Project Mouse in the Moon

           “It’s going to be beautiful!” I said to Humphrey. “The most perfectly assembled one ever made!” The Accelerator had a soft yellow cushion inside its clear see-through capsule, two orange parachutes to ensure a slow and gentle reentry, and an unlimited maximum altitude using the Blue Thunder rocket motor and fourth-grade arithmetic. “Project Mouse in the Moon, that’s the name of this magnificent mission!” I said to Humphrey as he looked on with excited eyes.
          I was an intensely curious nine-year-old boy with big dreams, and I could hardly wait to get started. I made sure I had everything I needed: blunt nose scissors, no. 2 Ticonderoga lead pencils, 12-inch ruler, Elmer’s school glue, wax paper, a Boy Scout pocket knife, and a ladder to reach the top shelf where dad kept all of his spray paint – yes, I had everything I needed. Then I planned every detail of the mission again and again, from assembly to launch and recovery, and I counted the days for the Accelerator to arrive in the mail.
           The day the rocket came, Humphrey watched as I checked and double-checked each part: the long body tube, the quadrilateral fins, the shock cords and orange parachutes, and most important of all, the nose cone and payload module. Humphrey read the instructions as I sanded and shaped the fins. Then as I applied a thin, double layer of glue to the edges of the fins and attached them, he glared like a bespectacled engineer and said, “The fins must be attached exactly ninety degrees from each other for stable flight.” And when I attached the payload module to the completed rocket body, he whispered excitedly just like Gene Kranz from NASA, “This is gonna be our finest hour!”

           “It’s ready to go,” I said as I looked at Humphrey and smiled. “Tomorrow’s the big day, so time for us to get some sleep.”

           Humphrey chimed in like he always did: “Dear Mr. Einstein, I am a little girl of six, and your ideas about the connection between time and space are too radical. Your application to the Wernher von Braun school of rocket science is denied… And, by the way, your dad said you need a haircut.”

           “Goodnight Sir Isaac Humphrey,” I said as I covered him up with a blanket and winked. “Dreams for you faster than the speed of light… You big fat mouse with a mass that’s going to expand into infinity.”

            The launch site in Park Hill, Colorado was less than a mile from the Red Baron’s castle (it really is there), and so I painted the Accelerator candy apple red in his honor. Its gloss coat of paint refracted the light like a prism as it stood on the launch pad. Even the launch pad was specially made for this flight; it was equipped with a massive blast deflector and four-foot maxi-rod launch rail. I slid the rocket down the launch rail and connected the Electron Beam Launch Control to the rocket motor. Humphrey, wearing his mirror-glazed wind goggles and brown leather flight jacket with mouse fur collar, checked out the Accelerator’s rocket body, engine mount, nose cone, and recovery system.

           “All systems are go… No wind, good visibility… No need to abort!” Humphrey said.
           “Are you sure?” I asked as I looked into his eyes that seemed glazed over in a trance.
           “Yes, I’m sure. Now put me in the capsule Mr. Einstein, and try to relax when the countdown starts,” he said with an air of bravado. 
           “4, 3… Catch you on recovery Humphrey!… 2, 1, blast-off!”

           The lead igniter fired, ignition started, and the Accelerator screamed off the launch pad with a bright violet-blue flame as the motor burned. The Accelerator left the rail perfectly with tremendous explosive force and into the stratosphere it soared. Then came the 10-second time delay between rocket motor burnout and the firing of the parachute ejection charge… and Humphrey was gone out of sight.

            Streams of fire, surging, rising
                        Between the earth and up above
                                    Floating, tumbling, whirling timeless………
                        Rocket’s burn explodes in flames of
            Parachutes mission down below

           When I saw the ejection charge fire a mile high, and the orange parachutes deploy, I saw the rocket falling, and I ran, and I ran, and I ran to catch Humphrey – to a nine-year-old boy, running so fast seemed like breaking Michael Johnson’s 200-meter dash world record. And when I got to the thin line of rising smoke, there lay the Accelerator with its exhaust nozzle burned and still smoking, its orange parachutes oddly tinged white, and it’s clear see-through capsule frosted light blue… But no Humphrey.
           Then I searched, and I searched, and at last I found him fifty yards away from the rocket. He was wheezing, barely able to breathe, and with his last words, he said slowly fading away, “Well Mr. Einstein… Your ideas of time and space really are pretty radical, but you were right, I was a mile high… Wernher von Braun is going to be happy. See you in rocket school…”
            And now, somewhere, buried on what’s left of that lacrosse field one mile south of the Red Baron’s castle, there is a mouse-shaped meteor that was consumed in bright violet-blue flame. And somewhere there too is a rock where a nine-year-old boy painted: “He died from the acceleration and burned up on reentry.”
           And now, even many years later, whenever I see NASA launch a rocket, I think of Sir Isaac Humphrey and thank him for teaching me such a valuable lesson about living and dying, and the responsibility of packing a parachute right.