
<em>Intro to Space Sciences - 2nd Grade Edition</em>
<em>Chapter 12: Traveling Really Fast In Space</em>

Have you ever wondered how our ship goes so fast? In the last chapter, we learned that solar bodies are <strong>really far apart</strong>. They can be <strong>millions </strong>of light-years away. That's a long way to walk! And yet, we'll be at our new home very soon. How can this be? How can we travel to a new star in just one person's lifetime?

The answer is: we use a <strong>very special</strong> engine in our ship, and it does all the walking for us!

A very smart scientist named Dr. Malcolm McCreedy invented our engine. He called it the &quot;Limnal Drive&quot;, because it uses a <strong>whole ocean of light</strong> as its fuel.

When you see things with your eyes, you see lots of colors: blue, red, yellow, even white! But there are lots of colors that you <strong>don't see</strong>, too. These colors live in the tiny spaces <strong>between other colors</strong>. We can't see them, but we know they're there because <strong>math tells us so.</strong>

Very smart people have known about this hidden energy for a long, long time: even our ancestors knew about itbefore the Little Bump even happened! But nobody knew how to <strong>use </strong>it. Not until Dr. McCreedy!

Dr. McCreedy found a <strong>very clever </strong>way to use this energy. He knew that if you <strong>push </strong>a lot of it in one direction, it will <strong>pull </strong>other things with it! If you push hard enough, it will pull very heavy things  <strong>even space itself!</strong>

Butwhat happens when you pull <strong>space</strong>? Let's find out!

Have you ever thrown a ball while in a zero-gravity chamber? You probably saw the ball go flying! But did you notice that you moved tooin the <strong>opposite direction</strong>? Why the heck did that happen?

It turns out, the universe has certain <strong>laws</strong>, and it works really hard to maintain them! A long time ago, a man named <strong>Sir Newton </strong>figured out the first of these laws while throwing apples around in a zero-gravity chamber.

And guess what: we found <strong>a lot more laws just like that one</strong>! Boy, Sir Newton would be impressed!

Now, instead of throwing an apple, what if you threw lots and lots of this special light energy? Well, I bet the universe would have to <strong>sit up</strong> and <strong>take notice</strong>! And what if you didn't even need to throw the energy yourself? What if it was just <strong>waiting </strong>to burst out in <strong>all directions</strong>? 

<em>So what does the universe do, and how does that make us travel so fast? Tune into Chapter 13 for the answer!</em>

