Friendship One

by BRBrony9

Test Flight

The Equestrian Space Exploration Agency, or ESEA, had been established a hundred years earlier to put ponies into orbit. That simple mission had long since been accomplished, with Saddle Spur becoming the first Equinaut with his thirty-minute suborbital journey, and Ruby Star becoming the first pony in orbit when she made two complete revolutions around the planet in her tiny, cramped capsule. Hundreds of other Equinauts had followed since, in capsules, on board space stations, and even visiting the rocky surface of Luna's moon and establishing a base there, near to where the Princess herself had been banished and imprisoned.

It was a symbolic location, and Luna had been awarded honorary Equinaut's wings for technically being the first pony to leave the planet, albeit not by technological means. That moon base was now home to five hundred ponies, living their working lives near to where she had spent so long, only able to breathe on the airless rock thanks to her Alicorn physiology and magic. Ordinary ponies would die an agonising death rather rapidly on the surface if not for their spacesuits. There were, however, other bodies in the galaxy besides Equis and her moon.

Colonisation missions were something mostly from science fiction, though the ESEA certainly had theoretical plans on the drawing board. Now, however, the timeframe was being rather rapidly advanced. By royal decree, the ESEA was to plan, organise and map out a mission which would carry ponies beyond the stars, out of the solar system, and out of harm's way, outside of the line of fire of the gamma ray burst.

The problems began almost immediately.

It was impossible, the technicians cried. It can't be done with modern technology. That much was immediately apparent. The director of the ESEA informed Celestia of this fact himself in person.

"Your Highness, though a noble endeavour it would be, I fear that it is simply not something we are capable of accomplishing in the timeframe we have," he told her. "You see, even if we were able to launch today, it is questionable whether we could get a space vessel to travel far enough to escape the blast. The highest speed ever attained by one of our deep-space probes is approximately one-hundred and fifty thousand miles per hour, and..."

"I understand the technical difficulties, Director, but nevertheless, it must and will be done," Celestia had replied.

"But Your Highness...rockets and even ion drives cannot..."

"You will not be using ion drives," Celestia informed him, much to his surprise. "You will be using magic."

And so the sketched theoretical designs for interstellar craft, with their huge hydrogen ram-scoops or frictionless drives, were hastily re-sketched to have no engine at all. Not for the cruise phase of the mission, at least, the time when the ship would be travelling between solar systems, through the inky void of space. A new design was presented to the director, who shook his head in disbelief that such a thing could ever work, but showed it to Celestia anyway.

"Should we not fit ion drives as well, Your Highness? In case of any...unforeseen issues?" he had asked, for magic had never been used to power anything larger or more complex than a train. No aircraft or spacecraft had ever been produced that would rely on magic for propulsion. It was not even known if magic was definitively a product of pure biology, or whether it was, in some way, tied to Equis itself, and if leaving the planet too far behind might result in a kind of 'loss of signal' as a unicorn moved too far from whatever it was that gave them their magical prowess. The thought of a ship becoming stranded in the void was one that filled the director with concern, but then ion drives would be of little use in such an event either, as although they could push the ship to a top speed of perhaps two-hundred-thousand miles per hour, it would still have been billions or trillions of miles from its destination planet, the identification of which astronomers were working feverishly on even as he spoke to the Princess.

"If you deem it necessary," Celestia had nodded loftily from her throne. "You are, after all, the ones in charge of building the thing."

"If I may..." he paused. "Your Highness...this, ah...venture...I must tell you categorically that we have absolutely no idea if it will work," he stated bluntly. "We do not know if magic can power a ship in space, or if it might cease to be effective at a certain distance from Equis, or how tiring such a thing might be upon the crew...nor do we know how fast it might be able to push the ship. You must understand...ah, as I'm sure you do..." he corrected himself, given her knowledge of stars that existed not just close to home, but also billions of light-years away, "that the distances involved in this mission will be vast. So vast as to be essentially meaningless to most ponies. An impossibility to visualise. Even our fastest shuttles and probes today would take centuries at a minimum to reach another planet. Our nearest neighbouring star system is some two and a half light-years away, and we already know that none of its three planets are inhabitable..."

"That is why you will test the idea first, Director," Celestia informed him. "A short journey, perhaps from Equis to the moon. Whatever you and your staff deem to be safest. Consider it a proof of concept flight. Do not tell anypony why you are testing it, of course, but..."

"Ah...yes, about that issue, Your Highness..."

"You believe your staff should know the true purpose behind their mission?"

"Yes, Your Highness. And...also no, Your Highness. In truth I am not sure, but I will of course do as you instruct me," he assured her. "I fear that the truth might shake them...some might resign, some might spill the story to the media...some might even take more drastic action."

