History

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Up until portions of the 20th century, the history of the world of Ecliptic Mariner is largely unchanged from the history you and I would be familiar with. However, beginning with events during the "space race", the history of the world begins to diverge quite rapidly from our own.

"It's accurate to within maybe a thousand kilometers. So, depending on what you're doing, it's 'close enough'."
Cassandra Higgs, Life Support Engineer

This article or section of an article is a rough pass at itself and will be subject to further refinement in later revisions.

The Space Race

While ostensibly a race for scientific and explorational prestige, the Space Race was a 20th century event that saw the world's two largest economies - the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - compete in achieve firsts in space exploration and rocketry. Years on, most historians agree that the real cause of the Space Race was a mutual demonstration of advancements in rocketry as they would have pertained to nuclear war; the same technologies that let you put a man on orbit let you put a nuclear warhead damn near wherever you want.

Ecliptic Mariner's space race evolves differently than the space race of the mundane timeline. For starters, the Apollo Program's first test flight does not kill its pilots. A greater attitude toward mechanical reliability and the survivability of flight operations on both sides of the conflict largely leads to a more "honest" form of the space race, where both parties are now genuinely competing for advantage in manned space flight. During this era, the Outer Space Treaty is still ratified on 10 October 1967.

Other major deviations from the mundane timeline include:

Colonization of Luna

The increased success of manned exploration of the moon creates a genuine interest in long-term missions to the moon. For the most part, these begin as multi-flight "camps" established independently by Roscosmos and NASA; the former at a site that became known as Lunograd and the latter at two sites, Camp Ascelpius and later Camp Eisenhower. During the time period of the Apollo-Soyuz Mission and its subsequent periods of increasing international cooperation in space, several publicity missions are run out of Lunograd and Camp Ascelpius where Russian and American cosmonauts/astronauts interact with each other, stay at each other's bases on exchange missions, or complete joint exercises.

At around the time of the launch of the earliest International Space Station modules, the issue is raised at the United Nations General Assembly in Nairobi that the establishment of the exploration camps on the moon necessarily violated the provisions of the Outer Space Treaty, which stated that national claims on outer space bodies were not permissible. The issue ended up being staved off in the short term by the Berlin Accord on Space Administration, which temporarily consigned Lunograd to NASA management while the Russian state was reorganizing. The later ruling of the General Assembly was that lunar colonization missions could go ahead under the auspices of the newly-formed United Nations Outer Spheres Committee, an agency of the UN for the purpose of organizing international efforts at space flight.

The first UNOSC-lead operations on the Mun were the Unity Program, which established a permanent base near Daedalus Crater on the moon's far side. Through successive evolution, this exploration camp slowly became a true colony and city on the Lunar surface. This development, rather than the US and Russian exploration camps (which did, eventually, become similar in scale to Unity Base), is usually credited in histories as the first "lunar colony", and also as the first city directly governed by a UN agency.

United Nations Federalism

Throughout this period, the UN is continuing to accumulate greater political significance. The success of the Unity program justifies increased faith in multilateral cooperation on the global scale, and the UN begins to establish European Union-like Regional Supranational Governments throughout the rest of the world. This proves essential, as an era of economic instability and conflict within and between nations known as the First Warming Crisis provides greater and greater need for international bodies to provide peacekeeping and conflict resolution.

In spaceflight terms, this era matches with the establishment of Gateway City Aitken near the south lunar pole, which marks the first time heavy commercial involvement is seen in an UNOSC project.

Colonization of Mars

Unmanned exploration of Mars begins as early as 1964 with NASA's Mariner project and continues much as it has in the mundane timeline. However, as early as the 1950s, proposals existed for manned exploration. The first successful manned mars exploration mission was UNOSC's Mars Direct in 1997. The mission had the joint support of the national space agencies of seven nations as well as UN Federal Funding, but is not considered to be the start of colonization of mars, as the landing site was not maintained permanently inhabited. Instead, much as in the moon race, a long-running program known as the Ares Program was conducted by UNOSC, consisting of 26 flights.

