It’s speech contest season in Toastmasters, and for the first time, I entered the Tall Tales Speech Contest at my club. The Contest Rules are as follows:
- Each speech is 3-5 minutes in length.
- Subject must be of a highly exaggerated, improbable nature and have a theme or plot.
- Humor and props may be used to support or illustrate the speech.
I was excited to have a fun idea that included a little bit of science and proceeded to type up the following story. I didn’t win the club contest, but I was proud of my speech and was glad to get compliments from a couple club members whose opinions I really respect.
Oh my gosh – you’re not going to believe what happened to me recently! I hardly believe it myself! I just have to tell you about how I became tiny and ended up in orbit.
See, I love CubeSats. Over the past few years I’ve been following the new applications for them, and I always feel a little thrill when I read about more being launched. I got to tour a lab where some graduate students were making final preparations for their CubeSat before launch. I was leaning over the little satellite trying to get a closer look when my elbow hit another device on the counter causing it to emit this weird beam all over the room. The beam hit me, and I fell down blacking out briefly. When I opened my eyes, I felt all disoriented. I looked around the room and was confused because everything was giant around me. I was laying on the counter next to the CubeSat – I had been shrunk! When I stood up next to the CubeSat, I estimated that I must have been only 1 cm tall – 1/10 the height of the CubeSat!
The graduate students returned, but they didn’t see me on the counter. I could hear them talking about the launch in a couple days, and I got this crazy idea – what if I stow away on the CubeSat when it’s launched! I could go up into space! Now, have you ever had an idea that you really didn’t think through very well, but you were so excited about it that you dove right into making it happen anyway? Well, that is exactly what happened to me. I started looking around for some food and thinking a little bit about how to survive a couple weeks in orbit. I had a water bottle on me when I was shrunk and was surprised it was still in my hand and had been shrunk with me. The graduate students were pretty sloppy in their lab, and I found some large crumbs on the counter to gather up to eat. I figured out a way to squeeze into the CubeSat and camped out to await the launch.
CubeSats are attached to a rocket in little pods as secondary payloads. The pod protects the rocket from the CubeSat and vice versa, so I felt safe enough. I was expecting a bumpy ride up to orbit, so I braced myself among the electronic wires inside the CubeSat. While I was waiting for the launch, I checked out what was inside the CubeSat. I noticed there was a camera, kind of like a Go-Pro, and I spent some time figuring out how I might be able to look out the lens like a window since the CubeSat had no built-in windows. I wanted to see Earth from space!
The launch was even more bumpy and scary than I expected, and I passed out as the rocket went up. Luckily, I woke up after the CubeSat had been ejected from the pod into its orbit. I was so excited to 1) be alive and 2) be in orbit! I raced over to the camera to look through the lens to see what I could see. It was pointed at Earth! Yay! What a beautiful blue sphere in space!
After the initial excitement about being in orbit and looking back at Earth, I started to get worried about whether I was going to be able to get back to Earth and home. CubeSats are usually allowed to orbit for a couple weeks or months until their orbit decays enough that they burn up in the atmosphere. I didn’t want to burn up in the atmosphere! Luckily, the CubeSat I was on was part of an experiment in satellite retrieval and recovery, and after a few days, the CubeSat was grabbed in orbit by another small satellite and pulled in to be returned to Earth. Even luckier for me, the graduate students were going to get their CubeSat back so they could study it! Luckiest of all, some key lab equipment had been shrunk at the same time I had, and a graduate student in the lab worked on reversing the process so he could return the valuable equipment to normal size. So when the graduate students found me in the CubeSat, they were able to enlarge the tiny me back to normal size (maybe minus an inch). If they hadn’t been able to, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you my story today! Whew!
