//------------------------------//
// Ad Astra 
// Story: For the Benefit of Yaks 
// by SirNotAppearingInThisFic 
//------------------------------//

The news quieted down before too long.  None of the nations performed any publicity stunts or launches.  At best, word got out of an engine test here or the completion of some important part there; for the most part, though, everypony just waited to see who would finish first.

Opposition to Equestria’s continuation of their space program settled down after Rainbow Dash went on record (against the advice of Twilight) for obscenely calling out the protestors for putting their heads in the wrong places and that she wouldn’t hesitate to step up and be a pilot again.

Almost a month-and-a-half later, Pinkie Pie got a short letter from Rutherford, requesting her presence in Yakyakistan.  She and her friends all knew what it meant:  The yaks were actually going to launch first.  A team of calculators had been assigned to help the yaks out, but beyond hypothetical scenarios and the specifications of the rocket, they weren’t any more privy to when the yaks were going to launch than anypony else.  It hadn’t been too much of a surprise, though; they had to acknowledge that Yakyakistan had industrialized in an alarmingly short span of time.

When Pinkie arrived in Rutherford’s home village, she found herself in the middle of the largest yak celebration she’d seen.  Hundreds of yaks wandered through the village and thousands more had set up camp around it.  Everything had been decorated with a mix of Yakyakistan colors and space-themed everything.  She could make out at least one source of music somewhere out of sight and the smell of warm yak-pastries filled the air.

On her way to Rutherford’s building, Pinkie Pie passed a field of yak children playing with stomp rockets; one yak strapped themselves to a rocket and their friends stomped on a pad as hard as they could to see how far they could launch the “space-yak”.  It looked like a lot of fun, but she knew there would be an ample supply of excitement to come.

Rutherford was in the best mood Pinkie had ever seen him in.  All of the yaks were, really.

“I solve tension with Grumpy yaks,” he explained.  “Grumpy yaks that were upset yaks might forget old ways.  I get best idea I had in while.  I tell grumpy yaks that yaks have big festival on day of launch.  I let grumpy yaks help all yaks celebrate old ways at same time we make new ways.  There a lot of stomping.  Yaks even make music that make yaks think of space.  All yaks happiest I seen.  Today very big for yak history.”

Pinkie ruffled the hair on his head.  “See?  I knew you were a good leader.”

Rutherford shook her off, but he couldn’t hide his smile.  “Anyway, there still lot of work to do for launch.  Yaks try to launch in couple hours when everything ready.”

This time, Pinkie found out, they would be watching from Rutherford’s village.  Supposedly, the launch would be grand enough to see from several mountains away, but Pinkie really didn’t see how they could be so sure.







“Three!”

Thanks to their limited cooperation with Equestria, the yaks also had wireless communication crystals and loudspeakers.

“Two!”

Not that they needed those for a countdown.  Pinkie Pie estimated that there were some ten thousand yaks counting in unison.

“One!”

Pinkie suddenly figured out why “several mountains away” was, arguably, still a little too close for comfort.  What must have been the explosion from the yaks’ new fuel flashed brighter than the sun, casting the entire village in the eclipse-like shadow of the mountains.

This time, Pinkie expected the shockwave, though she hadn’t decided whether trading off the rush of adrenaline for several seconds of unconsciously tensing every muscle she could in preparation was worth it.  In the meantime, the yak-rocket shot above the mountains, closely followed by plasma still dispersing from the explosion and at least a dozen house-sized boulders.  Fortunately, the boulders’ arc stayed a lot lower than the rocket’s, and they disappeared from sight after a peek over the mountains.

Then there was another blinding flash, for which Pinkie was thankful for the sunglasses that had been so widely passed out during the festival.  That would have been the rocket’s second detonation, of which there would be many more as it ascended.  For the next dozen or so seconds, the yak-rocket periodically exploded, with its lower half bouncing up rapidly in response to each explosion before re-extending away, kind of like an exploding pogo stick.

