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Natalia's family and my own had been as close to one another as though we were one family. During the first months, it was a great comfort to both of us, to have one another as a link to the familiar.
I could still remember when I felt for the first time a faint notion of the scope of the sacrifice this mission implied. It happened on the day that we left, amidst shedding tears while saying good bye to everyone, to all whom I had shared my life with for so many years. I had this sickening feeling, just for a moment, that I might never see my children again, whom, as I began to realize, I hadn't really known, not even my wife, as much as I would have wanted to. However, in the excitement of seeing the ship that we were about to enter, the sadness became dampened, then vanished for a while.
The ship stood sixteen hundred feet tall, a monument to man's ingenuity and industry, a technological marvel as tall as a mountain, powered by a complex of 12 deuterium-tritium fusion engines, capable of a grand total of 10-G acceleration, sustainable for ten years in continues use.
The ship was a grand sight indeed, a monument in its own right. It was free standing over a fire pit the size of a small city. Rumors had it that the European Space Center, south of Munich, had been built exclusively for this one mission.
We blasted off in late afternoon of a fine summer Sunday, with a 2G-acceleration force. The entire launch sequence went flawless, with the kind of perfection that one might expect if the launch had been practiced a thousand times. The liftoff felt firm, as firmly as I remembered being pressed into the seat of a jet fighter that made it to forty thousand feet in less than a minute.
The ship rose. It's hard to describe. Seeing the Earth's surface fading into a light-blue haze brought back this feeling of a great sacrifice, only stronger now. A whole way of life seems to have come to a sudden end. For twelve years I would not feel the warmth of the sunshine, hear the laughter of children, the wind, the rain, hear the song of birds, see the familiar faces of loved ones, feel their embrace and the joy of hugging. We were entering a world of perpetual darkness illumined only by some faint traces of starlight that pervades the universe of outer space.
The steps to the bus, before we were driven to the launch site, were the hardest steps I had ever taken, and still they seemed easy to take compared to those mentally taken after lift off. When we were waving to one another, a glass barrier separated us. Still, we were seeing each other while waving good bye. Later, when looking into the awesome black of space, I wondered if this sad good bye might been the last and final one.
We were out of the Earth's atmosphere in less than three minutes. In twelve minutes we had passed the moon, and at the half-hour mark, both the Earth and the moon had become indistinguishable from the rest of the stars of the Milky Way galaxy. Getting back home now depended on the precision of our on-board star mapping system that would allow us to re-trace our steps provided it would perform error free for a minimum of twelve years.
Of our six-year journey to Alpha Centauri, nine months would be required to accelerate the ship. At a steady acceleration of 1G those nine months would be required for the ship to reach its cruising velocity of 82% the speed of light. But the months passed, spell-bound by anticipation and fears. Would we survive travelling that fast? When the engines finally became silent, the ship began to spin along its axis at a carefully controlled speed to provide a new source for artificial gravity. The gravity effect was no longer provided from acceleration of the ship and everyone within it, but from centrifugal force. The swimming pool, now became a long band of water held in place exclusively by the ship's rotational centrifugal force. At this point the entire ship had to be re-arranged, from gravity simulated by the thrust of the engines that had stopped, to the new centrifugal gravity which acted from a different angle. For this changing physical environment the entire ship had to be rearranged. The Agro-Plant's vast forest of food plants and various trees had to be re-arranged, to say nothing of our living quarters and control centers. What used to be the floor now became a wall, and what used to be a wall now became the floor. After the 'rebuilding' of the ship was completed, finally, there was peace again, that is as much of a peace was possible with the captain conducting all the minutiae of life aboard the ship.'
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