Four Lives, Four American Lies / Chapter 5: Mason—The Cosmic Dreamer
Four Lives, Four American Lies

Four Lives, Four American Lies

Author: Susan Rodriguez

Chapter 5: Mason—The Cosmic Dreamer

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Picture Mason, age eight, sprawled on his bedroom floor surrounded by LEGO rockets and dog-eared copies of Popular Science. While other kids played Little League or traded Pokémon cards, Mason built rocket ships out of empty cereal boxes. He pored over NASA livestreams, dreaming of living among the stars. He taped glow-in-the-dark planets to his ceiling and doodled designs for his own spaceships in the margins of his math homework.

Even as a college sophomore, Mason knew that launching humanity beyond Earth would take more than backyard ingenuity. He scribbled out his plan on a whiteboard in his dorm, listing the first—money, and lots of it, whether from Silicon Valley investors, government grants, or his own future startup windfall.

He stared up at the ceiling planets, vowing that someday, he’d be the one to make it happen—even if it meant starting from scratch.

What would you do if your dream was bigger than the world itself? And how far would you go to make it real?

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