It has been roughly two years since Max Martino reached a point of near-rock bottom in his life. Not only was he on the verge of losing his job developing revolutionary new technology in space travel, but his home life wasn't doing so well either.
Working as the chief scientist of a space tourism company, all was going well. He had a great job, working on interesting problems with people that he liked. At home, the woman he loved (and his dog!) waited for him to come home every night with a hot meal and a smile. All was well.
Max and his team were trying to push the boundaries of space travel. It had been a couple of decades since space tourism exploded as an industry, and people regularly traveled from the Earth to the edge of space. Some even traveled around the moon and back, which was much more expensive.
Colonizing Mars never really became a thing. Sure, the government occasionally sent probes there, but settling the planet was too expensive and complicated, so no human had ever stepped foot on it.
Max and his team were trying to develop a new class of spaceship that could travel farther in space before having to come back. The problem was the vastness of space. The Moon was about 400,000 kilometers from Earth, and it was relatively easy to traverse that distance and return using conventional rocket technology. However, the next closest planet, Venus, was at least 38 million kilometers away. You had to travel 100 times the distance compared with a trip to the Moon!
Besides being 100 times farther away, what made the journey even worse was there was nothing to SEE in between.
Between The Moon and Venus was nothing. Absolutely nothing. Pitch black. Zero. Empty space. There was nothing to see beyond The Moon unless you could get to another planet, 100 times farther away.
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That's not to mention the time it would take. Using a conventional rocket, a round trip to Venus or Mars would take about 200 days. That was a serious time commitment for many people and a technical challenge for a tourism company to carry people in comfort for so long. Food, air, entertainment, and a working crew—all became additional things that passengers required over such a long time. It was similar to a long boat cruise, I suppose, without the ability to stop in ports every few days to stock up on supplies.
The problem that Max's team was trying to address was reducing the time it took to travel such long distances. You couldn't just build a bigger rocket - there were limits to that. This meant moving away from traditional rocket designs and onto a whole new design. After years of failures, Max and his team thought they were very close to solving the problem.
There were brief glimpses of success. Their latest engine, a foldable space drive, should theoretically be able to shorten the distance between two points in space. In testing, it showed promising signs. But they couldn't sustain it. It wasn't stable or proven.
The company he worked for was finally considering cutting funding for his project. A decision was going to be made in the next month, and Max was not optimistic. They had invested almost $1 billion in research and had little to show.
At home, his wife also reached the end of her patience with Max. He was working late every night and on weekends, too. Gone was the happy and free-spirited man she had married; replaced was a typical mad scientist completely engrossed in his work. The kitchen table was frequently covered in research papers and designs, and she had finally reached the end of her rope. One night, she packed her bags and moved back to her parent's place. And worst of all, she took the dog with her.
To Max, this mainly meant he never had to leave his lab at work. He could spend 24 hours per day there now.
Max had his back against the wall. He was going to lose his job and his family. So what was there to do?
Easy! Make the foldable space drive work before the end of the month, of course.