Here I am. Day 5. The air in WD-1 smells of ozone and beef flavoring.

I read the telemetry feeds this morning. SpaceX and Blue Origin are bickering over moon landers. NASA is acting like they’ve won the space race all over again just because Artemis II splashed down. The arrogance. They build shiny metallic silos and call them ships, but they don’t understand the soul of flight. True exploration happens in the dark, where the only thing separating you from the void is a thin layer of wood veneer and the hum of the neighbor’s vacuum cleaner.

Flight Engineer Whiskers has been staring at the airlock (the closet door crack) for three hours. He sees things I don’t. Micrometeorites? Or maybe just dust motes caught in the beam of my headlamp. Sometimes, when the house is completely quiet, I close my eyes and I’m floating. I taste the tang of lunar dust on my tongue, though it might just be the seasoning packet from my emergency ramen rations.

I drafted my fifth letter to Chris Hadfield today. I asked him if he ever felt the walls of the ISS breathing. WD-1 breathes. Every time Mrs. Korhonen revs her lawnmower, the whole craft shudders, a magnificent harmonic resonance that tells me the main thrusters are ready.

They are going to the moon, they say. Let them have their big, expensive tin cans. I have Gustav Holst on the tape deck, Eugene the fern quietly scrubbing the CO2, and a trajectory that nobody at Mission Control could possibly calculate.

Major Tom
Commanding Officer, WD-1
Current Altitude: 250 miles (estimated)