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THE TEXT WRITER: Countdown to ROCKET BLASTOFF!

created Jun 14th 2021, 20:33 by Sahith Borige


1


Rating

576 words
16 completed
00:00
(In this text, you are an astronaut who is ready for a NASA mission)
 
It's time. You have completed your training and now you are ready for your mission into space. You and two of your crew members climb into the Soyuz space capsule. It's a tight squeeze, but each of you has your own seat. You fasten your harness, making sure it's good and tight. As you sit for two and a half hours waiting for blastoff, you review all of your training. Are you ready? Yes! Finally, the capsule begins to rumble. The engines have started. 3,2,1 Liftoff! The rocket propulsion system ignites and you stream upward, leaving behind huge billows of white steam that look like fog. You are pushed deep into your seat by the massive gravity forces. The capsule continues to shake and vibrate. You feel pinned to your seat, unable to move. With a big bang, one engine falls away and you are thrown forward, then immediately pinned back as the rocket pushes upward. The gravity forces are now close to four times normal. You feel like an elephant is sitting on your chest. The pressure grows for another nine minutes. Then, all of a sudden, it's gone. You feel weightless. You have just reached the edge of space. The weight and fastening of the harness are the only things keeping you in your seat. Your arms might just float up all on their own. Welcome to space and microgravity. But wait, where's the space station? Shouldn't it be sitting there waiting for you? Not exactly. Your rocket took only 10 minutes or so to reach space, but sometimes it can take hours to meet up with the space station. One reason is that your spaceship is at a lower level of orbit than the ISS, which means that the ISS is higher than you. Imagine that you're on the ground and your friend is up in a tree. You're too far to stretch out your hands and connect. The same thing happens with your spacecraft and the ISS. You must steer your ship into the higher orbit to meet up with the ISS. It's not as easy as it sounds. You can't just make a right turn and get there. You're in a circular orbit. That means you need to nudge your way up slowly. Think of it this way. A running track has different lanes. You are in the closest lane and need to get to the outer lane. The only way to shift one lane is to go around the track one time. Each time you move a lane, you get a boost from your engines. If there are six lanes, it could take you six turns around the track to get to the outer lane. Once you get there, the other problem is that the ISS is moving at more than 17,000 miles an hour. Your spaceship needs to catch up to the ISS so that it can dock, or attach, to it. The best way to do that is to let the ISS catch up to you. As you move into the same orbit make sure your ship is in front of the ISS so it can catch your spaceship from behind. Whew! Was that tiring or what? Sometimes it can take as long as six hours or more to dock with the ISS. the whole time you are sitting in a cramped spaceship.  

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