Capercaillie

The 20th century was full of notable events–thirty-one major wars, unprecedented scientific advances, the septupling of the world’s population–but one crowning achievement stands out above all others: space travel. In particular, the Voyager 1 space probe, launched in 1977, was mankind’s first real admittance that they really believed something else might be out there; why else would they include a plaque depicting a diagram of the human form and a map to Earth on a deep space probe? Excitement was high, as was public approval; one of the few good things to come out of the Cold War was an almost unlimited budget for space programs, both in the United States and the Soviet Union.

But then the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, and people stopped caring about the space program. The energy crises of the early 21st century, in addition to escalating political, diplomatic, and economic global tensions, led people to ask why their money was being spent on sending things to space when things were so bad on Earth. Voyager 1 continued to collect and record valuable data on telemetry and solar flares, but this went almost entirely unnoticed by the public. And when it disappeared entirely in 2030 some 28 billion kilometers from the sun, no one was really surprised–it had, after all, been built in the ’70s, and it was impressive it had made it as far as it did.

And then it came back.

On October 17th, 2030, five months after Voyager 1 disappeared, it began transmitting data again–only now, it was seven light years away. NASA Control was stunned. How did it get there? How could it be transmitting a signal that far, that fast? For the data to be possible, Voyager 1 would have had to travel over seven times the speed of light, and for a brief period, public interest returned to the space program. Perhaps most interesting was that the probe was no longer moving, or at least was doing so very slowly–cosmically speaking–which experts theorized to mean it may have landed somewhere. When it disappeared again three weeks later, with no change in its data, it was assumed to be a glitch in a dying machine and nearly forgotten.

Then, on December 1st, Voyager 1 began broadcasting again, this time little more than a billion miles from the sun–and with a trajectory course towards Earth. It was coming home.

It landed in the southern Pacific Ocean a week later. The NASA recovery team was shocked to find that the probe was encased in a box of some kind: a black, coffin-shaped shell built of unknown technology. Public interest peaked again, and funds to study the object poured in. How did this box transport the probe seven light years away and back in a matter of months? And, more importantly, who made it, and why did they send it back?

Six years later, in 2036, the answer to the first question was discovered. The box contained a small engine capable of bending space itself, like an envelope, and traveling through two temporarily-adjacent points, and in 2039, NASA successfully reverse-engineered it. It was big, its design much less elegant than the Voyager Carrier, but mankind had crafted its first hyperspace drive.

With the energy crisis reaching a critical point on Earth, mankind looked to the stars to solve its desperate need for new fuels. The other planets in the solar system proved more than enough to provide these, in the form of gases or combustible minerals–and, in the case of a few of Jupiter’s moons, fossil fuels–and by the mid-2040s, Earth had entered a golden age of science and prosperity. By the 2050s, privately-owned institutions began to develop their own space programs, building and launching massive mining or exploration ships. The solar system was filled with space stations of all kinds, and many people lived and worked years without ever setting foot back on Earth.

The first baby born in space came in 2052 on Earth’s largest orbiting multinational spaceport, Hera Station–her name was Astra.

In the 2060s, attention turned to interstellar exploration. Hyperspace technology had advanced enough to make such ventures feasible, and so mankind set out to roam among the stars. In 2062, a multinational corporation named Frontier Science Industries was established by Francis Sutherland, a European tech mogul whose company had made enough important breakthroughs in spacecraft technology to give it all but unlimited funding. FSI’s purpose would be to travel to other star systems, learn what they had to teach, and use that knowledge to research new technologies for the betterment of mankind. Its flagship, the Capercaillie, was completed in 2064. At 4,500 feet long and 2,000 feet wide with a crew of 2,400, plus a manufacturing center the size of two city blocks (and a cost of $950,000,000,000), it was one of the largest, most technologically advanced ships ever built. Its autonomous operation by Frontier Science Industries meant that its operating potential was unfettered by bureaucratic red tape.

It sets out on its maiden voyage on January 3rd, 2065, to explore the mysteries of space.