Statistically Impossible

``Statistically impossible.'' That was what he was told when he asked about the likelihood that he would fail in the task that they had set for him. And he believed them. Every word. There was no reason not to, really, considering that they were the largest and most influential space agency in the world. Yet here he was, stuck in the capsule, floating somewhere between low and medium earth orbit, with no way to maintain orbit till help could be sent, and no way to safely crash land into the ocean below.

It was meant to be a routine earth-to-moon-base servicing trip. There had been hundreds of such missions before, and this was no different in any regard. The craft was the same, the launch platform was the same, even the mission itself was based on an old one that had undergone countless revisions and tests and actual deployments that there was nothing that it had not taken into consideration---such was the completeness in the mission brief itself.

Yet when he boarded the capsule at the top of the massive Prometheus-class rocket, he could feel nothing but anxiety. He raised his concerns with mission control, which merely noted down his misgivings and told him to carry on. He then asked them the likelihood of the mission failing, the infamous words of ``statistically impossible'' were returned.

The trip out was smooth. The payload was delivered to the moon base, and some of the moon base's back up data were transferred over into the capsule for return to mission control for safe-keeping. It was an additional redundancy used to handle transactional data that was important, but not important enough to take up the precious bandwidth in the laser-based communications channel that existed between the moon base and planet-side.

The launch out of the moon base proceeded without a hitch, but it was until nearly halfway through the flight that he discovered visually that his engines were failing, even though the telemetry systems indicated an all-clear in systems health. He relayed his concerns with mission control, and they told him to carry on with his return trip while they consulted the mission data to determine the actual status.

And the engines blew out completely when he was between low and medium earth orbit. Radio communication became sporadic before cutting off completely; he looked at the read-outs and checked on the transceiving array on this capsule and found that the array itself was shot. One of the sensors also indicated a sharp spike in various forms of radiation.

That was when he realised that everything was failing about him because the capsule and he had somehow crossed the path of a massive source of radiation that was knocking out the sensitive electronics. The realisation took a while to hit him, but when it did, he started sobbing, realising his own fate.