Project Overworld

The next couple of minutes felt terrifying to the group of NASA engineers. The last engine of their rocket did have some troubles pushing the whole structure into an orbit around the point they had planned beforehand. Keith really thought they had oversaw the amount of fuel injected into their build but it seemed like it was almost not enough.

'Where did we fail with this rocket?' He could not help but wonder. However, now was not the time to think and his attention immediately got back to the current mission. Luckily, up until now, everything went according to plan. Every single stage of the rocket successfully decoupled from the rest along the way and it seemed like these parts made their way back to the surface of the planet without much damage. In fact, there was no real point in having their rocket go itself into orbit as of now, since most of their design improvements had already been tested and validated until a couple dozen of minutes ago.

However, it was also true that their mission was to send a rocket into orbit, and potentially have it land back on Earth without much troubles. It now appeared impossible for the vehicle to land with the amount of fuel left in its engine, but the NASA engineers were still hopeful in reaching orbit with their 'Artemis 4', before having it slow down its speed to burn through the atmosphere.

In the end, it never was a good idea to keep a rocket float around the planet. In the 'real world', the Earth was completely surrounded by rocket debris and satellites making any mission at leaving the planet a bit more dangerous. Fortunately, these remains' location were mostly known by the Space agencies over the world so they could always prepare themselves and have their rockets dodge the trajectory of all this orbiting junk.

A few missions had been planned by the NASA to go and clean up some of these debris but for monetary reasons these missions had been postponed again and again for the past couple of years. Maybe one day, once the junkyard became too important they would have no way not to clean up the mess but for the time being they could always get around it in some ways or another.

Anyways, back to the mission at hand, Keith stressfully looked at the fuel gauges of the 'Artemis 4' trying to determine whether the rocket could end with an orbit trajectory around the planet or not. If it was only possible by a short margin, they would have to send new instructions to the vehicle so it would crash back on land. That was why these gauges had to be closely monitored by most of the engineers present inside the 'Area 51'.

Finally, after several more intimidating minutes the answer manifested before them. 'It is possible.' Keith realized. In fact, its trajectory almost reached a full circle around the Earth while its fuel reserves were at three percent. The NASA employees let out breaths of relief before congratulating each other for this success.

- "Good job, everyone!" Keith had to raise his voice so he could be heard among the conversations. However, he did not feel like giving a speech yet so he instead left the building and took a car to join Michael and the retrieving team on their job.

He was much more interested in finding out how much scraps they managed to save from that launch and whether they could be utilizing these rests again in the future. This was the number one objective of the Project Overworld Program, for the time being, and it could very well revolutionize the conception of rockets.

After a few minutes of traveling through rugged terrain, the young man finally arrived near one of the landing spots where engineers were slowly shifting the still standing launcher on top of a large vehicle. Using some ropes and a sturdy structure they embarked onto their jounrey, the group was behind really soft with the maneuvers to avoid the launcher from falling over.

After he arrived there, Keith spotted his friend helping with the manual labor and immediately approached him.

- "So, how is it going there?"

- "Oh, Keith! Very well for the time being."

- "Are you sure about that?" He enquired with a deeper voice. "I remember you telling me about some damage that has been done to the structure of this launcher?"

- "Ahah! Nah there aren't any real damage. Just a few scratches due to some pebbles being sent flying on the landing. However, it sure is really far away from the location we've initially set to its program." He remarked.

- "Yeah, there are a lot of ways of improvement..." The leader of Spacol breathed out. "Anyways, good job there, continue with this one and I'm going to assign a few other teams to the other landing spots."

After visiting the recovery team, Keith went back to the 'Area 51' and gave some orders to his subordinates. Afterwards, he started planning for their future project before disconnecting for the evening.

'Looks like we were able to make quite some progressn after all. We should be able to help the NASA with our new and innovating designs so we may finally set foot back on the Moon!' He meditated.

_______________

For the next couple of months, the NASA employees affected to the 'Project Overworld program' continued their experimentations until they were satisfied by their results. Now, the real challenge began for these engineers.

In fact, they had to convert a build made inside of a simulation to the 'real world' physics and for that purpose, several researchers of the Spacial Administration of the United States were actively working with Keith and his group to determine the best way to do it. It was a lot harder than they initially thought but Keith introcuded them to his own researches on the subject and shared a few equations he had started writing down in his free time. Thanks to that, and the many reports made by the engineers affected to the 'Project Overworld program', these researchers had a better idea on how the game worked and they focused their work on applying these new design to the real world.

The young man was really please by his current job. It was a nice change in pace relatively to his previous and boring job at a factory. On top of that, he could play his favorite game about eight hours a day while putting his knowledge to good use for the future of Humanity. However it was also true that putting such an investment into Project Overworld also made him and his friends less active for their own project at building facilities on the Moon.

Jim was still really involved in this work and Xena has had some nice and restful vacations to help him with the construction of the ice factory. The young Indian man was almost done with his studies so he would be joining his friends at the NASA in several months, provided the fact that he did graduate from his school. However, there were no real doubts about his results because he has been pretty focused up until now and had some good marks.

As for the other four original members of Spacol, they mostly connected during the week-end to help them around. Keith sometimes went back down onto the Earth with his main Project Overworld account to order the new recruits around and make sure they were accomplishing their job as planned.

Regarding their progress, they started the construction of a second 'Rocket assembler' and one third of its components had already been tinkered. Its structure was also halfway done and it should not be long before the Spacol Moon base gained another large boost in its supplies. However, Keith started thinking about the future and realized he should be introducing some of the seven recruits to the way the Spacol Space Station worked so they could work in there and improve a few things related to the refueling of rockets.

'Six years... It's been quite a while, isn't it?' Keith started thinking. 'I can't believe I've gone from crafting a few guns for a third party to actually working for the NASA and actively participating in enhancing the future of humanity.' He was shocked by the progress he had made for only a couple of years and he would have never imagined to switch his main activity from economics-related to being an engineer.

However, it was also true that he felt elated and could not hope for a best way earn a living. In fact, he would have done it even if he did not earn any buck from such a work. After all, working for the NASA was a natural succession from working on a Moon base and developing new and improved rocket designs.

'Anyways, I'm gonna give my all into this job so we may one day set foot on another planet of the Solar System. Who knows, maybe our next destination would be Mars after we established ourselves on the Moon?'