Leaving Earth Flash Fiction

Project Description

"Earth is dead"
        "The year is 2152. After centuries of unimaginable growth, our luck has run out. After the Oil Wars and the Great Oceanic Migration, it seemed like we had finally reached a happy status quo. That’s when the Terrans came. Within months of their arrival, the human race had fallen in numbers to a few thousand. Our manufacturing facilities lie dormant, and there is only one last hope: The USS Andromeda.
        The USS Andromeda is an ion-thrust colonization ship, located in a museum near Everett, Washington. With all options gone, and most of the engineers killed in the first wave by the Terrans, our only hope is to refurbish the Andromeda, and locate a suitable new planet to make our home. A successful mission is not guaranteed, but through careful planning and a firm understanding of physics, humanity just may live on."

That is how my teacher introduced this project. From the creative introduction you can tell that this project was going to be a little more interactive than the just another data collection project. Following the premise of the story we were given our goals and objectives seeing how the project was structered around the laws of Kinematics. They were as follows:

Research and determine which body in the solar system you would like to propose establishing as our colony, and determine what materials you will need to bring in order to set up a colony to support 100 people (your Mission Parameters).
Using the weight from the Mission Parameters necessary for your destination, determine the amount of fuel needed to reach the escape velocity for the booster rockets.
Based on the location of bodies in the solar system, the nature of motion in a 2D plane, and your initial launch conditions, identify the launch date necessary to complete a Hohmann Transfer trajectory.
Write a piece of Flash Fiction outlining your mission and it’s outcome ala-The Martian, including a discussion of your calculations.

With that, we split into groups and began working.

Process

This project began by finding what destination we wanted to travel to within the solar system. Taking into consideration the distance from Earth to the destination, the potential of having a habitable atmosphere, a sources of nourishment, and any other potential hazards that could come up. After some initial research we decided to look at Saturn's moon Titan. We complied our research onto a spread sheet shown below.

Reflection

what things did you learn from the project?

What are your thought about Space travel in general?