The First Pony in Space

by Peace Petal

Chapter 1

Secret Wish smiled for the cameras, posing in her shiny silver spacesuit. The sunlight bounced off the glitter in her translucent pink body, scattering spots of light on the concrete. Her pink and orange hair was cut short. She had the confidence to know that the cameras loved her. “There’s the crowd-pleasing smile that got you chosen!” her colleague and friend, Fairy Dust, said. Reporters clamored for a glimpse of the soon-to-be first pony in space, but they gave Fairy Dust some space, as she was in uniform.

“You and I both have similar résumés as test pilots, Fairy,” Secret Wish said. “But I have one thing you don’t, and it’s not my smile.”

“What is it, then?” Fairy Dust said.

“A lifelong streak of good luck!” Secret Wish glanced around and added, “I guess that means Mission Control thinks I’m going to need it.”

“You’re only hurtling up into the vacuum of space strapped to a barely tested package of ten thousand kilos of volatile refined sparkle essence. You’ll be fiiine.” Fairy Dust grinned.

“You’re trying to make me nervous, but it’s not going to work!” Secret Wish said. “Anyways, I have a flight to catch.”

“Good luck!” Fairy said just before a unicorn assistant used levitation to put on Secret’s helmet, muffling the sound of the clamoring reporters.

Secret stepped towards her steed, the beautiful white rocket that would take her into space. It was slender and tall, reminding her of the big spruces from her hometown. Gasses rhythmically hissed out of valves at the bottom, giving the impression of the rocket being a breathing creature. Secret stood on the elevator, which raised her up the scaffolding towards the capsule. It was a beautiful day, sunny and clear. The perfect kind of day for making history!

The elevator stopped. A small hatch gave Secret Wish access to the cramped capsule. She climbed inside, an action that required some dexterity in this bulky spacesuit, but she had rehearsed before. She took her seat, leaned back and facing upwards.

An assistant closed the hatch, and Secret Wish confirmed that her radio was working. Radio chatter sounded off as Mission Control went through preflight checks. Unfortunately, Secret would have to sit here for a couple of hours before takeoff while they checked everything and the fuel cooled down. And all that for a flight that was planned to last fifteen minutes! She wasn’t nervous; she was confident in her abilities and those of Mission Control and the engineers who had designed all this. She was excited! She could hardly wait to go to space. Ponies in space! When she was a filly, that was the topic of a bad sci-fi column in the Pony Daily newspaper. Now it was happening in real life! She wasn’t dreaming, was she?

She had two hours to overcome her giddy emotions, but by the time the countdown drew closer, she wanted to prance like a filly again. A voice from Mission Control came on over the radio. “Hey, Secret, you should know that Fairy rolled a die to predict how well your flight would go, and she got a 1. Would you like to abort?” She recognized the voice of another colleague, Cloud Climber. Her tone indicated that she was barely holding back laughter.

“Tell Fairy that I’ll beat her at a game of Yatzee when I get back,” Secret said. “And tell her I’ll race her to the landing zone, too! Ten bits says I’ll get there first.”

“The cosmonaut is good to go,” Cloud Climber said. “Here, boss, you can have this back.”

There was a sound of a microphone shuffling, then a stern voice said, “If there are no further distractions, we’ll begin the countdown at one minute.”

When the countdown reached ten, Secret couldn’t help but quietly count along. “Ten,” she whispered. “Nine, eight, seven, six…” At this point, the rocket engine ignited. “Five…” The rocket shook with the power of its sparkle engine, which sprayed a glittery light show all over the landing pad. “Four…” Voices on the radio confirmed the successful ignition, leaving Secret to complete the countdown herself.

“Three.” The roar of the engines shook Secret’s bones. “Two.” Time seemed to slow as she eagerly anticipated the moment. “One.” The rocket lurched as the engines reached full power.

“Zero.” The acceleration slammed Secret into her seat. Within a few seconds, the rocket cleared the tower and was already in the hundreds of km/h. It was a feeling of power and exhilaration, more intense than any aircraft takeoff. Too intense, almost. Secret’s vision started to tunnel. These forces could make a pony black out, but Secret had trained for this. She maintained her focus as the rocket soared higher and the sky faded to black. Already the path of the rocket had slanted to nearly horizontal, letting her see the world below her.

Was that… Butterfly Island?? She could see the entire shape, and it only took up a fraction of her view from the porthole. She was so high!

There was a deep thud, and then quiet. The rocket had separated. The capsule was in free-fall. The acceleration had stopped, and Secret felt weightless. The flight was too short to risk unstrapping. She grabbed a boxy camera from a compartment, with a big button for her gloved hoof. It floated effortlessly in her hoof as she aimed out the window and snapped a shot of Butterfly Island.

Already it was time to turn the capsule’s heat shield towards the ground for reentry. She grabbed the control stick and set each axis of the capsule at the predetermined angle. The thrusters responded well to each input. However, the reading on the pitch indicator confused her. She adjusted the pitch a bit, but the indicator did not respond.

“Mission Control, it seems I have a problem with the pitch indicator,” Secret said. “It is stuck at –43 degrees.” There was silence over the radio for some time.

“Shooting Star, you’ll have to guess the angle manually,” Mission Control responded. “You can use a protractor against the horizon in your porthole.”

“Understood,” Secret said. It was impossible to control the ship and use the protractor at the same time, so she had to eyeball it at first. Then she held the protractor against the window to check her angle. She was off by two degrees. She corrected as well as she could. “Mission control, the capsule should be in the correct orientation, now,” Secret said.

The response from Mission Control was difficult to understand. “Repeat?” Secret said. The response was still warbled. Well, hopefully it was nothing more than a confirmation that she was in the right position. There were clouds over much of the world below. Still, Secret had done everything she needed to do. She let herself take a moment to drink it all in.

Here she was, in space. It was quiet, it was chilly, she was weightless. The world was below her, impossibly far away. She could see the curvature of the globe. She was an earth pony, born without the ability to even fly. And here she was, out of her world entirely, in the void of space, where there was no air, no life. It made her feel impossibly small. Her spunky smile was gone, her eyes staring out of the window in muted awe.

Secret Wish remembered her secret wish. A meteor shower had appeared in the sky on her eleventh birthday, and she had wished to be a shooting star that could grant others' wishes. She had never told anypony about that wish. The closest she had come was in insisting that her call sign be “Shooting Star.” Maybe it was wishful thinking, but she hoped that generations of ponies would find inspiration in this flight.

She was shaken back to reality by the shaking of the capsule. “I am reentering,” she reported. She sat back in her seat as the capsule heated up. Flames licked at windows, and blue returned to the sky. It was only moments before the parachute deployed. The ocean was below her, slowly getting closer. “Parachutes successful,” she reported.

The capsule hit the water in a rather heavy impact. The capsule leaned over for a moment, but it soon righted itself. Secret removed her helmet and opened the door, letting in the warm, salty air. All she had to do now was wait to be picked up.

It wasn’t long before she saw a ship on the horizon. She thanked her lucky streak that everything had gone off smoothly. She had even gotten the pitch angle right manually. Something always had to break. That was a rule when test flying. Secret looked up at the sky, wanting nothing more than to return to it. Hopefully young ponies everywhere would feel that same urge after hearing about this. Secret's wish had come true.