Galactic Adventures: First Kids in Space

Tristan Bancks tells stories for the page and screen. He has a background as an actor and film maker in Australia and the UK. His short films have won a number of awards and have screened widely in festivals and on TV. Tristan has written several books for kids and teens, including the explosive Mac Slater, Coolhunter series (Random House) released in Australia and the US, and his illustrated series, Nit Boy (Laguna Bay Publishing), about everybody’s favourite mini-beasts. Nit Boy is currently being developed for television. Tristan’s young adult novel, It’s yr life (Random House) was co-written via email between Byron Bay and L.A. with actress/author, Tempany Deckert. Tristan is saving for his ticket to space. He loves telling inspiring, fast-moving stories for young people.

www.tristanbancks.com

Also by Tristan Bancks

Mac Slater Coolhunter series

Nit Boy series

It’s yr life

For Hux and Luca.

Dream big.

‘A bit of advice given to a young Native American at the time of his initiation:

"As you go the way of life,

you will see a great chasm.

Jump.

It is not as wide as you think."’

– Joseph Campbell

A Joseph Campbell Companion

Prologue

In 1971, two years after the first moon landing, the US government secretly attempted to send three children into space. The craft, containing thirteen-year-old Douglas Bailey, eleven-year-old Meredene Holden and nine-year-old Robert White, exploded before it left earth.

Now, over 40 years later, five more children are being given the chance to become the first kids in space. This is their story.

1. G-Force

‘Dash Campbell. You ready?’

I nod.

‘3, 2, 1 . . . Engage.’

I feel the pod move under me. My head and shoulders are thrust back into the red leather seat. The washed-out monitor in front of me shows a live video image of my face. Numbers jitter across the top of the screen. The number on top right flips quickly from 1G to 1.5, up to 2G. Then 2.5G to 3G. 3G means that the pressure I’m feeling on my body is three times my regular body weight. My arms are pinned to the armrests. I feel like I’m being fired from a cannon directly into the air, but I haven’t even left the ground.

I grit my teeth.

‘That’s right,’ says the voice in my headset, an Eastern European accent. ‘Mouth closed. One, two, breathe.’

They warned me in the briefing that my jaw could break if I opened my mouth.

I’m locked inside a TSF-18 centrifuge: 300,000 kilograms, top speed 270 kilometres an hour. It’s used to prepare astronauts for rocketing in and out of the earth’s atmosphere. The centrifuge is a round metal pod on the end of a 20-metre-long steel arm. I’m inside the pod, swinging round and round a white circular room in the Galactic Adventures Spaceport somewhere in the Mojave Desert, Nevada, USA. I’m a long, long way from home.

‘One, two, breathe.’

As the intensity of the G-Force creeps up I can feel my face starting to deform. My eye sockets are stretching. My vision’s blurring. Now it’s at 4Gs. I can see my cheeks smearing across my face in the monitor. I look scary, like an alien. My body’s clocking four times its regular weight because of the high-speed spinning of the centrifuge.

My right hand is gripping a joystick. My thumb is pressing a red button firmly. I know that if I vomit, freak out, or if I let go of the button before my five minutes are up, I can say goodbye to the only chance I might ever get to go into space – the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to do. But I don’t know if I can hold on much longer.

4.3G.

‘Squeeze your stomach. Breathe.’

I take a breath, using my diaphragm, not my chest. They warned me that if I let my chest collapse I might not be able to breathe in again.

A minute passes.

‘Okay, we are going to push through to 5Gs now. Are you ready?’

I don’t say anything. I can’t. Tears start to roll out of my eyes. The pressure of the centrifuge pushes them back into my hair. I grip the controller even tighter, trying to stop myself from letting go of the button.

‘Are you okay in there?’ the voice says.

Sweat makes my eyes sting. I blink hard. I want to wipe them, but I can’t lift my arm. My heart bangs fast.

‘Dash? Are we go for 5G?’

‘Yep.’ It’s all I can eke out.

I try lifting my head off the headrest even though they told me not to: ‘It may result in unrecoverable loss of head position.’ The extra acceleration kicks in and I feel like I’m being buried in sand. There’s a rushing in my gut. The lunch train has pulled out of Stomach Station and is roaring up through the tunnel towards Mouth.

That’s it. My thumb half-releases the red button. I’m not going to let myself hurl. I’m just about to release the button fully and stop the machine, when I feel a little twitch in the pocket of my grey hoodie and I press the button firmly again. The pocket twitch is Marv, my rat. I’m not, officially, supposed to have a pet rat at the spaceport, but Marv’s kind of my best friend. I snuck him onto the flight from Australia. We need each other.

The screen reads 4.7G and I begin to lose the edge of my vision, as though I’m staring into a tunnel. I hit 4.9 and, finally, 5G. The pressure I’m feeling is five times my body weight. My eyeballs are squeezing their way past my ears, into the back of my skull.

