You strap into a chair facing the sky, tight enough to just about make you part if the chair. You can hear your own breathe through the visor. Your body is heavy from the voluminous suit. The fire suppression systems, body ventilation and health support systems make it one of the most expensive in the world. It is also the most unconformable thing to have on. All that just so you can have a chance against death.
Behind you are tanks of fuel whose worth is the gross domestic product of a small country. From the outside, you sit atop of several buildings combined in height and width. From the inside, your cabin is smaller than most bedrooms and with less room to move than what you’d get in a cramped bathroom. The rest is filled up with electronics working through trillions of calculation a second to keep you from accidentally blowing up.
Beneath the entire contraption is a small river and above it sits the myriad of engines priming with tiny amount of sparks; just in small case fuel doesn’t get burnt. Then a few switches later, a small swish runs through out the cockpit. Systems are firing up. Fuel and oxygen gets propelled to their respective turbo pumps. This doesn’t fully burn the fuel but just provides enough power to greatly boost the fuel pressure. At this moment, only the people close to you can hear the noise of the engines spooling.
Then the two pumps mix their outputs in the presence of a flame and boom! A thunderous explosions echoes. The a millisecond later, another! Then a shorter while later, another! A choir forms and it all forms a join loud sound that is simply; biblical. A white plume of smoke rises, that’s no ordinary smoke. Your exhaust is vaporizing the tiny river below. So much so that for a second the entire rocket is bellowed by steam. Were it not for the river, you would have melted the ground to glass.
You shake from the cockpit. Side to side. You doubt if the structural integrity will hold. It is a miracle that things are not falling apart. A while passes and the shaking stops momentarily as it now shift to constant vibration. Then the vibrations gain a back and forth momentum. You slowly feel the thing lift as the steam clears your windscreen. We have lift off!
Slowly and steadily, you begin feeling a force pushing you against your seat. It gains momentum. Reality hits that you are now traveling by explosions by burning fuel worth entire bloodlines; per second. You have different worries now. The acceleration.
At some point you have the force of five of you pressing against your back for eight to ten minutes. It holds, everything shakes. You breath hard and this point, you are concentrating the basics like breathing and panic regulation. Heart beat now holds steady at twice the normal rate as sky turns from blue to black. You clutch tighter at your seat, holding on to dear life.
Suddenly; peace overcomes. No vibrations and the force on your back subsides only ever so slight to give you much needed relief. Then, as sudden as the peace was, chaos comes back to rule. Tanks dropped and a new set is ready to fire up. Transition is a success. This time only ever so slightly less violent. We now wait till we can match the planets velocity then we can walk outside at speeds of tens of thousands of kilometers per hour. Nine or eight sunset and what’s more; the humans I left behind are technically aging faster than I am. Relativity!
It is F1, taken to a whole new level. Simple a formula. An engine, a driver separated by tanks of fuel. When I experience this, then and only then will I think of visiting Nibiru.