#His only sadness is that he STILL hasn't high fived an alien

[crayonurchin]

There’s an influential moment in Embers’ life that set him on a passionate, determined path towards his career in space engineering 

Ember’s always been obsessed with outer space, right from a little kid when he watched Wall-E. If it had stars, spacemen or aliens, he ate it right up. One of his favourite games was playing ‘moon landing’, which consisted of putting a plastic bowl on his head and having his Baba hold him under the arms so he could ‘space walk’ all over the bed, floor and tables. Baba also provided sound effects. It added to the atmosphere.

Leading to his 8th birthday, Solo mentioned they likely couldn’t do much, as they were low of funds. Ember was sad, but ultimately used to it by this point.

Come birthday day, one very loud awakening via party horn revealed SURPRISE, WE’RE GOING TO THE PLANETARIUM LIL DUDE!!! And you can get any one thing from the gift shop as your gift!

One hearty breakfast of birthday cake later, the two are at the Planetarium, where there’s a midday tour for kids and parents going on! Solo managed to let the guide know it’s Ember’s 8th birthday, and she makes sure he’s at the front, and it’s a whole 2 hours of nerdy, spacey, alien fun!

By the end of the tour, just before they head to the gift shop (where Solo KNOWS they sell kids astronaut costumes and has saved up just enough to buy it) Solo grabs the guide to thank her for helping them out in treating Ember.

It’s at that point they see him looking at a huge wall sized picture of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in their space suits, with the crew of the first moon landing all standing, smiling at the camera. But Ember has this dark, sad look on his face. Concerned, Solo goes over to see if he’s feeling okay.

“None of them are in wheelchairs.”

Solo blinks, unsure of how to respond to that. Before they think of anything, the tears start dripping down Embers face as his expression crumples.

“I’m never gonna be a spaceman, Baba...”

Panicking slightly, Solo tries to think of how to distract Ember or change his mind, and as they do, the tour guide comes over and kneels down to Embers’ level.

“Hey, that’s just a few people in that picture, birthday boy. Truth is, most astronauts ARE able-bodied, because there’s a lot in a spaceship that needs body work. But you know who ELSE got to go into space?”

She takes out her phone and gets up pictures of Houston, ground patrol, and various employees of Nasa in 1969

“All of these people got to go to space, because they’re the reason we can even GO into space. These are engineers, scientists, physicists, incredibly smart people who figured out how we can put our tiny, fragile bodies into metal boxes and throw them into outer space. They used maths to figure out gravity, radiation, black holes, and back then their computers were so old they couldn’t even run PacMan! But they STILL got the first humans on the moon, and they did right here on Earth!  Who knows, maybe one day we’ll be so advanced, we could make spaceships that let wheelchairs move on the moon. But right now, we need people to make those changes possible- we need the astronauts on Earth. People like you, Birthday Boy.”

Ember was utterly mesmerised by her, and smiled when she smiled. Solo was IMMENSELY perplexed by what just happened, but was just relieved Ember seemed to have cheered up. He wheeled himself back to his Baba so they could go to the gift shop. Solo started over to the costumes, but Ember called them back, instead holding up two items, GIGANTIC puppy eyes.

“Baba, please please PLEASE can I get two things instead of one?”

He was holding a Nasa stamped calculator and a Nasa stamped pen and book set.

Solo, who’d worked A LOT of overtime to afford the costume, tried a couple times to convince him that “errrr well wouldn’t you rather the suuuuper cool fancy spaceman suit buddy?” but changed their tune quick when they saw just how badly Ember wanted these cheap things. Deciding ‘screw it, now we can buy ice cream on the walk home’, Ember left the planetarium in silence, head down at his lap, writing his times tables in the book with the calculator helping him out.

He stopped ONLY to take licks of his giant scoop of strawberry ice-cream.