Peter Lee
tapped his foot nervously while Jim Macomber and the rest of his team looked at
the design on their slates.
Jim let out
a sigh and scratched his nose.
Peter
swallowed hard.
Charlie
Nichols, across the table, caught his eye, gave a brief nod, and a smile.
Easy for him, his expertise is navigation.
But then, this whole thing was his idea.
“Yes, sir,”
Peter nodded.
“The ion
engine is smaller than I expected.” That was Walker.
“The whole
thing is smaller. Less mass, so the produced thrust will be more effective,” Ed
Carr said.
“The
numbers work out.” Peterson said. According to Charlie, that was a compliment.
Peterson was disagreeable on good days and a jerk on normal days. “The antenna
will be powerful enough to reach earth. Using capacitors is a brilliant idea
since there will be such a delay for the signal to reach us.”
Everyone in
the room looked up from their slates to Peterson. He didn’t notice.
“Okay, we’re
doing this,” Macomber said. “We proceed with this design. I’ll call Sophia at
JPL. She and her team will have eighteen months to get this done. I want our
baby mounted on the new Argo launch system. Peter, this is good work.”
“Can we
possibly make it?” Jennifer said.
Wish I could work up the courage to ask her
out.
“There’s no
can about it,” Macomber stood. “We’re going to make it. I can get funding. We
need to verify if we actually can send a vehicle faster than the speed of light.
Now our travel time is under two years.”
“What are
we calling it?” Nina asked.
Macomber
looked at Peter, the rest following suit.
“Um, well,
since it’s going out into the unknown, and sailing dangerous waters, what about
Odyssey?”
Macomber
thought for a moment, then wrote on his slate, the image popping up on the
table in front of them. At the bottom of the satellite’s design in big, bold letters,
he had written “Odyssey 1.”