Astrotwins — Project Blastoff

by Mark Kelly

  “The way the mass of the boat is balanced, the gravity acts on one particular point—that’s the center of gravity,” said Barry.

  “Even I’ve heard of that,” Mark said.

  “Because you’re a genius,” said Scott.

  “As is well-known,” said Mark.

  “Uh-huh,” said Barry. “Anyway, the center of buoyancy is the center of gravity of the volume of water that the hull displaces—the water moved out of the way because the boat takes up the space where it used to be. The center of buoyancy needs to be above the center of gravity. Because if it isn’t and they get out of line, the boat starts to tip. It will probably keep tipping, tipping over, and probably sink. So if you load too much weight high in the boat, this can happen and if there is a wave or something, it can tip the boat over.”

  “And you drown,” said Scott. “Glug-glug-glug.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Mark. “I’m a good swimmer.”

  It was almost lunchtime by then, and the three boys were hungry. Mark rowed back, and together they pulled the boat onto the beach. They were walking back along the path when Mark stopped in his tracks and looked around.

  “Hang on a sec,” he said. “What do you guys think of this as a launch site?”

  They were standing in the bare field between the shrubs and the trees. Grandpa said a builder had brought in a bulldozer and cleared it to put up houses, but there was some problem with money so the project was on hold.

  “It’s a pretty big area,” said Scott.

  “Out of the way, too,” said Barry.

  “Nothing to blow up, either.” Mark grinned. “I think it’s perfect.”

  CHAPTER 16

  * * *

  Grandpa Joe did the library drop-off that day, and the pickup, too. “Peggy—that is, Mrs. O’Malley—shouldn’t have to do all the chauffeuring,” he explained.

  As the kids had done the day before, they spent part of the afternoon in the library and the rest in the park. When they were finished, Scott sighed and pronounced it “three lost hours of my precious summer.”

  Mark punched him.

  They dropped Egg off at her house in town and Howard at Nando’s Auto Repair. Then Grandpa steered the car for home. “You guys are awfully quiet,” he noted.

  Riding in the back with his brother, Mark leaned his head against the seat. “That’s because building a spaceship turns out to be harder than you’d think. Did you know NASA spent millions of dollars on the Mercury program?”

  “What’s your budget?” Grandpa asked.

  “Negative numbers,” Scott said. “We still owe Dad for the calculator.”

  Barry shook his head. “I am trying really hard not to say ‘I told you so.’ But if you think about it, I told you so.”

  “Lucky you’re in the front seat, or we’d pound you,” Scott said.

  “I wouldn’t have said it if I weren’t in the front seat,” said Barry.

  They drove for a few minutes in silence; then, in a voice like a stage actor’s, Grandpa said: “We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard, because the goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, uh . . . something something . . . because the challenge is one we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone.” He shrugged and said in his normal voice, “I’m paraphrasing.”

  Mark closed his eyes and shook his head. “Grandpa, my brain’s so tired it aches, and now you start talking crazy. What was that about?”

  “President Kennedy, right?” Barry asked.

  Grandpa nodded and looked at Mark in the rearview mirror. “The president’s point was that sometimes you do the hard thing because doing hard things is good for you.”

  Like Grandpa, Scott and Mark were usually optimistic. But the stuff they had learned at the library about NASA’s Mercury program did make their project look either impossible or crazy, or maybe both.

  Besides the budget, there was the matter of rocket fuel. The Atlas rocket that shot John Glenn’s Friendship 7 spacecraft into space carried almost thirteen tons of rocket fuel. Where were they going to get that, as well as a rocket big enough to contain it?

  Finally, there was the matter of personnel. Given all the challenges involved, their best bet would be to make the mission as simple as possible, and as light. That meant one astronaut. But both Mark and Scott wanted to be the first kid in space. For all they knew, maybe Egg, Barry, and Howard all expected to be astronauts as well.

  Who would get to go?

  CHAPTER 17

  * * *

  After so much physical activity at the lake and mental activity at the library, the boys were exhausted. Back at the house, they plopped down on Grandpa’s old, super-comfy sofa and closed their eyes.

