No, that's not a typo -- it's the 50th Anniversary of the Wonderbirds, the greatest sci-fi movie series in Equestria. Rainbow Dash just wants to buy a ticket and watch the movie marathon -- but Pinkie Pie wants to go into SPACE... because... The Wonderbirds... are... UP!
Written in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and also in honor of the countless comic strip, movie, and television characters that kept our childhood dreams of space travel, adventure, and scientific discovery alive.
(Original CBS broadcast of the Apollo 11 landing transmission:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDAunP8T5C0)
Chapters (11)
I'll give it a read
5
What's up with the "[⬛⬛⬛⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜]" in the synopsis?
I love this idea. Let's do this!
Celestia is going to hold back the sun for this? Suddenly I'm seeing panic and Nightmare cults in the street.
And what's Twilight going to think of this? She'll either 100 percent for it as a learning opportunity, or 100 percent against it as a wild game with no chance of success.
9728208
I think that is a filling fuel gauge. We are currently at 3/10 capacity.
Who is going to be first to call Murphy?
Pimkie laughing at every physical distortion thrown her way?
I bet Spitfire was expecting Spike at most to be That Darn Lizert.
Pinkie, not just experiemnts, but the flight plan, is a cake recipie. Leading to the biggest Moon Pie ever.
Chapter 1
Hmm. I never even considered the possibility that ponies wouldn't have traveled to the moon, but here it really seems to make sense.
Is Wonderbirds a reference to the old Thunderbirds franchise?
If Spike is Buzz, does that mean he gets to punch out a reporter, and then Dash gets to punch Discord, because its in the script?
I really like the staging description, but thats only because they cant get hold of Errol?
Have I mentioned yet how much I love this? Rainbow is just too wholesome here. Keep up the good work, friend.
Where Pinkie is concerned, Apple Neighton is chilling out with Discord and watching the show on Free V.
Huh. The Pink One is intimidated by the vastness of space. Who knew?
9735095
More like the total absence of convenient distractions from the existential angst of corporeality itself... but yeah, same difference.
And by the way, thanks so much for cheering me on here, it makes all the difference in the world!
9736076
You and me both... and that's how these catchphrases gradually build up meaning for the fans of a series. Don't believe me? May the Force be with you...
So many things that can go wrong. With Neighton having time out, Murphys claimed extra duties?
The condenser from Star Trek:First Contact? as well as a bit of 13?
Well, that was exciting. Did not expect shades of Apollo 13 in this, but it definitely works. I especially like Luna's reasoning for not cancelling the spell early. Yes, it's dangerous, but that's what Rainbow Dash lives for.
I love all the direct parallels to the real Apollo missions. Pony princesses are best princesses. Luna 2020.
When we leave, all that will be left will be memories, then legends, then myths, then oblivion. finally, on the next visitors, denial.
Though, as Gallileo said,
Nontheless.
We Made It.
Did they just steal an existing moon from someone? Because it really feels like that's what they just did.
9740047
Nope -- Twilight's spell is modifying the fundamental basis of reality, so that's what the pony Moon would look like if it originated in a physics-based universe, rather than a magic-based universe.
Though I will admit to using our own Moon as a model for the description...
I think I would find it somewhat sad if the next crewed vehicle to land on the moon would be a privately owned fusion powered craft using antigravity.
9740309
At least it wouldn't be as bad as the generation ship reaching Epsilon Eridani, and finding it was already overpopulated because in the meantime everyone else had discovered warp drive and just hadn't bothered taking the time to zip back and find them ...
9740359
Thats actually the thing I find sadest of all, that the space probes with the ion drives, capable of far higher speeds for a given cost, are then cost cut so much they take longer to get anywhere than an unpowered rock sailing under solar power.
9740359 Frank Herbert's short story 'Far Centaurus'. Four astronauts travel to Alpha Centauri in a spaceship at 1% lightspeed using cryosleep. When they get there 500 years later they find it's been colonised from Earth centuries ago by FTL colony ships.