Then the sound of the first explosion reached her.  Even around the mountain, the sharp crack of it bespoke violence of a scale that Pinkie could scarcely imagine.  It felt as though all of Gaia started to rumble in response.  Pinkie was no stranger to excitement, but, as the sounds of the subsequent explosions caught up, she couldn’t deny that the idea of hiding in a dark corner somewhere tempted her.  Every hair on her body started to stick up as she tried bottling up her feeling of unease.

On the other hoof, what the yaks had just accomplished was amazing and she wouldn’t miss it for the world even if she had known what to expect.

Eventually it subsided into a tolerable, dull roar.  Pinkie Pie wondered how it could still shake the ground so much before she realized that thousands of yaks were still cheering and stomping.

Pinkie made her way inside Mission Control and sat down next to Rutherford while they all monitored the data coming in from their tracking stations.  Once the yak-rocket had started drifting to its orbit altitude, Rutherford took a moment to warn her that going to the moon, as they’d found out from their last attempt and the pony calculators had confirmed, would take a while.

“A while” as in days.

Pinkie wasn’t sure what would get to her first: the excitement of making history lasting several days, or the tedium of taking so long to make history.







The crowd cheered and stomped again when the Mission Control announced that the yak-rocket had achieved a stable orbit and would soon be initiating its transfer to a lunar orbit.

Soon after, Mission Control announced that the transfer had been initiated and everything looked good.







The festival continued the entire time, which gave Pinkie something to distract herself with during the long spans of time between mission activity.  Not that she could do much when something was happening.  Most of that time passed in a blur, possibly induced by the quantity of yak sweets she consumed while partying.

That is, until one fateful moment.  The space-yak landed on the moon, by then under the scrutiny of the UMMR and EQSA, without incident.  The space-yak took some pictures, packed up a few moon rocks, verified that they did not, in fact, taste anything like cheese, stomped around a bit, and prepared to return to Gaia.

That’s when the yaks hit a snag.

The next words that Twilight would hear from Pinkie Pie were, “Horseshoe Bay, we’ve had just a teensy bit of a problem here.”







EQSA scrambled to finish its own preparations in time to mount a rescue mission.  The space-yak had verified that too much fuel had been consumed during landing for the upper stages to return to Gaia.  At best, she could make it back into a lunar orbit.

By Pinkie’s account, the situation was dire:  There were only enough snacks left on board to last for 3 days.

Naturally, Twilight took this both less and more seriously than Pinkie, taking the stance that snacks weren’t that critical, but being stuck in space was no joke.  Equestria’s spaceplane was currently the only other space-faring vehicle known to be complete, or at least nearly so.

The mood of Equestrians across the nation most closely resembled “collective eye-rolling” as word got out that the Equestria’s attempt to go to the moon would be replaced by a rescue mission for the yaks.  Nonetheless, it would still be a matter of pride for the mission to go off without a hitch.

While their own planned launch had been just around the corner, they had to make modifications to the plan and spaceplane to make it possible to attach it to the yak’s capsule.  Twilight also called for a real-time communication link to be set up between Horseshoe Bay and Yakyakistan, to facilitate the cooperation that would be necessary for a rendezvous.

One-and-a-half days after Yakyakistan had urgently contacted Equestria for assistance, the Chroma rolled out onto the runway, once again capturing the eyes of the nation.

The Chroma’s engines fired up in their low-altitude mode and the spaceplane raced across the runway, tearing through the air with a dreadful roar, and lifted off with ludicrous speed.

Crystal projectors across the nation soon switched to the views that nearby observational airships had to offer, as the Chroma drew closer and closer to the point of switching to its high-altitude mode.  Everypony at Mission Control held their breath as the spacecraft approached supersonic speeds, the point at which the Philomena had broken up previously.  The tension broke as the Chroma passed the threshold; ponies everywhere watched in amazement as the Chroma’s engines each caused their own sonic rainboom and started to leave a prismatic trail in their wake.