"Such as?"

"Suicide, sabotage...my team in Interstellar Operations are the best you will ever hope to find, Your Highness. I would hate to lose even one of them for any reason. But on the other hoof, knowing the importance of their task might motivate them to greater heights...overcome any doubts, push them into late nights and extra meetings and more effort all around. And that might be critical, given the timeframe we have...ten years to design, build and test an interstellar craft is...really not something I had ever envisaged as being realistic. I still don't."

"You have your doubts, then? About the success of this project?"

"Very much so, Your Highness," he nodded. It is one thing to draw up an outline of a plan for some unspecified date in the future when funds become available But now that those funds are available...I am not sure how to proceed."

"Proceed as you would with any other project," Celestia suggested. "Only faster."

Six months later, with the news of doom still contained among the inner circles of government and the relevant agencies and the veil of blissful ignorance still draped across the general public like a comforting blanket of snow, a shuttle, one of the routine transports that carried a dozen or so ponies and not-insignificant quantities of cargo between Equis, the three space stations orbiting it, and the moonbase, was launched from the equatorial launch complex near New Zebrica. This mission carried seven Equinauts, all unicorns, thus marking an incidental first, the only mission with a multi-pony crew to consist entirely of unicorns to ever be launched. Pegasi were the preferred candidates for spaceflight, especially in the early days, as they were the ones who had the most experience in operating fast combat aircraft, once considered a vital prerequisite to being employed as an Equinaut. That fact in turn had come about because Pegasi were built for flight, for fast turns and g-forces, rapid acceleration and deceleration. Their lungs could cope better with thin atmosphere, their wings enable them to guide themselves around a zero-gravity environment inside a spacecraft more easily than clumsily grasping at railings by hoof. Their physiology, it had always been noted, was the most suitable for adaptation to space travel. Earth ponies with their robust and strong musculoskeletal and cardiovascular systems were next on the list, able to cope very well with the rigours of launch and splashdown and the effects of long-term spaceflight such as loss of bone density.

Bottom of the pile came unicorns. They were physically weaker than the other pony races, less well suited for the stresses of combat or high-speed flight. What they lacked in strength, however, the unicorns did make up with magic, which allowed them to perform several tasks at once during a mission, or operate switches from across a cockpit without moving, or even aid in the safety of a spacecraft. One capsule and both its crew were saved by magic, projecting a magical barrier as a replacement heatshield when the real thing had been damaged by a micrometeorite strike. Magic also gave unicorns great dexterity for complex tasks such as maintenance, spacewalks and conducting scientific experiments, which was why they tended to feature more heavily on more recent crews compared to earlier ones, when the rigours of spaceflight were more thoroughly understood, the risks were lower, and the mission was more about science or construction than it was about simply getting ponies into orbit and back home again.

This mission was all about magic, an odd dichotomy given the high-technology used to put the ponies in space, blazing rockets and thundering boosters carrying the shuttle to orbit. From there, instead of using its main engines as normal, the crew would attempt to use magic to propel them into lunar orbit. It worked surprisingly well, until it didn't.

Three of the unicorns blazed beams of magic out of the rear of the shuttle, bypassing its metal and composite skin, and emitting a stream of magic particles in a similar fashion to how an ion drive worked. The shuttle moved, and moved, and moved faster and faster until they were at the same speed that it would have achieved using its main rocket engines. Two of the other crewponies used similar spurts of magic to rotate the shuttle about its axis instead of the thrusters, flipping it into position for an orbital insertion burn- or rather, not a burn, but another magic deployment. The same three unicorns who had sped the craft up now acted to slow it down. Technically it wasn't even necessary to flip the shuttle, because the unicorns could have simply moved to the front of the craft and used their magic, but it was a traditional part of every mission- the shuttle engines needed to be facing their direction of travel to slow them down again, after all, in every other mission at least.

They were even more necessary this time, but unfortunately it was too late. The unicorns used their magic to slow the craft, but for some unknown reason, deceleration did not seem to be quite as efficient as acceleration had been. They were slowing down, but not fast enough. The engines were ignited, silently blazing in the blackness, but they were too close to the moon by that point. A rapid recalculation was made by mission control, a desperate series of automated radio signals sent to the onboard computer, which engaged in a lightning-fast combination of actions, firing the thrusters automatically, cutting the main engines, then igniting them again, then cutting them again, all in an attempt to orient the shuttle for the inevitable. They were not going to be in orbit, but rather plunging into the moon's gravity well.

