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Space Story

Year is +53, Cendrillon is starting to be given some responsibility (mainly because she looks older than she is).

Time for SOUNDING ROCKETS! But, there's no infrastructure, so we'll have to go over the history of rocketry in a few years first.

The adults tolerate this and are mostly wanting to make sure nobody gets hurt. A bit of the COT estate that borders on one of the few curated patches of desert is dedicated to this.

Fireworks! Yay! That's a legitimate pursuit, and one everyone has fun with it, but making fireworks pretty distracts from making them go up. Cendrillon is mildly annoyed, goes to do her own tests with a couple of friends.

They find that the "testing range" is being used between firework shows by other people who have a similar intention! They're older kids and "teenagers" who want to sell fireworks in order to finance a sounding rocket.

A mini space race starts between the COT teenagers and a nearby group called The Outer Light. It's friendly competition... at first. Then there's some pushing and shoving and stealing of floppy disks, but nobody is stupid enough to break safety for the actual rockets. Fireworks shows continue.

Cendrillon is conflicted, the "space race" idea put things back on track, but she feels responsible for causing animosity.

The rockets are getting pretty good, the two "teams" have a score board for flight time, height, and some actual data gets collected (atmo density, etc).

A metereologist visits COT to get a copy of the data. This alerts the COT adults that it's gotten a bit beyond fireworks, but instead of getting mad they decide to make a bit of a production of it, invite the extended neighborhood so to speak, in a few weeks.

Everyone wants to show off, and design sharing stops for a while. More pushing and shoving when red team wants to watch a blue test launch or vice versa. Cendrillon has to calm people down, and is accused of partiality by the red team captain, Sergei.

Someone wipes the PC that had most of the shared designs. Each team accuses the other, and starts over from their own backups. Due to the setback and having a deadline, some safety corners are cut. Nothing major, but there are bruises and singed eyebrows. Red team has a failure to launch (they're trying strap-on boosters instead of vertical stack). While yelling at Sergei about safety, Cendrillon discovers that the red team has a much smaller support network than COT, and they've been running on a meal and a half a day to be able to afford to do this stuff. She helps them do a pantry raid on COT.

The next day, Cendrillon fesses up to the raid, explains why it was done, and is rebuked by Chloe and told that all the red team guys had to do if they were legitimately low on food was ask, sheesh.

Demo day! The sounding rockets go up to about two thirds of the sky now, which is pretty impressive. Strap-on boosters work beautifully and the red team wins on all categories except science-fair-style presentation. Rayford, being the airline pilot, gives him a certificate. Sergei makes a little thank-you speech in which he praises his team for the effort and thanks Cendrillon for the support.

Rayford is bothered by the lack of references to faith in the speech, basically shoves Sergei off the stage, and gives the speech that he thought Sergei had to give, which is longer and includes an altar call. The certificate ends up with Cendrillon's team, who give it back to the winners the next day.

A day later, the grownups have decided to take over the project (for safety reasons, apparently) and reorganize the two teams into one, which means some layers of hierarchy. That means STANDARDIZED TESTING! The tests have been written by Chloe, Tsion and Chaim and are a bit heavy on the theology, but not stupidly so. The test results aren't shared ("This isn't school, relax, you all passed!") but red team guys mostly find themselves in subordinate roles. Cendrillon is assigned to do the presentations and has to give up the lead engineering role to one of her guys.

With adult supervision comes a better budget and the work continues faster; the final rocket is sure to reach the water canopy, and is set up to transmit video and various environmental data. This is enough of a thing that local media shows up; Buck truthfully says that it's mostly the kids having done the work, but manages to hog the camera anyway.

A couple hours before the launch, Sergei is found crying in a corner; at the last system check, Rayford vetoed "his" boosters because the sounding rocket might crash into the water canopy, with fragments falling out of control or even an unplanned rainstorm. Sergei protested that the whole point is to see if it's pierceable in the first place. Rayford accuses him of star-worship and even morning-star-worship, and "disinvites" him from the launch. Cendrillon almost kisses Sergei, is too shy to, comforts him for a while and then when one of the kids finds them (they don't want to launch without Cendrillon being there) she drags Sergei out with her to go to the launch anyway.

