November 24, 2011
Before them stood a tremendous rocket, looming overhead like a giant cigar piercing the sky. At the top was the capsule in which they'd be spending the next several months of transit, which would become a ground base on Mars, which would house them for the long trip home again - but below it, there were tons of pure rocket fuel. Effectively, they'd be sitting on a giant bomb, and if one thing went wrong, it could send them into a gut-wrenching death spiral, plummeting back to the ground in a burst of flames and melting metal and crunching bones.