The year was 2024, I can remember it like it was yesterday. It was not a typical night like any other. At the time I was an Astronaut for NASA and I was preparing for a launch in two weeks. I was to hitch a ride inside of the space shuttle Endeavor to relieve some scientists that were on the space station Discovery. The team that I was with to go up consisted of 5 people, a shuttle commander and four scientists. I was one of those scientists. But unfortunately something happened on the space station and my team and I had to leave that night. We had to go up and fix the air regulator on the space station or they would run out of air and die. The scientists in the Discovery space craft had only 48 hours of air left.

As I went up the elevator that took us to the top along side of the shuttle, I could remember looking out to the sky. The sky was dark with lots of clouds and there was supposed to be a storm coming. Then the rain started to fall out of the sky very lightly. At the time I was concerned because there has never been a launch

We didn't know where we were at the time but by the looks of it we were on a remote island somewhere off of the coast.

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We all got out and collected everything that we could carry.

The countdown at this point was at minus ten minutes and counting. I sat right behind the shuttle commander so I had a pretty good view of what was happening outside. There was more lightning bolts stretching across the sky. As I sat there I thought about my wife and kids. My wife was not ready for me to leave this early. She was not happy but understood the situation and supported me in my decision to go up. All of a sudden I felt the shuttle start to shake and then I heard minus ten, nine... My heart raced like the first time I rode on a roller coaster upside-down. I then heard the bolts that were holding the shuttle in place explode so that the shuttle could be free. The shuttle at first rose steadily but then picked up speed in a hurry. About two minutes into flight I saw a big flash and knew right away that we had been struck by lightning. All of the controls went haywire and the shuttle was out of control. The only thing we could do is do an emergency evacuation.

Some common words found in the essay are:
Astronaut NASA, Shepard Jr, , shuttle commander, space station, space shuttle, shuttle commander tried, minus ten, remote island, commander tried,
Approximate Word count = 832
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)