2.1 Overview

It is no doubt hard for star-bred cadets to imagine that only a little over two and a half centuries ago, space was still a dream for the people of Earth. But it was a dream as old as mankind, like the ancient myth of Icarus flying to the sun. Since the first man scanned with wonder the mysteries of the nighttime sky, the stars have beckoned, and he longed to respond. The opportunity came a little past midway into the twentieth century.

The Space Age began in 1957 with the launching of the satellite SPUTNIK 1 by Russia, and was followed very shortly thereafter by EXPLORER 1, sent up by the United States. These were the two major space faring nations at that time. Before the century was out, the Earth had been orbited extensively, its moon settled, and the initial exploration of planets in our home Solar System (Sol) had begun.

Of course, spaceflight did not just become an instant reality. For a half century before, such individual pioneers as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia, Robert Goddard in the United States, and Hermann Oberth in Germany painstakingly worked out the fundamental principles of guided rocketry and interplanetary travel.

Though often scorned as impractical dreamers, these brilliant scientists helped create the theory and technology from which all subsequent spaceflight grew. Without them there would have been no SPUTNIK or APOLLO 11 or DY-100. These men are honored as the fathers of spaceflight.

The late twentieth century was a rapidly changing, turbulent time for mankind, marked by global tensions, social unrest, and unprecedented breakthroughs in science and technology. It was a time of great transitions: from an industrial to a nuclear and solar age; from a world of splintered, mutually hostile nation-states to the beginnings of cooperative, autonomous regions working in harmony and mutually beneficial competition; from an Earth-centered mankind to a space pioneering race reaching towards the stars.

The first full decade of the space age saw the United States pledge itself to putting a man on the moon. This ten-year-long national goal was achieved in 1969, when APOLLO 11 touched down on the Sea of Tranquility. Hundreds of millions of people from around the world watched their television screens as Earthmen stood, for the first time, on the surface of another celestial body.

But the excitement, interest and adventure of space which prevailed during the 1960's, diminished in the 70's. There were five other moon landings and SKYLAB, a research station, was put into orbit, but the overall attitude was one of apathy. People became very vocal about allocating funds for an accelerated space program when there were so many problems to solve closer to home.

One of these problems, ever increasing energy needs, endured throughout the 1970's and 80's. Back then, there were no matter/antimatter reactors, no ion power generators, practically no safe nuclear processes. Most industry utilized the inefficient burning of fossil fuels like coal or oil. Though many of the people of Earth believed their future was beyond their planet, to explore this possibility with greater support first required the ability to satisfy this fundamental problem.

The long-awaited solution to this problem began in the early 1990's, with the construction of the first orbiting Solar Power Satellite, which began transmitting energy to meet the world's pressing demands. With humanity now on the path to solving its energy needs, man could at last set his sights beyond his world to the neighboring planets and to the unknown galaxy beyond.

The abundance of cheap energy began the worldwide eradication of poverty. The Gross World Product (GWP) accelerated to sufficient levels to sustain most of the world's peoples. Futurologists of the time had predicted that the increased affluence would flatten the population curve to acceptable levels of growth. Concurrently, the excesses of the industrial age—pollution, ravaged landscapes, urban decay—started to be corrected using the nearly unlimited influx of energy resources.

Earth's gravest crisis in this period resulted not from any natural catastrophe or traditional political tension, but from biology, the then-revolutionary field of genetic engineering. The Eugenic Wars, Earth's last major conflict, were waged over this new-found ability to manipulate human genes, making it possible to wipe out most birth defects and organic diseases, such as diabetes. However, some leaders, like the infamous Khan Noonian Singh, also saw it as an opportunity to produce a genetically perfect master race. The 1990's witnessed an intense struggle between these would-be supermen and those who understood that humanity wasn't defined by some preselected string of genes. Fortunately, the latter prevailed, and today we still possess the incredible diversity that is perhaps the greatest hallmark of man.

A lasting testament to the global cooperation that prevailed in the aftermath of the Eugenic Wars was the construction of the Goddard Moonbase, mankind's first permanent home away from Earth. An impressive product of international design and manufacture, this first of the many moonbases served as an invaluable resource depot for orbital space industrialization and as a center for space research. The original Moonbase survives today as an historic monument to early space exploration.

In retrospect, it is not surprising that mankind's ethical coming of age, the elimination of war, poverty and pollution, the beginning of true worldwide cooperation, the recognition of the supreme virtue of individuality coincided with the dawn of the space age. Before the most pressing problems on Earth were solved, space exploration could be little more than a ray of hopeful light cutting through the darkness of human despair. But it was just this ray, and the discoveries that resulted from the first space efforts, that helped mankind see its way to a new age of harmony and growth. By the beginning of the twenty-first century man was truly ready to go where no man had gone before.