Collecting ice from the rings was very
dangerous but also one of the many things they had set up to do on the mission.
The Juno V crew knew their responsibilities by heart and every one of them knew
everything about their ship and their list of duties. They also knew how to fix
the microwave if it broke or how to properly grow food in the small
compartments where doctor Wood worked all day every day. Not that anyone
thought he would leave or something, but rather he had told him how to do it.
He was a botanist, one of the best, and had
accepted to be on the mission because he wanted to test many of his theories
and what better way than in a mission to Jupiter and its moon. It was the
perfect place to make tests and try to execute every single one of his theories
in order to know if they were accurate. His results would prove essential for
the advancement of botanical technology on Earth and in other space missions.
Wood had tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes and
apples growing on his small farm. Well, it wasn’t really a farm because of the
dimensions of the laboratory and of the food but he enjoyed calling it that, it
made it seem less advanced, more grounded. After a few months, he was able to
feed the other five people of the ship with his vegetables and they enjoyed
their salad thoroughly. It was much better than eating one of those dehydrated
meals they had in stock. No one complained about sizes or portions because they
understood the difficulty of the whole thing.
One of the astronauts that spend a lot of time
with Wood was Brooke Stone. Ms. Stone was in charge of the telescope and
everything related to the observation of the bodies they were studying such as
Jupiter, Europa, Ganymede and Io. She love to spend her day taking pictures of
them, trying to not only make them functional for work but also a bit artistic
as she thought science lack a little bit of that sensitivity only real artists
had.
When she was younger, Brooke wanted to be a
painter or a sculptor. But her parents did not encourage that at all. They were
very accomplished scientists and believed the only art that made any sense was
music and even if Brooke wanted to be a musician, they would have thought it
would’ve been a waste of her time and their money. So throughout her childhood,
she was convinced to become a scientist like them.
She didn’t resent them or anything like that.
If anything, she was pleased to be there, taking pictures of the chaotic
weather of the gas giant, a very long distance away from her parents. They had
a very tense relationship and she realized it worked best when they were
separated instead of being in the same room. She loved her moments alone, which
she used to draw, sometimes copying the picture she took.
The adventurous one, the guy who took a step
forward to pick up the ice shards with a robot, was called Alexei Ibaraki. His
mother was Japanese so he had these different features that made every single
person turn around to look at him. Not only was he very daring but he was also
very attractive and interesting. He was one of those guys that always has a
story to tell or that has that ability of making anything they say into
something extremely interesting, even if it really isn’t.
Alexei was also a model, besides an astronaut,
and was used frequently in campaigns done in order to encourage children to
study the sciences and getting interested into it. After being sent to Mars on
a routine flight however, he became also the poster boy of several brands that
wanted him as an imaged. His face was connected to beer, butter, insurances,
banks, toothpaste and even condoms.
The truth was he enjoyed that work but he
loved to be in space doing work that was more important than selling beer to
people that were already going to buy it. As he operated the hand of the robot
that collected the ice from Jupiter’s rings, he realized that’s what he wanted
to be doing his whole life. He wanted his actions to be remembered instead of
his face. Alexei was tired that people only looked at him for his beauty and
not his brain and wit.
Carmen Nyongo, the medical chief of the ship,
was very aware of the crew’s problems. She was not only a certified physician
but also a psychologist that loved to spend at least thirty minutes which each
of them every two days to check on their mental health. This was determined by
the agency as something very important as they were going to be very far from
home in a place where no one else had been before. They needed some support and
Ms. Nyongo was an obvious choice.
She had worked for years in military hospitals
were she proved to be simply the kindest person ever to come in contact with
all the soldiers and astronauts that needed her help. She loved to listen,
since she was a very young woman. She liked telling her friends what she thought
of the world but she much rather listened to them and their dreams and what
they had inside their heads.
Carmen thought people were extremely
interesting and that’s why, after medical school, she got a masters degree in
psychology. She thought it was essential to get to know about mental health in
order to prevent and help people with their physical problems. She was not your
average doctor but she had proven, once and again, that her methods made a lot
of sense, to her and her patients.
The
most frequent one, of course, was the captain. Her name was Katherine and she had
been born in the Australian outback. Her parents still owned a big ranch there,
where they had some of the best cattle in the country. With all the money they
had won with that, they had built up a very good life for themselves and their
two children. They rarely went to the ranch anymore, but it had been that place
that made them who they were now.
They lived in beautiful homes and went to the
best school. When Katherine said she wanted to be an astronaut, her family
didn’t say a word for or against it. They just supported her with money for
every single expense she had to make to turn her dream into a reality. So she
studied abroad and came back only on the holidays. From then on, the relationship
with her parents was kind of broken, not really deep.
They were not very sensitive people, any of
them, but she would have loved more kisses and hugs in her life. She would have
wanted to feel some kind of interest from them, but the only thing they did was
giving her money and talking to her about it all the time. And when they
weren’t they were busy. So when Katherine met Carmen, it was just a natural
thing to become a very frequent patient of hers, even before the mission
started. She just wanted to come to terms with the fact that she wanted
recognition and she was never going to get it, not from her parents at least.
The last crewmember, the one who made
everything work properly, was Alejandro Obregón. Different from his captain,
Alejandro had a very difficult life and had to raise himself to the place he
enjoyed today. He was the happy father of a very intelligent young daughter. He
loved his wife, whom he had met in a fast food restaurant after training in the
astronaut academy. She was studying in a nearby university and they hit it off
right away.
They both had a very strong personality, the
kind that made them being a little overdramatic but always effective in public.
They didn’t mind being looked in the street as if they were crazy. They didn’t
mind anything else than their love for each other. They also had in common that
they supported a lot of good causes, maybe because they had received so little
over their lives.
Alejandro would always go to marathons
supporting any type of disease, would march in the pride parade and would
protests in front of police stations or administrative building. He was all
about causes and its effects on people’s lives. He really believed everything
could be better for everyone. And that’s why he had become an astronaut: he
thought that a future where everyone was equal had to involve that final
frontier and he was going to be one of those who brought it closer to every
other person on Earth.