The guy who replaced Cendrillon as engineering lead gets to push the button and the rocket goes up. Sergei gets to see the launch, but is pretty much neck-scruffed by Rayford shortly after. Cendrillon sticks with Sergei but is roughly pushed off as he's escorted off the premises. Most of the meteo instruments on the rocket turn off just before launch, but the cameras are rolling and Rayford says to go on anyway.

The rocket itself works as intended, except for the fact that it's climbing a bit too high and too fast, as if it was lighter than spec. Even without the strap-ons, it will hit the water canopy at some speed. Cendrillon shouts to Sergei that she's sorry, and goes back to the telemetry station -- that's where she's needed right now.

The rocket's camera shows what looks like a translucent sheet of incredibly clean water before slamming into it; the camera snows. Cendrillon makes a copy of the recording.

An unpredicted rain briefly follows, causing a little bit of equipment damage and preventing the fireworks display that was supposed to happen as a conclusion for the event. Chaim and the metereologist show up to say that everyone has done a fantastic job and learned a lot, the rocket program was a success, and that effort would be redirected to other activities. The local news show most of the event, with artful cuts around the commotion and the impact.

At COT, the two teams are given a space for a very tame "graduation party". Sergei isn't there. When it comes out that he's been banned from the ground, everyone on his team and (much to her elation) almost everyone on Cendrillon's team walk out of the space. The wrapup party happens in Sergei's house; his parents have grounded him after the scuffle with Rayford, but agree that effort should be rewarded, so the grounding can start the next day. They are shown the full telemetry recording and congratulate the kids.

Sergei and Cendrillon, as well as a couple of others, stay up all night analyzing the telemetry, and determine that the water canopy has a ground speed of zero and is indeed water, but by the look of it, has a layer of ice on top - it looks blue-tinted because of it, not because it's the same color as the surface sky. The two of them fall asleep in front of the terminal. They figure out a way to use the water canopy for space launches, rather than treating it as an obstacle -- it should be possible to build a waystation on top of the ice, do vertical launches to it with a grapple for docking, and then launch capsules from the top of the canopy without the atmosphere being in the way and with the ice itself as a potential source of reaction mass.

The next morning, they are woken up by half the COT cadre. Nothing untoward happened, quite obviously, but there is the problem of maintaining a proper image for everyone involved. Coincidentially, Sergei's family has been offered a mission trip to the Philippines; the offer is quickly accepted. Cendrillon is "temporarily" prohibited from straying away from Jerusalem more than 300 miles, to prevent her from following Sergei - which she has no intention of doing. The two hug, and then share a firm handshake on a job well done before Cendrillon is taken back to COT for a thorough dressing down by Chloe, who has been hanging around Buck for a while full-time, and has misunderstood the issue entirely; Cendrillon gets a lecture on how it's important to wait until marriage, and so on. Cendrillon daydreams of being an orbital dock worker throughout the abstinence lecture. By now Cendrillon is pretty sure she's heterosexual, but hasn't really clicked with anyone in that sense yet. Chloe's lecture, well intentioned but superfluous, does however make Cendrillon understand that Sergei probably had developed more than a crush on her.

Leaving, Cendrillon overhears Buck and Rayford be disappointed at Chloe for going too easy on her. Going back to her room, she sees a couple of vans carrying away the disassembled launchpad. Once in her room, she fires up her terminal. There's a message to Sergei from the previous day, indicating that he's removed some of the meteo instruments (which would have worked in lower atmo anyway, and whose data can be obtained without using a rocket) to get a few more meters per second of delta-V so as to hopefully reach the canopy. She writes back to Sergei.

"Dear Mr. Korolev, when you receive this e-mail, it will be because your work in the Philippines has progressed enough to allow connecting to the network. It was a wonder to work with you and I hope we can do it again soon! Here are my thoughts on a possible aquatic stage..."