‘Okay, 3, 2 . . .’ says the voice in my headset.

I feel a really bad burning in my throat. Then the lunch train pulls into my mouth. My cheeks flex out.

‘1 . . . and . . .’ The pod begins to slow. The acceleration drops away rapidly. All the tension in my body slackens. Blood speeds to my head, causing a deep, warm rush, like when you stand up too quickly, but times a thousand.

Marv runs out of my hoodie pocket and up my chest to my neck. I’m on camera, so I grab him and shove him back in my pocket, hoping that no one has noticed.

The pod comes to a stop. I sit for a minute, just breathing, knowing I’ve survived one more challenge, the last challenge before the five are chosen. My heart rate begins to slow down.

The pod door hisses open. Heath, a spaceport worker, grey hair, bushy moustache, sticks his head inside.

‘How’d you do?’ he asks. ‘Looked like you were gettin’ upset in there. We were gonna pull the plug.’

I force a smile and swallow what’s in my mouth. It tastes real bad.

‘What’s next?’ I croak.

2. First Kids in Space

Two months ago, almost to the day, I was sitting, eyes glued to the computer screen in the back office of our laundromat. There were post-it notes in my stepdad, Karl’s, messy scrawl stuck around the edge of the screen.

‘Join the ranks of the greatest explorers in human history,’ said James Johnston, the old man on-screen. He was wearing a white cowboy hat and he had wild, silver hair spewing from his nose, ears and eyebrows. ‘Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Neil Armstrong . . . and you.’

I’d been waiting for this moment nearly my whole life. But I refused to believe it till I actually heard him say the words. I cranked the volume and closed the door to drown out the noise of ten washing machines, five dryers and the highway out the front.

‘When I was twelve years old,’ he said in his Irish accent, ‘I sent a letter to NASA offering to be the first kid in space. They didn’t write back. I’m now slightly too old to be the first kid. But not too old to give you the chance to make that pioneering leap for humankind.’

I figured pretty much every kid in the world with web access was watching Johnston’s announcement at that moment.

‘I invite children everywhere,’ he said, giving a raspy cough and taking a sip from a tall glass of water, ‘to upload a one-minute video to firstkidsinspace.com. You must show me why you, out of all the children on earth, should be one of the first five kids in space. You have one week to submit your video. Twenty children will be chosen to spend a week at my spaceport facility in Nevada. They will be put through a week-long training and medical assessment program. The top five participants will then spend one month at Space School. Space travel puts extraordinary stress on the human body and you must be exceptionally fit. You will be blasting beyond earth’s atmosphere at three times the speed of sound. If you survive Space School, you will experience ten incredible days of weightlessness aboard my Utopia Space Station, orbiting earth more than 150 times.’

I tried to stay calm as I jotted down the details:

1 min. video

20 kids chosen

Top 5 = 1 month Space School

Survive that → Utopia

Johnston leant in to camera, lowering his voice. I leant in a little, too. I wanted to catch every word.

‘Children will be needed on future long-range missions to distant planets and also for long-term stays on space stations like Utopia. Children will be vital for their advanced computer skills, technical expertise and adaptability. I believe in children. Our top five will, officially, be the first kids in space. Will you be one of them?’

The screen cut to black, then Galactic’s silver star logo faded up with the web address. I sat there, buzzing all over. Then Karl, my stepdad, shoved open the door, letting real life spill inside. ‘What are you doing? We’ve got a heap of clothes wash. Get onto it,’ he said.

‘But I’ve just—’

‘Move it!’

I pocketed the envelope that I’d written my notes on and headed out to the baskets of dirty washing. I picked up the biggest pair of underpants I’d ever seen. On any other day I would have been totally freaked by what was inside them. But, that afternoon, I was so fired up it was as though skid marks didn’t even exist.

I worked for two hours, went out on deliveries, then I made dinner – just three out of the million jobs on my list. I opened the fridge to find one floppy brown carrot, a bottle of beer, an empty tub of margarine, some rock-hard cheese with cracks in it, three eggs, a plastic bag with two bread crusts and an old green vegetable of some kind. I grabbed the eggs and crusts. The eggs kind of smelt a bit when I cracked them, but I scrambled them anyway and dumped them on toast with some no-name beans. I choked mine down in front of the TV without even thinking about how bad it was. My head was already in space.

Karl sat next to me on the couch to watch a current affairs show. Top stories were, ‘Are Big Macs as Big as They Used to Be?’ and ‘Is Your Bra Killing You?’ My brother Chris’s armchair lay empty to my left. It had been that way for a year since he got his apprenticeship and moved out. He wanted to be a mechanic. He hardly ever dropped over now, even though he only lived four streets away.

I knew exactly what would happen next. Karl would say, ‘That was good, Rocket. You’re a chef.’ That’s what he always called me, Rocket. Then he’d take the dishes, dump them in the sink, come back and pass out on the couch for a couple of hours. I’d nudge him just before nine. He’d go down, close up