  “What time’s dinner, Grandpa?”

  “Soon as you want to make it,” Grandpa said, and all three boys groaned.

  Without opening his eyes, Mark said, “If we’re cooking, it’ll be Froot Loops with a generous side of Frosted Flakes. I hope that’s okay with you.”

  Grandpa pretended to consider. “I’d hate to die of sugar poisoning. Here’s an idea. I’ll make dinner. You boys go out and take a look at my workshop. Maybe some of the odds and ends will prove inspirational.”

  Mark sat up in a hurry. “Seriously?”

  But Scott sighed. “You’re not going to let us give up, are you, Grandpa?”

  “You can’t give up now,” Grandpa said, “not when the whole thing’s going so well.”

  “Going well?” said Scott. “We just realized the whole thing is totally impossible!”

  “True,” said Grandpa. “But look at it this way. You haven’t had a fight all day, and the level of destruction around the house is way down.”

  “Before we can start building, we need plans,” said Barry. “Have you got any graph paper, Mr. McAvoy?”

  “I do, and I’ve got something else, too,” Grandpa said. He went into the bedroom where his desk was and came back with an old issue of Life magazine that had a diagram of John Glenn’s Friendship 7 spacecraft.

  “People said I was crazy to save this,” said Grandpa, “but I knew it would come in handy one day.”

  Friendship 7 was the first American spacecraft to orbit Earth with an astronaut inside. It was made up of four parts. By far the tallest and heaviest were the two stages of the Atlas launch vehicle, the fuel-filled rocket whose entire job was to push the smallest part, the capsule containing the astronaut, up and into orbit.

  While Grandpa started dinner, the boys studied the magazine pictures. Then Scott called into the kitchen, “Are you sure it’s okay if we go out to the workshop, Grandpa?”

  Mark punched his brother. “Don’t ask again, idiot! What if he says no this time?”

  “I heard that, Mark, and yes, it’s okay,” said Grandpa. “Just don’t—”

  “—blow anything up!” the three boys chorused.

  “Well, there’s that.” Grandpa appeared in the kitchen doorway. “But what I had in mind was something else. I haven’t been out there in a while, so it’s probably pretty dusty, and who knows but some critters might have taken up residence.”

  “Critters?” Barry frowned anxiously.

  Grandpa shrugged. “Nothing to worry about. None of ’em will be as big as you are. But the place is pretty stuffed with clutter, and with the daylight beginning to fade, you won’t be able to see well till you hit the fluorescents. You remember where the switch is, right?”

  “Is there a chain that drops down from the fixture?” Mark asked.

  “Right. It’s in the middle of the room,” Grandpa said. “So you have to go inside before you can turn the lights on. What I was going to say was, try not to trip over anything.”

  Their energy restored, the three boys were out the door before Grandpa had finished speaking.

  “We’ll be careful,” Scott called back.

  “We promise,” said Mark.

  CHAPTER 18

  *
* *

  The sun was low in the sky as Mark, Scott, and Barry jogged down the path toward the big red barn. The twins could hardly believe they were being allowed inside without Grandpa coming along to supervise. Did he think they were growing up, getting more mature?

  Or maybe he was just counting on Barry the brainiac to be a good influence.

  Grandpa Joe was what his daughter—the twins’ mom—called a pack rat. He could never resist acquiring anything that might be useful even if no one else could imagine how, and he could never throw anything away. The people who used to own the property had built the red barn for horses, but Grandpa had always used it to store stuff.

  The barn’s front doors were huge, to accommodate horses, but the back door was a regular human size. When Mark turned the knob and pushed it open, the hinges squealed. Inside, the air smelled like sour dust and it was hard to see after having been in daylight outdoors. A few beams of early evening light shone through chinks in the siding, but instead of lessening the gloom, they added to the creepiness.

  “What kind of critters, I wonder?” Barry said as they made their way carefully across the wood floor, expecting at any moment to trip or bruise their shins.

