Project Overworld

- "Well, that's quite impressive, indeed." Keith commented while monitoring the data sent by the last rockets they had produced. Months after the start of the 'Project Overworld Program', the NASA made some huge progress related to their creations. This whole program, related to the simulation they all knew and loved, was only a part of a larger, yet more realistic objective : the 'Artemis program'. Its goal was to ultimately bring humans back on the Moon and start the construction of some installations there to help out with their future plans.

Keith's job, as well as the many NASA employees designated as his subordinates, was to design new generations of rockets to reduce their construction costs so they could be launching large amounts of rockets towards the only natural satellite of the Earth. Their job was really important on top of being in a hurry because this Artemis program as been going for several years as of now.

The NASA had already launched a few rockets up there, using one of their latest 'Artemis' rocket design which launchers could be recovered thanks of their automatic landing system. However, the more they progressed with their plans the more they realized conquering the Moon would be a pretty tough challenge to overcome. The huge amount of materials they needed stacked up pretty quickly and they eventually had to go through a short break related to their 'Artemis program'.

The huge success that was Project Overworld as well as the thousands of innovative players who populated its servers made a lot of the NASA higher-ups hopeful as to how they could be improving their future rocket designs. In fact, Horace Johnson was beginning to believe their investment in the game would be coming to fruition sooner than expected.

Keith had been coming up with situation reports every week or so and the progress of their team was visibly impressive. In only four months the team had already reproduced their latest generation of rockets within the game and they were now experimenting with new ways of cutting their rocket construction expenditures.

'Well, looks like the young man really has an innate ability at coordinating a team. Let's see how far he'll be able to get us!' The leader of human resources management team talked to himself while sitting back in his chair and focusing back on his work.

_______________

On this day, the 'Area 51' team Keith was coordinating launched one their fourth generation of rockets towards the skies, hopeful as to how this whole situation would unfold. It had been pretty frequent over the past few months that their launches would end up as a failure. Be it from the inexperience of the NASA employees with this virtual world or the huge changes they decided to make to their designs, not a single one of them really stood out from the masses of launches they had participated in.

Though, this time every member of the NASA present within this secretive location had they eyes glued to the various monitors while praying for their rocket to reach orbit and its structure to successfully land back on the planet.

In fact, this was one of the largest change of the fourth 'Artemis' generation of rockets. Up until now, only the launchers would be landing back on Earth while the rest of the stucture would be left behind to burn through the atmosphere while advancing through the stage of the rocket. This time, the Project Overworld engineers had put a lot of efforts into making the perfect rocket.

Up until now, Keith had organized their group into three, sometimes four, to take care of various projects at once. They would be construction much smaller rockets but it had been a really good way to train everyone to this new environement and test their knowledge with the rocketry-related stuff. Though, Keith had to be keep a really modest attitude because all the knowledge he himself had acc.u.mulated over the years was only relevant in a video game and he was not sure if he could be reproducing his feats within the real world.

In any case, the everyone had gathered on this project, according to Keith's orders, and the twenty NASA employees worked on a one undred and fifty feet high rocket over a period of two months. It had been a really long project, especially when considering that they did all that within a video game that was helping them with every process leading to the creation of their rocket, but the young man was really happy about how it turned out to be. In fact, the group of NASA engineers had been planning things a lot to make sure such a build could also be working within the real life and that was why it took so long to design everything. Obviously, it require several months of time to translate such a creation to the laws of physics of the 'real world' and even more to construct such a detailed vehicle, but it was satisfying for testing purposes.

While the rocket was flying towards the upper areas of the thermosphere, Leyla was constanstly checking every data the rocket was sending towards us and made sure that no anomaly was encountered. She was not the most knowledgable in that domain anymore, as some of the engineers assisting them with their 'Project Overworld Program' had been particularly tasked with reading those data for dozens of years now, but this did not deter the young woman from letting her curiosity take over her usual self. In fact, she often asked for precisions to the NASA analysts and constantly tried and improved herself.

Keith would not be surprised if she became one of the most notorious engineers of the NASA in a few years from now. Going back to business, he himself made sure nothing was wrong while checking the altitude of their 'Artemis 4' rocket.

'Hmm... It should be decoupling its second stage in a few miles. Let's hope everything goes as planned.' Keith meditated. Normally, the second stage consisting of one of the largest launchers of the rocket should be landing back on the planet after a few dozen minutes-long travel. For the time being, only the initial boosters assisting with the launch of the Artemis rockt made their way back down, and Keith had already tasked Michael and five other engineers to go there and recover these parts.

It would not be long until he heard about the results of this landing, but Keith was currently much more preoccupyied about what was about to happen. Their team had already successfully made some boosters land back on Earth and even if something went wrong on that end they could easily pinpoint was went wrong when comparing to their previous launches. However, the next few dozens of minutes would determine whether they would be going at it for another couple of months or start working on the next line of improvements. Well, either way their team would obviously make some huge progress so it was not as simple as 'losing' months of work.

Their 'Project Overworld program' was only made for testing, after all.

- "Decoupling in T-1 minute." Someone announced. At those words, the tension within the room visibly worsened as everyone was waiting for the fateful separation leading to the third stage of the rocket.

- "5... 4... 3... 2... 1... Decoupling!" The person exclaimed. A few seconds later, the tension was immediately washed away as the lights remained green. It indicated that, in fact, everything went exactly as planned. No explosion, no extra collision between the second and the third stage, it went really smoothly. However, the launch was nowhere near finished yet. First, the whole structure of the second stage of the Artemis rocket needed to land back on Earth without a scratch so their future maintenance would be as little as possible.

Secondly, the shuttle actually needed to reach orbit. They had set themselves this objective and it would really be a shame if they lost some power or underestimated the quantity of fuel they needed to embark on their vehicle.

Anyways, the last few maneuvers would be taking place in another couple dozen of minutes so the group had some room to breathe. Thus, Keith decided to check on the situation of Michael by calling him through his talkie-walkie : "How is it going for you over that landing spot?" He inquired.

It did not take long before an answer came out of the strange-looking phone : "Everything seems quite alright. We've been checking the structure for a ten minutes and it doesn't seem like it suffered any significant damage. Other than that, we're currently attaching one of the boosters to our vehicle and we should be back in an hour. How did the decoupling go?"

Keith patiently waited for his friend to be finished before speaking up : "What do you mean no 'significant' damage?" He inquired in a cold voice. "In any case, I'll let you know that the third stage successfully decoupled from the second and our rocket it currently aligning itself to the trajectory of an orbit. Over." He continued with the same voice tone.

- "Erm... I meant no damage at all?" Michael replied, unsure. "Anyways, see you later!" He quickly dismissed the conversation.

'I swear, this man...' Keith breathed out. However, he knew his friend would have told him if any 'significant' damage occured to one of the boosters, so he decided not to sweat to much about it and instead focused back on the current flight of their rocket. 'Fourty minutes, huh? Let's hope it's got enough fuel to propel itself up there without any troubles.' He silently prayed.