Spaceships are not supposed to blow up. But halfway between the Earth and the Moon, ours did. Later on, we found out it happened because of a last-minute substitution of cargo. You’re not supposed to put that next to this. But because the cargo-packing software only checked for weight and balance and not proximity, we ended up with plenty of that packed next to too much of this. Boom. Or in this case, beep-beep, whoop-whoop—crackle, crackle, boom. We had just enough warning to scramble for the life pods. We got all twelve passengers off okay, the two forward life pods