Two months later, Gus Grissom rode the Liberty Bell Mercury capsule into orbit several times around the Earth, providing ample time to enjoy the view. During the short sub-orbital flight, he barely had time to enjoy the view of space. Alan Shepard rode the Freedom Mercury capsule into space for a sum total of fifteen minutes. So here it is, my very first piece of fiction, modernized by age.Īmerica took its first ride into space on May 5, 1961. Naturally, I added more to it, having experienced the Apollo missions, geosync satellites and political events of my lifetime. Having been written presumably on notebook paper and never copied, (no Xerox machines in those days), I took to rewriting it based on memories from my childhood. The memory of my first fictional story from that seventh grade class kept calling to me to locate its whereabouts. Over the many years that have passed I became a novelist writing mostly romance and some science fiction. At the time I hadn’t heard of the possibility of another planet behind the sun and believed it was my original idea. When I was in seventh grade, (many years before the advent of geosynchronous satellites) I wrote a story about this very subject for a class project. Go ahead and name your favorite sci-fi stories that have used this trope. Most importantly, when someone tells you there’s a hidden planet on the other side of the Sun, just remember these words: Unfortunately, the forces of gravity conspire to make this hidden planet idea completely impossible. Which means, if you had a massive enough gas giant, you could have a less massive terrestrial world in a stable orbit 60-degrees away from the planet. Jupiter has a collection of Trojan asteroids at its L4 and L5 points of its orbit, always holding at a stable distance from the planet. L4 is about 60-degrees ahead of a planet in its orbit, and L5 is about 60-degrees behind a planet in its orbit.Ī small enough body, relative to the planet, could hang out in a stable location for billions of years. The best of these are known as the L4 and L5 Lagrangian points. These locations are known as Lagrange points, regions where the gravity of two objects create a stable location for a third object. There are a few places where objects can share a stable orbit. Now, I’m now going to make things worse, and feed your imagination a little with some actual science. Or maybe 64 64th Earths all transforming and converging to form VOLTREARTH. What if there was originally two half-Earths and they collided and that’s how we got current Earth! Or 4 quarter Earths, each with their own population? And then BAM. Diagram of the five Lagrange points associated with the sun-Earth system, showing DSCOVR orbiting the L-1 point. And if we were unlucky, they’d collide with each other, forming a new super-sized Earth, killing everything on both planets, obviously.

If we were lucky, the planets would miss each other, and be kicked into new, safer, more stable orbits around the Sun. Over the years, these various motions would escalate, and that other planet would be seen more and more in the sky as we catch up to it in orbit.Įventually, our orbits would intersect, and there’d be an encounter. And so, we’d speed up a little and catch sight of it around the Sun. So, while we’re being pulled a little forwards in our orbit by Jupiter, that other planet would be on the opposite side of the Sun. As the Earth orbits the Sun, it’s subtly influenced by those other planets, speeding up or slowing down in its orbit. There are those other planets orbiting the Sun as well. But we don’t exist in a Solar System with just the Sun and the Earth. If some powerful and mysterious flying spaghetti being magically created another planet and threw it into orbit, it would briefly be hidden from our view because of the Sun. Well, could this happen? Could there be another planet in a stable orbit, hiding behind the Sun? The answer, as you probably suspect, is NO.

Flying too close to the sun origin