AumSum had always dreamed big. Not just tall-building big or mountain big, but space big. He wasn’t just the kind of kid who asked why the sky was blue. He wanted to know what would happen if someone jumped all the way from space down to Earth.
One evening, after reading a book about space, his mind wandered as usual. What if he really did jump from space? Not from an airplane, not from a tall tower, but from way, way up - above the clouds, past the airplanes, even higher than the weather balloons, from the edge of space itself.
In his imagination, AumSum was suddenly floating high above Earth, standing on a tiny platform just at the edge of the atmosphere. The planet looked like a giant marble below him. It was beautiful and a little bit scary. There was no air, no sound, just silence and stars. He looked down at the glowing curve of Earth and leapt.
At first, nothing much happened. That was the weird part. There was no air up there to push against him, so he didn’t feel like he was falling. He was just floating downward slowly, calmly. But the calm didn’t last long. As he got closer to Earth, things began to change.
AumSum’s body started picking up speed. The invisible pull of gravity, gentle at first, became stronger and stronger. Soon, he was zooming downward at hundreds of kilometers per hour. But it didn’t stop there. He was in what grown-ups called free fall, and he was heading straight for Earth like a human comet.
As he passed into the upper layers of the atmosphere, the air began to thicken. That’s when he really started to feel the fall. The wind roared past his ears. He was falling so fast that the air around him was heating up from the friction.
But AumSum had thought ahead. His suit had a special shield, just like the ones used on spacecraft that come back to Earth. It protected him from burning up as he blasted through the sky. As he got lower, he remembered something important - terminal velocity. It’s the fastest speed someone can fall through air when gravity pulling down and air pushing up become balanced. AumSum had now reached that speed, and it was still really, really fast.
Luckily, in his imagination he carried a massive parachute. He pulled the cord, and with a sudden tug, the parachute opened. The fall slowed down quickly, and instead of zooming, he was now gently drifting.
Finally, he touched down safely, his feet landing on the ground with a soft thud. His journey from space was complete.