Dusk -the magic hour for both photographers and astronomers, who used this time to watch Near Earth Asteroids. Now this sky is ocean: deeper and more wondrous than any dare to go. Uncountable porcelain satellites move in chaotic glimmering shoals, like diamond fish, wandering purposefully, 100km off the ground. They speed around the semi-sphere of night, diving and then returning from the horizon, criss-crossing like lost souls busying themselves with ascension. Bullet shaped and built on foundations of magic, the rocket ran the preparation procedures. Across the blurred mysterious dark sea, hovered luminous signs: "10:30 to Musk - Gate closing in 20 minutes". The cargo, customers, adventurers and escapers lounge agitatedly. In the harbor, awaiting the ferry to the rocket is an inconsequential nuclear family: a younger sister and an older brother - but not older by much, and the mother, who is ten years older than her husband (her second try at marriage). The little girl is crying because her brother said that her pig tails look stupid, like her, her older brother is sulking because she doesn’t let him get pig-tails and he’d look way better than her with them, this is the 5th time today that he’s caused an argument; he’s not a bad kid, he’s just angry that Mom is taking them to Mars, away from their Dad. Their mother, a diplomat by profession and maternal experience, manages to mute their mewing complaints and sends their step-father to buy 0g sickness tablets. He desperately wants to connect with his step-children but his next of kin already perceive that as an endeavour doomed to fail, which is perhaps a self-fulfilling mentality. 

Lawyers in pressed suits, that know no imperfection in their acutely tuned minds or reinforced suits stood expectantly, wondering what the delay was and chattering notes about contracts and copyrights into earpieces to be used later. Rugged and hopeful lower-class engineers, fleeing the oppressive atmosphere of big-city America to achieve the American dream in the New world. Disabled, sick and weak children leave for lower gravity, assisting their frail wirey tight skinned bodies are keenly attentive humanoid machines that hum in comforting deep and metallic vibrations, occasionally applying anti-inflammatory to the computer chips logged in the backs of their heads, which allow the children to walk again. Once ferried to the launch platform the pioneers-to-be were confronted by the immense size of this pinnacle of human ingenuity.

Air stewards and hostesses strap in the passengers wearing airtight cream jumpsuits, handing out snacks and self-contained pockets of water, with casing that dissolves in the mouth, leaving no waste. Crackling through the passenger's headsets, the disembodied voice of the very much terrestrial Captain announces the ironically useless safety procedures. The voice speaks with stern experience and warm formality. As the Captain starts the countdown, two words linger in the minds of the commuters. Take Off. The explosive shock of sound from the thrusters rings the chassis like a bell. As Geriatric passengers get flashbacks to the Challenger tragedy and the fates of the astronauts plummeting to the ground, great expanding clouds of fire jet out of the collection of cone shaped thrusters, unhindered by the air, slicing through it like a scalpel through skin. Still the passengers remember the tale of those unfortunate ones, in free fall without power or communications. Some of them recalled as a stress induced mantra, POTUS’ quoted poem, ‘We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God’.

 Astonishingly, the gargantuan lump of metal heaves itself up with an absurd magical quality, as though logic and Newtonian physics willingly collapse to allow this engineering colossus to elevate to the heavens. As the launch tower, muted next to the rocket, pulls away it releases white gas, trickling off the sides of the rocket. Like the scum of blizzard snow drifting down a waking mammoth.

Crushed into the seat by the invisible palm of acceleration, the voyagers - neck tendons bulging, stinging watery eyes - yearned for the inky nightness of unconsciousness, to forgo the storm and reach the calm waters beyond it. From the ominous concrete obelisk of orbit control on the ground and the perspective of the captain, the rocket looked like a sparkler, no bigger than an eyelash, releasing a greatly disproportionate amount of light, like a meteor in reverse. Uneasiness panged in the jolted stomachs of the rocket’s cargo, as the projectile artificially directed its trajectory diagonal, tracing the graceful sweeping curvature of the indescribably beautiful sphere of Earth. The cockpit gradually grew darker with the sky: from the blue walls of a maternity wing; the hypnotising blue of an old world gas stove; the deeply meaningful blue of mountainside lake and the unexpected unnerving total blackness of the cosmos.

