound inside it will travel normally. A small rock hitting the outside will make the wall of the craft vibrate, and then the air inside, so you might hear that. But sounds created on a planet, or in another spacecraft, would not carry to you unless someone there converted them into radio waves (which are like light and don’t need a material to carry them), and you used your radio receiver to convert them back into sound inside your ship.

  There are also natural radio waves traveling through space, produced by stars and faraway galaxies. Radio astronomers examine these in the same way that other astronomers examine visible light from space. Because radio waves are not visible, and we are used to converting them into sound using radio receivers, radio astronomy is sometimes thought of as “listening,” rather than “looking.” But both radio and visible-light astronomers are doing the same thing: studying types of electromagnetic waves from space. There isn’t really any sound from space at all.

  * * *

  The roar of the engines rang through their whole bodies as the spaceship curved away, leaving a trail of white smoke behind it. As they stood and watched the craft climb ever upward, they saw the wispy white clouds form into a shape against the blue sky.

  “That looks like a heart,” said Annie dreamily. “Like it’s saying, From the space shuttle with love.” But a second later she shook herself back into action again. Looking around, she saw that all the adults were still gazing up at the sky. She grabbed George and Emmett.

  “Okay, I’ll give the countdown,” she said, “and then we run! Are you ready? Five, four, three, two, one…”

  Chapter 8

  As the spaceship disappeared into the skies above, the kids also vanished—down the same stairway Eric had taken. They found themselves inside a huge building with long corridors leading in all directions.

  “I think it’s this way,” said Annie, but she didn’t sound at all sure. They rushed down the hallway after her, past framed pictures of astronauts and drawings done by the children of astronauts, which hung on the wall to commemorate each mission.

  “Um, let’s try this door.” Annie pushed hard, and they burst into a huge room full of giant pieces of machinery.

  “Oops!” she said, backing out rapidly, treading on George and Emmett behind her. “Not that door, then.”

  “Do you actually know where you’re going?” asked George.

  “Of course I do!” said Annie huffily. “I just got a little confused because all these places look alike. We need the Clean Room. That’s where they keep the suits. Let’s go this way.”

  George’s heart sank at the idea of Annie navigating her way around the Solar System. If she couldn’t find her way around the Global Sp
ace Agency, which she claimed to have visited many times, could she really be trusted to take them to Mars and back?

  But Annie was not to be deterred. She dragged them along to another door, which she shoved open. The room was in darkness, apart from an illuminated screen at the front, where a man was pointing to a picture of Saturn.

  “And so we can see that the rings of Saturn,” he was saying, “are made up of dust and rocks in orbit around the giant gas planet.”

  George thought back to the little rock from Saturn he had once pocketed when he and Annie were riding around the Solar System on a comet. Unfortunately a teacher at George’s school had thought the precious rock was nothing more than a handful of dust and had made George throw it in the trash can. If only! he thought. If only he’d been able to bring that little rock here. What clues about the Universe might they have been able to discover from his fragment of Saturn?

  They came to a door marked COMETS, but it was locked.

  “Ping-pong!” they heard from inside Annie’s backpack. Cosmos seemed to have switched himself on.

  “Cosmos!” said George. “You have to stay quiet! We’re trying to find the Clean Room and we don’t want anyone to notice us.”

  “Do I sound like I care?” came the reply.

  “Oh, shush!” said George urgently.

  “Emmett, make him be quiet!” ordered Annie.

  “Actually,” said Emmett, “it would be better to leave him switched on right now. If I close him down and then have to open him up quickly, we might have even more problems.”