Even my six-year-old sister, Violet, who was normally as cheerful as an animated cartoon chipmunk, was starting to go stir-crazy. I was going nuts cooped up inside Moon Base Alpha. Not great odds.Īnd yet I still desperately wanted to go back outside again. I had nearly died on two of those excursions, which was a 50 percent near-death-experience rate. I had been outside on the moon four times: once while walking to MBA from the rocket that had brought me there and three times due to emergencies. For this reason, NASA forbade children from ever going outdoors, meaning that we were supposed to spend our whole time on the moon inside a building smaller than your standard Motel 6.ĭespite it being against the rules, I had experienced the dangers of the surface myself. There were a hundred ways you could die on the lunar surface we had already lost one person out there and nearly lost another. Leaving Moon Base Alpha was extremely dangerous. That was another problem with being a kid on the moon: You couldn’t go outside and play. You know how, on earth, parents will sometimes drag you to their friends’ house for the night and ask you to hang with their friends’ kid, even though they know the two of you don’t really get along? Well, imagine that, instead of going over to their friends’ house for one night, you’ve gone over for three years. I was just stuck with them, and the only other boy my age, Roddy Marquez, wasn’t much fun to hang out with.

There were other kids at MBA, but I hadn’t been given any choice in selecting them. Not only did we have to deal with the same lousy dehydrated food and cramped sleeping spaces and sadistic toilets as the adults, but there were a host of other problems for kids. But as hard as it was for the adults, it was even worse being a kid there. It turned out, living on the moon was far more difficult than anyone had predicted. When NASA had recruited us, they had made it sound like MBA would be the most exciting, amazing, incredible place in the universe. Along with a handful of other scientists and their children, we lived at Moon Base Alpha, the first human settlement in outer space. We were some of the first lunar colonists. Now, before you start thinking that my father was the biggest cheapskate on earth, there are a few things you need to know:įor starters, my father couldn’t have been the biggest cheapskate on earth, because we didn’t live on earth. For my thirteenth birthday, my father gave me the greatest present I could have ever hoped for: He took me outside to play catch.

Space case stuart gibbs series