The mission had been timed to coincide with the moon's rotation, so that the moonbase and its miles-long runway carved from the regolith would be available in case something went wrong. It had taken a long time to make the runway, flatten the anorthosite and clear away the lunar dust. It had taken even longer to convince the powers-that-be that a runway on an airless moon was even possible. Without an atmosphere, landing shuttles had to rely on their wheel-brakes to slow down. Flaps and spoilers in the wings and the big orange-and-white parachute that blossomed from the base of the tail upon landing back on Equis were entirely useless with no air to act upon them. It would also require a very precise approach, computer-controlled for the most part (like most things in spaceflight) unless something went wrong, because a shuttle could not glide through the air the way it did on Equis, but had to first perform a de-orbit burn, some precise thruster manoeuvres, and a radar-guided long range approach, following an incredibly long and shallow 'cone' that required a satellite in orbit to relay the guidance signal over the horizon, so lengthy was the necessary approach. It also needed a lot of runway. That was why the runway at the moonbase was ten times longer than the runway at New Zebrica, an absurd length of almost twenty-five miles, just to make sure there was enough of an overrun that a shuttle coming in at any speed could still be slowed to a safe halt before it reached the end and rumbled off into the boulders and thick dust of the lunar surface.

The runway was equipped at half a dozen different points with extremely strong and extremely stretchy arresting gear, wires strung across the runway like the deck of an aircraft carrier. A hook at the rear of the shuttle would catch these wires and use them to bleed off speed until the computer released the hook, ready to catch the next wire and slow down some more, and so on until they finally came to a halt. There was a very good reason for this unusual setup- namely, a vertically-landing craft would need to carry a vast quantity of propellent for itself in the form of rocket fuel, which would hugely reduce its carrying capacity for cargo or passengers. Building a runway for landings and a mag-ramp for takeoffs was far more economical, though somewhat more dangerous, than tail-landings like the early exploratory rockets, and the only reason the moonbase had been able to be constructed in the first place. The runway had been cleared by drone-robots and the first pony crew with their rover, a little dune-buggy cousin, so that the first shuttle could land with the heavy gear necessary to begin the establishment of a permanent settlement.

None of that mattered this time, because they came in too fast to even orient the ship toward the moonbase at all, despite the best efforts of the flight computer and then the mission commander with his hoof on the joystick. While the ground crews prepared their crash tenders and rescue gear, the shuttle raced in over the empty landscape miles from their landing strip. The ground out here was rocky, all sharp edges and jagged boulders, and not ideal terrain for a landing attempt to say the least, and the results played out exactly as might have been expected. The disadvantage of the horizontal landing option was that the shuttle, not oriented toward the heavens, could not simply engage its engines to blast clear of danger, for that would just drive them across the landscape below at a higher velocity.

Nor were their thrusters powerful enough to push them back into orbit. Once they were below a certain altitude- which they already were- they couldn't even use the thrusters to orient the ship vertically and then engage the engines, because they would not have enough propellent left in the tanks to get back into orbit, which would leave them stranded in a suborbital trajectory until they hit the far side of the moon. Once committed to the landing run- which they had been, by virtue of coming in too fast and too steep to enter into an orbit first- the shuttle had no choice but to execute that landing, preferably on the prepared runway. The crew tried their best to use their magic to get the shuttle into a stable orbit, but it was no use. The time for that had already passed, if it had even been possible at all. They were well inside the moon's gravity well, and accelerating the craft too hard with their magic might send them pinballing off into deep space or slamming into the surface below even harder than they were about to do anyway.

The rocky landscape below was the antithesis of the prepared, smooth strip with its friction-generating regolith which improved braking and its arrester gear. It was essentially impossible to land in such terrain, whether coming in vertically or horizontally, barring a miracle. Unfortunately, the Princesses that the crew worshipped were unable to provide one, and once they ran out of altitude, drawn in inexorably by gravity, the shuttle nosed in to a long crevasse of rocks and boulders. With no air, and thus no oxygen, the shuttle did not burst into flames upon impact, but merely crumpled up like a tin can, bursting open under pressure and venting its internal atmosphere, spilling bodies and equipment out, which went cartwheeling away cartoonishly thanks to the low gravity. Only once the fuel tanks with their liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen were punctured and both products mixed together as though they were inside the engine did the shuttle explode in a spectacular fireball, blazing like a sun upon the surface for only a moment before being snuffed out by the void.

Though it had cost the lives of seven brave Equinauts and a 100-billion-bit spacecraft, the mission, paradoxically, was deemed a success. The concept of magic-powered spaceflight had been proven, at least in principle, and that had been its only real goal. The seven ponies had died to prove the basic bare bones of a concept- a concept that would later be relied upon to save the legacy of an entire species.

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[Booster Spice]

In honour of those that go before.