Seemingly only momentum propelled them forward, as weightlessness began and the joyous carsick feeling tightly gripped the commuters (those without 0g sickness tablets endured worse effects), as all sound cut away, like the homely embrace of sleep. Finally allowed to unfasten their seatbelts, the entire cabin slowly, and unsuccessfully at first, drifted to the ceiling windows and gazed wondrously and entranced by the organic looking processes occurring at an orbital construction yard. Strange, as if mechanical life - evolved from flesh - was semantically recreating the first instances of life, 1000 km above its home, four billion years later. As the Earthbounds’ concept of direction collapses, they find themselves in an agoraphobic and claustrophobic ball of endlessness. The human mind, in situations when it is confronted with magnitude at the scale of titans, melts. It is not the glory of God that causes men to scream from agonising knowledge, but rather the infinity of Ouranos, confined to the finity of his kin. There are one million stars, for every grain of sand on Earth, in our local group alone. There are around ten planets per star. If one in one million earth-like planets had life, and one in one million of those planets had multicellular life, and if one in one million of those planets had intelligent life, there would be millions of intelligent species. Millions. The human mind fails to gasp the scale of infinite space, and infinite time.

Slingshotting past the moon, like blood in a centrifuge, the Earth-Moon industrial complex shrank to the scale of a nest of ants, soundlessly busying themselves with inconsequence. In precarious isolation for three months, the excellence of space quickly wears off for the weary travellers, the silent ripples of propulsion streak behind the rocket like a Chinese calligrapher; dried and hardened by the penetrating and unobstructed instant heat of the sun. On a counterintuitively parabolic arc, the mote of metal, meticulously forded through the endless black sea, to a shining dot that grew each day. Until one day, the core of the strange star had drained, revealing a pale mustard red planet in the centre, surrounded by a halo of silver haze. Circling the peculiar orb were two grains of red - Phoebe and Deimos - looking not too dissimilar from ladybugs. In stark contrast to Earth, wandering without purpose, a few dismally sized satellites lapped the dwarvish planet. The taste of bitter dried food retained in their mouths, the passengers now longed for this planet, their new world. They longed for the food, the freedom, the lower gravity - the frail bodies of the disabled children, now surprisingly well adapted and agile as any. The rocket precariously drew itself nearer the rusty dwarf, now dwarving it; a strange web like network of lights, throbbing to the pulse of the planet lay, taught, on Mars’ North Pole, spreading out from Musk the Martian Capital. 

Musk - named after the hated and beloved industrialist of the twenty-first century. A man reminiscent of Citizen Kane. One that investors call a genius, skeptics call a fraud and analysts call a strange new type of hybrid, between paragons of capitalism and ruthless unsympathetic internet culture. Many resisted and despised the naming of the capital after such a man, but as the founders of the base were members of his personality cult, the name stuck and the relevance of the problem faded.

The landing sequence commenced, a vivid mirror to the launch in all but sound - that ear rupturing tear, that soul shredding shake. The Martian soil zooms into view, growing ominously. The second thrusters fire, and the rocket is shaken by the sudden change in kinetic energy. The landscape - now flat - could be observed to have bumps and notches, not dissimilar to Earth, like the skin of an old animal, pulled tight like a drum. Or a builder plastering a wall. The horizon was pulled into view and then morphed into a strange parabola, as the rocket settled into a polar crater, landing lights blinking expectedly, like they had been waiting for two years. A voice that they had not heard for three months, crackled through the speakers in a prerecorded message, ‘10 seconds to touchdown’ it boomed, that stern formality exchanged for knowing but uncontainable giddy excitement. The landing gear whirred and hissed as they extended and the rocket softly, incrementally touched down. When the doors opened the two siblings were the first to disembark and the first to see that, opposite the door, a far sun rose above alabaster skies.