  “Mice, I guess, or bugs,” Scott said.

  “Or rats or spiders or werewolves!” said Mark, and at that very moment there was a rattling sort of flutter high above, near the far-off ceiling, and an instant later a disturbance in the air announced something was swooping in the shadows above them.

  Make that some things—lots of them—that were squeaking as they flew.

  “Bats!” shouted Barry.

  “Vampire bats!” said Mark.

  Both boys ducked and covered their heads. Scott, meanwhile, waved his arms to drive them away. “I don’t even think vampire bats are for real,” he said.

  “Real or not, are they gone?” Barry peeked out from behind his hands.

  “I don’t hear them anymore, at least,” said Scott. “Come on. The chain for the light’s around here someplace.”

  A moment later, Scott’s hand brushed the chain; then there was a click and a stuttering flash as the fluorescent tubing lit, casting a greenish glow over a large expanse in the middle of the room while leaving the edges and corners in shadow. With the bats and the darkness, the barn had seemed haunted. Now the harsh light and electric hum made it seem more like a mad scientist’s laboratory.

  But at least the boys could see. And what they saw was inspirational. In the well-lit center of the space were three workbenches stocked with tools, and several rows of shelving units, some stacked with paint and solvents but most with bins full of parts from every kind of machine.

  In the shadows lay old and broken machines themselves—stuff anybody else would have called junk but that Grandpa called unexploited treasure. These included appliances, lawn mowers, and air conditioners.

  “Is there a kitchen sink?” Barry asked after he’d had a chance to look around.

  “Of course!” Mark pointed to a white porcelain fixture lying upside down, its silver pipes exposed.

  “If we can’t build a spaceship out of all this stuff, then we can’t build one at all,” Scott said.

  “All this stuff . . . and Howard’s computer,” said Barry. “We will need a lot of computing power to plot the route and do the flying.”

  “The astronaut does the flying,” said Mark. “Doesn’t he?”

  Scott said, “Or she,” but only to annoy his brother.

  Mark ignored this, and Barry said, “Not really. The astronaut has to override the computer if something goes wrong, but the computer autopilot is programmed to handle the navigation and, responding to sensors in the gyroscope, to keep the capsule stable.”

  The boys were all set to do some more exploring when Grandpa showed up in the doorway. By now the sky outside was dark silver, and stars twinkled behind his black silhouette. It was getting late.

  “Dinner is served,” he announced.

  “I can’t wait to call Egg,” said Mark.

  “And Howard,” said Barry.

  Scott sighed. “I guess there’s no getting around Howard,” he said. “We have to have that computer, not to mention what he knows about it.”

  “Tomorrow we meet right here,” said Mark. “And we start building!”

  CHAPTER 19

  * * *

  Only it turned out they weren’t as well prepared as they first thought.

  Even with all the resources in Grandpa’s workshop, there was still material they needed, most important the very first thing the twins had put on their list: metal. What they were hoping for was lightweight titanium for the interior and heat-resistant nickel alloy for the outer shell. Those were the materials NASA had used for the Mercury capsules.

  “Maybe we should start with the interior instead,” Egg suggested. It was the following morning, and she was on the telephone with Mark. “Like, we need an instrument panel and a seat and seat belts, too. With no seat belt, the astronauts will float away.”

  Mark noticed she’d said “astronauts,” plural. Unlike the twins, she seemed to think everyone who wanted to could still get a ride on the spaceship. Mark didn’t want to argue. It was better if all of them were eager to work, and maybe they wouldn’t be so eager if they realized he was the only one who would get to go up in space.

  “Grandpa probably has an old tractor seat, but no seat belts and nothing like an instrument panel,” he said.

  “What about if we use a dashboard from a car?” Egg said. “Oh—and we can use a speedometer, too. In a car it measures speed by how fast the axle is rotating. Spacecraft don’t have axles, but maybe there’s a way to hook the speedometer to the guidance system to get the data, then recalibrate the numbers.”

  Mark mouthed the word “recalibrate,” then tilted his head so Barry would know it was a question. Barry answered in a whisper, “It means to adjust to a different kind of measurement.”

