“What?” I shrug. “I’m not here to socialize.”
“Do you know anything about the people you work with?” Rooney asks. “What about barbecues or office parties? Aren’t you angling for a promotion?”
“How do grilled meats have anything to do with that?”
“Dusty seemed to appreciate that you know about his cacti,” Rooney says. “It shows him you’re interested. That you care. It’s nice to have people on your side, Jack.”
“It’s just not something I’m used to. My inner circle is… small. As for my colleagues, I know what they do here and how we need to work together,” I say. “I don’t see how needing to know who’s married to who or who does what for fun on the weekends really matters.”
I can see Rooney studying the side of my face as I guide her through the room so I feel compelled to add, “When the team needs something, anything, I will do what I have to do to get it for them. To ensure the mission is a success. I like to focus on the work. Besides, now I’m mission liaison.”
“Exactly. You’re the mission liaison. You’ll be talking to the press about your mission but also about the team behind it, right? They’ll want to hear how you all work together to accomplish this massive undertaking more than they’ll want to know about the technicalities.”
I shake my head. “I bet people are more interested in how it works than you think. That’s why I’m the one who has to liaison and explain it. And I’ll be using your art to help me communicate the big ideas. People want to know how we’re actually going to get to Mars, not about the people behind it like me.”
Rooney gently places her gloved hand on my shoulder. “They definitely want to know about people like you, the people behind the machines. And absolutely they want to hear from the ones who aredoing the work more than they want to be marketed to by a communications team. You and your team do challenging things every day here. Tell people who you are.”
I let Rooney’s words sink in. When she doesn’t say more, I lead her to the airlock, the area attached to the clean room where spacecrafts and equipment move in and out without exposing the clean room itself to the outside air.
“Once the spacecrafts leave the airlock, they’re on their way to the end destination,” I explain. “People think it’s once the spacecrafts have taken off at the launch site that the journey begins. But no. This is where it all starts.”
“It’s fun to watch you do what you love,” Rooney says as she hugs her sketchbook to her chest. Her papery-thin suit makes a soft crinkling noise.
“How can you tell I love it?” I ask.
She hums. “The way you talk about it. How your voice softens. Your thoughtful movement in the room. Your patience with me.”
“Being in here never gets old. This is where history is made,” I say matter-of-factly.
“Literally. It’smadehere,” she says, looking around at all the shiny equipment.
Behind my face mask, I smile at her.
We quietly walk past teams working on spacecrafts for their missions. Finally, we reach one of the parts of the FATE mission equipment. My colleague, Maria, is already there working on troubleshooting potential problems.
“You grounded?” Rooney asks, looking carefully at their wrists.
“Fast learner,” Maria, the team’s instrument systems engineer, says with a laugh. She holds up her wrist to show us that she is.
“So this is it, huh?” Rooney says, eyeing up the craft.
“One of the FATE spacecrafts, yes,” I say.
“How would fuel actually get to the equipment?” she asks.
“We’re working on a couple of different options,” I explain. “There’s one way of thinking that uses the moon’s water ice from its lunar craters to convert into rocket fuel. But our mission focuses on alternatives to moon mining.”
Maria climbs down the ladder. “We want to build stations like the International Space Station, or ISS for short. Not as large, of course. Just big enough for docking and fueling,” she adds. “Jackson, if you need me, I’ll be back from lunch in a bit.”
I nod to acknowledge her.
Rooney watches us curiously. “So you launch these into space. Then they just stay where they are?” she asks me.
“Good question. The ISS orbits Earth at seventeen thousand five hundred miles per hour to stay in orbit. The equipment of our FATE mission would also always have to be in orbit. We would manage them and their locations within the solar system from Earth.”
“It’s like stepping stones,” she says. “To Mars.”
“That’s a nice way to imagine it,” I say.
