Students involved in AeroBing were expecting to launch their first rocket to space this Wednesday following months of research and development, finally accomplishing their group’s mission of bringing Binghamton to the forefront of college rocketry. They also incidentally brought Binghamton to the forefront of a global imperialist regime’s production line; when project leads Eva, Timo, and Vaughn arrived at the launch site, they found several high-ranking Lockheed Martin executives waiting to let them know their rocket design had been confiscated by the government and that they would be rewarded for their work with positions in weapons development at the company and with multi-million dollar military contracts.
“I’d never thought I’d make it this far,” Vaughn remarked. “At most I thought I’d be doing some independent project that helped people, like SpaceX, but the government? That’s way cooler! They even invited our families into Washington for the launch party. It was really special to watch a rocket I designed take off like that. I just wish it had landed on the moon, and not on someone’s house.”
“My mom was nagging me about adding a science minor to help find a job after college, so I took a few Computer Engineering courses to try it out, and the next thing I knew I was thirty-five years old watching my kids play in the yard and thinking of all the children I’ve probably gotten killed with that stupid rocket design.” With this, Timo stopped and looked pleadingly at the reporter, his eyes begging for forgiveness with a profundity his words cold never reach. “I just didn’t want to have a useless major,” he wept, “and now I’m complicit in crimes against humanity.”
“We did a great thing designing those more energy-efficient rockets a college quickly running out of money can afford to build. It’s not our fault that their power source is under South American soil or that their governments won’t give it to us for free. We’re engineering a better world with our ideas and our missiles. We are... We are,” said Eva, likely practicing her nightly speech to herself she needs to believe to fall asleep. “At least I have good job security in STEM, right?”