172 Hours on the Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

was going to take three teenagers on a trip to the moon; a bunch of people at school
     were talking about it. But he hadn’t given it a second thought.
    And it was right about then that it hit him:
What were you
just wishing a second ago? You wanted to get out of here. Well … you can’t get farther away than that
.
    He’d already decided. He would sign up. As soon as he got home. Damn it, he would go to the moon, as far away as he could
     possibly go.
    Then she could sit there in her room holding hands with Noël until she got arthritis, for all he cared.
    When he finally reached home, he didn’t say anything to his parents, pretended like nothing was up, and forced a smile from
     deep down in his gut when they asked how Simone was.
    “I was just thinking about Simone,” his mother said. “Maybe you’d like to invite her over to dinner soon? Maybe this Sunday?
     We haven’t seen her for ages, and she’s such a great girl. Don’t you think so, Arnaud? Arnaud?”
    “Huh? What is it?” he heard his father yell from the living room, his newspaper rustling.
    “I was just saying we think Simone is such a great girl, isn’t she?”
    “Yes, yes,” his father’s voice said from the living room after a brief pause. “A really sweet girl. You have to take care
     of that one, Antoine. You hear me?”
    Antoine felt his heart rising into his throat and realized he might throw it up at any moment, bloody and useless.
    “Yeah,” he forced himself to say. “Yeah, I’ll ask her.”
    Then he went into his room. He powered up his Mac and entered the address: www.nasamoonreturn.com .
    With a few clicks of his mouse, he found tons of pictures and film clips from the old moon landings in the sixties andseventies, interviews, and information about the contest. Applicants had to be between fourteen and eighteen to enter, but
     of course he already knew that. He also knew he probably would have no problem at all passing the medical and psychological
     examinations. After all, he was in good physical condition, and no one in his family had ever been mentally ill or anything
     like that. His parents and relatives
were
kind of strange, true, but that wasn’t the same as saying he was likely to suddenly snap and start hunting down his crewmates
     with an ax.
    NASA’s rigorous three-month training program was another thing altogether. Would he have the stamina to go through with it?
     From what he understood, it included daily running sessions, logic tests, stress tests, and a number of flights in the Vomit
     Comet, an aircraft that quickly climbed to thirty thousand feet, only to point its nose straight down and dive for the deck,
     giving passengers a chance to experience weightlessness for twenty-five seconds at a time. Or nausea for two hours straight,
     if they were really unlucky. Then there were the high-altitude flight chambers used to familiarize trainees with the symptoms
     of oxygen deprivation, or hypoxia, as it was called. And finally they would have to spend a substantial amount of time in
     the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at Johnson Space Center, where a 202-by-102-foot pool, complete with a mockup of the spacecraft
     and landing module, would train them to enter and exit the modules at a depth of forty feet, simulating zero gravity. This
     was definitely no joke. Not to mention the hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of theory they would have to read and learn
     before they left the ground.
    But first he had to apply, of course. And then just wait. Thethree winners would be notified in mid-July, he read. They would have to be absent from school from April until June of the
     following year for the training and final mission.
    The winners would be flown first to New York to appear on
The Late Show
and then to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where they would undergo the training before the launch from Kennedy
     Space Center in Florida in mid-July. He’d have to postpone a few finals, but that