Every third chapter of the book—we’re calling it the Book now—is basically an essay about something related to what’s going on in the story. Except for this first essay I have to write about rockets and space shuttles and that’s cool at first but now we’re getting into the nitty gritty details about the world of engineering and it is so motherflipping boring I gotta say.

Y’know if I wasn’t so dumb and had more time to [procrastinate] study for this project I would’ve eventually figured out that instead of researching shuttles, which in real life have been discontinued for 5 years and I had to “reintroduce” in my story because I’m too lazy/stupid to invent my own vehicle, I could’ve researched Soyuz spacecraft–which is basically what Russian cosmonauts have been using since the damn 60s because who needs to invent new things if the old things work amirite??

Technically NASA is working on a new spacecraft called the Orion. Plan: since this is the future, Orion spacecraft have been proven to be unsafe and NASA has fallen back on using their old shuttles for missions. Yeeeaaaahhh…