10 february 2025, @mariannewest's Freewrite Writing Prompt Day 2643: conceive

Image by tommy pixel from Pixabay

“OK, we may need to relocate the spaceport, because we have a need for speed and there is a big problem.”

Nine-year-old Milton Trent had looked through a few books and went to find his best friend nine-year-old George Ludlow and George's little brother Grayson, six-year-old Lego engineer.

“How much speed do we need, Milton?” George said.

“A lot – I mean, just to get into orbit, we gotta get going at 17,000 miles or 28,000 kilometers an hour.”

“What's a kilometer?” George said.

“That's science measurements and stuff. All I know is, you need 17,000 miles worth of kilometers to even get into orbit.”

Grayson considered this.

“Yeah, we're going to have to move the spaceport,” he said, “because you need a really long runway, or you gotta go straight up, and you're going to need a lot of car engines to do that.”

“I don't even think you can do that with a car engine – I mean, race cars are doing like 200 miles an hour,” George said. “I don't even know if a jet engine can do that – I mean, there are planes that can do like 2,000 miles per hour, but still!”

“Really long runways,” Grayson said.

“And then, what kind of gasoline are they using for rocket fuel nowadays?” George said, “and how much?”

“Yeah, with gas being $4 a gallon, we just got a lot more stuff to figure out before we can do this,” Milton said. “And then there's the other part – there's sixty minutes in an hour, and sixty seconds in a minute, so basically, to get into orbit, you gotta be moving at five miles per second.”

George and Grayson considered this.

“What even is that?” George said.

“Yeah – my grandmother said that's so fast we can't even conceive of it,” Milton said.

Grayson started counting on his fingers … and then stopped.

“Yeah, we can't build a long enough runway,” he said.

“Nope,” Milton and George said.

“What you need to do is skip all that and find out who has a spare warp drive and go get that,” Grayson said.

“Yeah!” Milton and George said.