9740369 Ion drives are only really suitable for small robot missions and stationkeeping. They have high impulse (efficiency, or the amount of velocity change you can get out of a unit of fuel) but their thrust sucks. This means that they can only accelerate very slowly, but that they can keep it up for a very long time.
9741468
9740262
9740369
Thanks so much, gang, for reading and commenting on the story all the way through!
It's really helped, knowing some of my regular customers were giving this a look.
4
I wish I could remember the name of the short story, where there was a race from LEO to the moon.
By competitors pedaling generators to power the ion drives.
First cycle race to the moon.
Then theres the other short story about the Sunjammers. First solar sail race.
I really hope Skylon/SABRE works. Single stage Airbreath/Rocket to orbit, carrying standard 747 cargo pods. The whole reason for the design of the Apollo stack, was because they didnt have a docking and assembly space station in orbit around the Earth and Moon. So they had to carry Evreything in one go. then again, there was Geminii, which showed they could have two launch vehicles active at the same time?
This looks like a great start!
Definitely looking forward to seeing how this develops from here!
I really enjoyed seeing Twi and Starlight go full-on magic/science nerd as they get more and more into the idea. XD
Okay, we've got our crew picked out. Time for some training real soon!
I really, really like the insight or lesson from Spitfire in this chapter. Always great to see these other characters fleshed out and given further depth!
What a great ending to this story.
Hmm. So space isn't 'real?' What's the sky then, like this...big...screen thing everything is projected onto?
So...basically, they're going to make space 'real' temporarily for a rocket launch? Huh. Interesting premise.
Did Luna just make the world ROUND?! How powerful is she?! Was the world flat before? By 'endless' do you mean the world was literally infinite?
So if nothing they've done was actually real, what's going to stop all the moon landing conspiracy theorists? Will the data and samples they collected continue to exist?
9740359
How WOULD they find them, though? Space is a big place.
9771677
In a word, physics. Knowing an object's trajectory, and assuming a fixed (or calculably varying) velocity, you can pretty much know roughly where something should be forever, or at least until it hits something. It's how we're able to predict eclipses so precisely, and how NASA keeps track of orbital space debris.
9771655
Since Equestria (and by extension Equus) is based around magic, I assume for the sake of this story that the "sky" is basically a minimal handwave needed to make the rest of the world work. It doesn't necessarily have to be a flat surface, it may simply be a boundary at which the "reality" of the world fades off into whatever lies beyond it (if there's anything there at all).
9771669
Or, as with the sky, it simply tails off into nothingness, so it doesn't really have a "boundary". See the Wizard of Earthsea series for an example of a fantasy world that's built like this.
9771674
Would you question the word of Princesses who could prove the Moon landings were real by giving you a one-way-ticket there?
But yes, my assumption is that objects collected from the Moon and brought back would become "real" so that when the spell ends they don't go away. Kind of like bringing souvenirs home from a vacation -- the vacation goes away, but the souvenirs remain.
So why is absolutely all of Pinkie's dialogue italicized? It's really distracting.
9774471
It's the typographic equivalent of her sugar-rush verbal delivery in the show, which itself takes some getting used to. When I first started writing Pinkie Pie, having her dialog look just like everypony else's just didn't feel right. After thinking about it, I settled on Italics as a way of getting across her "sound". It's an acquired taste, I know, and takes a little getting used to, but so does the Pink One herself...
Because actual space programs sure as heck aren't managing that, what with having peaked at the aforementioned Apollo 11 with the conspiracy theorists trying to take even that away from us...
9955243
Thanks much for the read! And yeah, even with this story I was hoping there'd be more of a reaction from folks, that there might be more of an overlap between the pony-geek and space-geek crowds. Sigh, seems like people would rather be a YouTube influencer than an astronaut these days...
9955398
Didn't even read the fic itself... yet. I originally got here with the Tempest Reformation stuff before I had an account. Might get around to it someday.
9771669
I'm thinking this Equestria lives in a pocket universe.
One flat plane. No sun, no moon. No stars. All are just lights in the sky.
9741023
The question I have is how effective would they be if you used a booster rocket first to get to some percentage of speed.