He knew the eyes of the world were on him.
The final selection had been made and it was decided that he was the right astronaut for the mission. Although this opportunity would probably make him world famous and one heck of a celebrity, he wasn’t likely to be around to bathe in the glory of it. He would leave them all behind; his girlfriend, his parents, his friends and relations; all of them, for the greater good of mankind. The mission; to travel out into space, well beyond anything that had been undertaken before. He would travel beyond the solar system, beyond the Milky Way into the deepest space, into a great firmament that had only been seen through the most powerful telescopes on Earth. It would be unknown territory. The cameras and the world watched him go.
After several months of travelling at unimaginable speeds through an endless void, he became aware of a particularly interesting signal amid the incessant space noise coming from the speaker, the first of any real significance since leaving the launch pad. It appeared to be a small, lone world in a vast and empty tract of space. It could well be some kind of outpost in the centre of its vast surroundings. He watched his screen as a great yellow light came into focus. Great arches glowed brightly in the night’s shadow that covered the land mass. It was a pillar or a post, maybe some sort of communication tower. The screen was sharpened and full magnification was used. Beneath the arches, and behind the pole, a structure, dimly lit but obviously inhabited.
He slipped his craft into a holding mode above the planet and entered the pod. Landing softly before the building he made his way to the entrance. He paused briefly to look around.
The bizarre nature of what he was looking at and the ridiculously impossible circumstance he found himself in, simply faded into insignificance compared with his love of hamburgers.