Hitching A Ride

Fourteen-year-old Andrew Young gets a simple school assignment: write down a dream he hopes to achieve someday. Most of his classmates pick something safe and years away. Andrew writes down a different kind of dream. He wants to reach space before he turns sixteen. It starts as homework. Then Andrew realizes most of the hard engineering work has already been done by other people. He just has to put it together and actually try.

His best friend Reynolds signs on, and the two of them start acquiring pieces: a restored Russian spacesuit, bought and pressure-tested in Houston. A pressure-test failure almost ends things there, and they spend nearly all their spare hardware fixing it before they can move on. Eventually they land a set of real rocket engines from Swedish Orbitals, an actual amateur aerospace company that agrees to help once its founder realizes Andrew isn't playing around.

None of this happens quietly. Andrew's father Carl, a wealthy tech entrepreneur, ends up funding and sheltering the whole project. But first his wife Natalie nearly says no outright. She only agrees after Andrew promises her real things: he'll introduce her to everyone involved, he'll explain every system so she actually understands it, and if anything ever stops being safe, she's the first person he calls, not his father. Reynolds' own parents refuse completely until Natalie talks them through it herself, one mother to another. A warehouse in Mexico becomes the project's real headquarters, staffed by local workers who go from hired help to true believers once Andrew tells them what they're actually building.

Meanwhile, FBI Agent William Snare, NASA's aerospace liaison, spends over a year chasing a trail that looks suspicious from a distance: a spacesuit purchase, a donation to a foreign rocket company, an odd shipment to Mexico. He's convinced something dangerous is going on. What he eventually finds is a fourteen-year-old with a mission patch and a straight answer for every question.

On launch day, the rocket lifts off from a platform in international waters, carrying a capsule Andrew and Reynolds have named The Dreamer. The same explosive bolts that failed three separate times in testing have to work now, for real, with no second chances. They hold. In orbit, Andrew gets his mother on the radio and describes what he's seeing while it's happening. Then he does the part of the plan he's kept mostly to himself: using his spacesuit to fly across open space to the International Space Station and knock on the door, counting on an old rescue treaty and the goodwill of six astronauts who were not expecting company.

They let him in. The crew spends a tense, often funny week figuring out what to do with him while Snare and NASA scramble to get ahead of a story that's about to break either way. Andrew comes home aboard Dragon II, faces a press conference, and goes back to being a regular teenager, more or less, for the first time in over a year.

HITCHING A RIDE is a YA STEM adventure about a kid who decides an impossible goal is worth chasing, and the people around him who end up carrying it too.