Chapter Text
“Show of hands,” Ed said. “Who wanted to be an astronaut when they were five?”
A respectable number of hands went up.
He nodded. “Exactly. This is a very popular career at five.”
A few people laughed.
“Then something happens. You discover dinosaurs. Or sports. Or medicine. You decide you’re going to be a lawyer because someone on TV has a nice suit. You get to college and find out finance pays better than whatever you were planning to do, and suddenly the five-year-old who wanted to walk on the Moon is a thirty-seven-year-old man making very serious decisions about retirement funds.”
More laughter this time.
Ed glanced toward the teachers sitting along the wall of his old high school auditorium.
“I should say, before somebody emails me afterward, that there’s nothing wrong with finance.”
Someone near the front called, “There is now.”
“That was you, not me.”
The room broke properly then.
Ed smiled and waited for it to settle.
“The point is, most five-year-olds are allowed to be unreasonable about their futures. That’s one of the privileges of being five. You can say astronaut, professional athlete, president, dragon. Nobody sits you down and asks for a ten-year development plan.”
He shifted his weight against the edge of the lectern. “I was apparently an unusually boring child.”
Someone in the second row laughed.
“I said astronaut at five and then just… failed to come up with anything else.” He let that sit for a beat. “So I kept going.”
The screen behind him still held the photograph from the previous slide: Ed in a flight suit, helmet tucked under one arm, slightly younger than he was now and trying very hard not to look as pleased with himself as he had been.
“It wasn’t a straight line. Nobody’s is. There are exams you don’t do as well on as you expected. Applications you don’t get. People who are better than you at things you thought were yours. There are medical tests, training cycles, years when most of your job consists of waiting for somebody else to decide whether you’re going anywhere.”
He looked up at the photograph.
“And then, occasionally, somebody straps you to a controlled explosion.”
That earned another laugh.
“Which does make the waiting feel more purposeful.”
A hand rose.
Ed pointed. “Yes?”
“Were you scared?”
That one always came eventually. He thought about it. “Yes.”
The boy who had asked looked faintly surprised.
“I was. I mean, anybody who tells you they sit on top of several hundred tons of fuel and feel absolutely nothing is either lying or somebody you should not allow near the controls.”
The teachers laughed harder than the students at that.
“But fear isn’t particularly informative by itself. Sometimes it means stop. Sometimes it means you understand the stakes. The useful question is whether you still think the thing on the other side is worth doing.”
He glanced once more at the photograph.
“For me, it always was.”
Another hand. “Why?”
That question made him pause longer.
There were answers he had given in interviews. Curiosity. Exploration. Science. The view of Earth from orbit. The usefulness of work conducted where almost everything humans took for granted stopped functioning normally.
All true.
None complete.
Ed looked out across rows of faces in the auditorium where, years ago, he had sat listening to other adults explain how they had become themselves.
“I don’t know,” he said at last.
A few students smiled, assuming another joke.
He was not joking.
“I can give you all the sensible answers. I probably have given most of them already. But if you’re asking why I never grew out of it…” He shrugged. “I suppose space always felt less like somewhere I wanted to visit than somewhere I was meant to get to.”
The auditorium had gone unusually quiet.
Ed smiled again, lighter this time. “Which is a very dramatic thing to say at 10:43 on a Tuesday morning, so please don’t put that on the school website.”
The principal laughed somewhere behind him.
Ed clicked to the next slide.
“Al'right. Questions about training, living in orbit, what happens if you need the bathroom during launch, and whether the food is actually as bad as everyone says. Those are usually the important ones.”
Several hands shot up at once.
And a few years later, he would remember that he had told them the truth; he had simply misunderstood what he was trying to reach.