The Chroma switched engine modes after about another minute and the prismatic trails faded out as it approached the edge of space.  Twilight explained to anypony who would listen that this had to do with the lack of an atmosphere for the pegasus magic used in the engines to refract through, though at that point only Mission Control had any visual on the spacecraft, and even that wouldn’t work after the spaceplane left orbit.

The Chroma achieved an orbital trajectory shortly thereafter.  In order to reach – and then retrieve – the space-yak within the next thirty-six hours, it burned its engines far longer than the mission to the moon had originally called for; between limited mana reserves and the time crunch, there wouldn’t be any way to work in a moon landing.

On the other hoof, securly attaching the Chroma to the yak capsule required one of crew to perform the first orbital spacewalk.

Twilight ordered her team to take a break as the Chroma began its 16-hour drift to the moon.  As restless as everyone involved was, pony or otherwise, there just wasn’t anything they could do but wait.







Rutherford had tried to hide any embarrassment from letting Pinkie persuade him into asking the ponies for help so quickly, but she could tell that it was there.  Pinkie didn’t have much luck reassuring him that the stakes were high enough that not even a yak would think twice about it, at least, not until the Chroma had rendezvoused with the yak-rocket.

Pinkie Pie got to listen in on the conversation between Horseshoe Bay, Spitfire (who performed the spacewalk) and the space-yak, who would also be performing a spacewalk to assist.  Everything had started off fine, but Spitfire reported difficulty in lining up the temporary struts, because they sometimes got a bit stuck on surfaces she had accidentally brushed them against.  The space-yak had better luck holding the struts in place, to the extent that she didn’t have to hold them in place after setting them.  Spitfire even reported that the struts appeared to be, to her bewilderment, firmly attached before she had even bolted them down.

Rutherford cheered up a bit when a pony admitted that yaks put things together hard enough that bolts became “a precautionary measure”.







Spitfire cut the struts off after the transfer, seeing as the Chroma couldn’t possibly reenter Gaia’s atmosphere while still attached to the yak-rocket capsule.  The capsule still had plenty enough fuel to deorbit after the Chroma had performed the transfer and capture burns entirely.  The space-yak offered fresh-baked cookies from her last batch of dough before the two spacecraft parted ways to land in their respective nations.  As the Chroma waited to come around to perform its deorbit burn, Spitfire and Blaze teased Soarin' – the unfortunate soul who was CAPCOM at the time – by describing their warm fluffy texture with the perfect amount of vanilla extract as they ate.

Pinkie could feel Twilight’s disapproval all the way from Yakyakistan.  On the other hoof, fresh-baked cookies were really tasty, so Pinkie thought cookie ovens should always be involved in long spaceflights.

By the end of the hour, both spacecraft and their crew had been safely recovered.  Only the yaks had moon rocks, though, a fact which did not slip by Twilight.  Considering access to the first moon rocks and the potential economical advantages to more fully integrating the yaks’ technologies – after refining them, of course – and resources, Twilight decided to trade in the favor Equestria had surely gained by rescuing their yak and still officially recognizing that yaks were the first to the moon.  She formally proposed that the Yakyakistan and Equestrian space programs merge together. 

Having explored space first, as he set out to do, Rutherford declared that Yakyakistan would be happy to work with its pony friends in the future.







Two weeks after Equestria successfully recovered the space-yak from lunar orbit, the Labyrinthines launched their mission to the moon.  The UMMR’s Titan – which dwarfed any other spacecraft – took a crew of four Labyrinthines to the moon.  Parting with their usual secrecy, the UMMR released recordings of the behemoth rocket’s launch and dozens of photos taken on the moon.

Featured among them in the released packet, a picture that showed one Labyrinthine standing beside a flag they had planted, with the Titan lander in the background.  Along with this, the Labyrinthines included a statement for the other nations, informing them that the UMMR claimed the moon as its own territory.