  Mark nodded, then said into the phone, “Sounds good, Egg. But where do we get those things?”

  “Don’t you worry,” Egg said. “I have an idea. Howard and I will see you this afternoon.”

  * * *

  Grandpa had been right about the state of the workshop, and the boys spent the morning cleaning. “This is not exactly what I pictured when we thought up the idea of building a spaceship,” said Mark, who was high on a ladder, knocking down cobwebs with a broom.

  Scott, kneeling to corral dust and other crud in a dustpan, protested. “Hey! Watch where you knock down those spiders, wouldja? I think I’ve got a creepy-crawly in my hair!”

  “Maybe he’ll comb it for you, for once,” Mark said.

  “Look out below!” Barry cried, jumping from the top of the stepladder he’d been using to dust shelves. A moment later the hinges on the human-size barn door squealed and a girl’s voice called, “Hello-o-o-o?” Then, “Yikes, it’s like magical in here!”

  “Do you think so?” Scott looked around. It was definitely a lot cleaner than it had been the previous evening, and the sunbeams that filtered through the walls seemed more jolly than eerie. Also, the bats were gone, or possibly asleep and out of sight.

  “Come and help us unload,” Egg said.

  Parked outside was a blue commercial truck labeled NANDO’S AUTO REPAIR. A man was handing a car’s old bench seat to Howard, who didn’t look so sure about receiving it. Mark hurried to help him.

  It was another hot day, and the man wiped sweat from his brow, then stood up straight and grinned. Egg opened her mouth to make introductions, but he spoke first. “I am Nando Perez, owner of Nando’s Auto Repair. And you are?”

  Mark, Scott, and Barry introduced themselves. “This is really nice of you,” Mark said.

  “De nada—don’t mention it,” said Nando. “My company is one of the sponsors of the science fair. This looks like a very ambitious project! I can’t wait to find out what it is you’re building.”

  Now the truck’s passenger door opened, and Lisa, the girl the
y had seen yesterday, jumped out.

  “Meet Lisa, everybody,” Egg said. “She’s going to help us, too.”

  Scott and Mark looked at one another, both thinking the same thing: Who said it was okay for Egg to invite another kid? But they didn’t want to be rude to Lisa, who looked like she was kind of shy anyway, so they smiled and said “Hi.”

  One benefit of having a lot of helpers was that it didn’t take long to unload the truck.

  “Thanks, Mr. Perez,” Egg said when they were done.

  “What else do you need?” he asked.

  “Sheet metal,” she said, “if it’s not too much trouble.”

  “I’ll see what the junkyard has available,” said Nando.

  “We really appreciate it,” Egg said. “But how do we pay you back?”

  “With a blue ribbon from the science fair,” Mr. Perez said.

  Egg grinned. “That is a deal.”

  * * *

  Mark and Scott were showing the other kids around the workshop when Grandpa came out to see if anybody wanted lunch.

  “Me!” Barry, Scott, and Mark chorused.

  “Whoa, Nellie!” Grandpa looked around. “You boys have sure done some good work on the cleanup.”

  “You’re telling us,” said Mark.

  “Thank you,” said Barry.

  “And now we’re going to organize our workspace,” said Egg.

  “Oh, goody,” said Mark.

  Howard looked at Mark. “That was sarcasm, right?”

  “Howard, my boy.” Mark clapped him on the back. “You are catching on.”

  “She means we organize our workspace after we eat lunch,” said Scott. “Grandpa Joe? It’s not more peanut butter and peppers, is it? I would never whine, you know that, but . . .”

  Grandpa laughed. “I’ve got cold cuts today. And lemonade. And there might be some cookies in the cupboard.”

  The kids ate outside. Scott counted, and Lisa said exactly eleven words: “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. McAvoy” and “Thank you, Mr. McAvoy.” If she was going to be part of this group, he thought, she was going to have to learn to speak up a little. In comparison, Howard was downright chatty when you got him on the subject of computers and math.