True colonization of mars did not come until the Homesteader Program and the completion of the shipyard facilities at Gateway City Aitken. Homesteader was another joint initiative of UNOSC and corporate interests, specifically those of an economic block known as the Corporation for Advanced Spaceflight, a conglomerate combining 17 individual corporations with spaceflight interests, including all the major corporate partners of Aitken City. Championed by Jean-Claude Verre, an industrialist from Montreal, Homesteader was pitched as a way to make the human race's survival more secure, and as an opportunity to restart society through a revival of a bootstraps ideology familiar to proponents of the "American Dream". Verre's CAS constructed the first permanent human settlement on Mars, Prosperity City, on Mars' Meridiani Planum, near the landing site of the earlier Perseverance Martian Rover. In addition to a permanently-inhabited colony site, Verre's vision included a long running project - the Terraforming of Mars.

Homesteader was not without its opponents. Some within the UN General Assembly (which controls UNSOC funding) expressed concern over the heavy corporate involvement, which naturally skewed the interests of the project toward commercial enterprise and the interests of a small number of states - of the 17 companies that made up the Corporation for Advanced Spaceflight, only four nations of Earth were represented - the United States of America, China, India, and Canada. These missions, which began in the 2020s, also were seen as an extravagance during a period where earth's resources were becoming increasingly constrained, and where the Anthropogenic Climate Change Crisis was becoming a serious issue.

However, ultimately, the project went ahead, though not without continuing opposition. Various organizations brought claims before UN bodies of everything from arguable violations of the Outer Space Treaty to human rights abuses in the selection and treatment of candidates for the colonies - many were CAS employees on contracts that essentially amounted to indentured servitude in exchange for the right to travel to, and colonize, the red planet. This opposition included ecoterrorist attacks on UNOSC and CAS launch facilities.

Collapse of the Outer Space Treaty

Up until this point, while the situation on Earth was as turbulent as ever, the situation in space had remained largely peaceful, owing in no small part to UNOSC being the only major player in spaceflight above Low Earth Orbit. This would all ultimately change after the perpetration of the Aitken Mutiny. After years of preparation and planning, a faction of Aitken base personnel loyal to the CAS seized the facility and evicted all UNOSC personnel by cramming them onto the leaving supply shuttle. This lead to an extended standoff between the UNOSC and CAS personnel on the moon which would culminate in the suppression of the munity by an armed contingent of UNOSC personnel two months later, made up of UN Peacekeeping forces who had been hastily trained to serve as what were essentially the first contingent of stellarines. During the suppression effort, thirty people were killed in an extended seige of the life systems engineering facility, including the lead mutineer, Erika Donnolly.

The CAS disavowed the actions of the mutineers, blaming their actions on rogue management who were acting out of frustration as a form of labour dispute. They were, however, still sanctioned by the UN General Assembly, forced to pay record fines, and some members of the CAS executive board were even tried - though ultimately acquitted - as potentially treasonous by their home nations. The fines from these settled cases were a major part of the funding for the construction of the UNOSC shipyards at Unity City.

By this point in time, there was a proliferation of non-governmental spacecraft, suitable for the Earth-Moon transportation circuit, but increasingly for the Earth-Mars transportation circuit as well. In the years that followed the Aitken Mutiny, UNOSC created the United Nations Space Security Corps (UNSSC), colloquially known as the "UN Navy". This marked the essential end of compliance with the Outer Space Treaty, though the UN attempted to prevent other organizations from owning armed spaceships or the proliferation of arms into space.

CAS continued to operate the shipyards at Gateway City Aitken until the war for Martian Independence, during which the city was captured by UNSSC personnel and became a UNSSC colony.

Martian Independence

Eventually, the tension between Earth and her colony, Mars, became too great. While UNOSC and CAS cooperation had technically continued after the Aitken Mutiny, the conflict had only exaggerated the disparity between the UNOSC and the CAS contributions to the Homesteader Program. From the UN perspective, CAS was attempting to flood the program with their financial contribution in order to claim larger and larger responsibility for the project, and thereby effectively buy their way into a private, for-profit colony on Mars. From the CAS perspective, UNOSC was attempting to use century-old regulation and political trivialities to hang up an important step in human revolution (and get a free ride on the company dime). Eventually, these tensions would have to come to a head, after the first generation of ships left the shipyards around Phobos.

CAS declared, unilaterally, that UNOSC involvement in the Homesteader project was no longer required for technical expertise or organizational support, and that effective immediately, CAS themselves would take over responsibility for all matters related to the logistics, organization, management, and governance at Prosperity City. This was an intentional provocation. UNOSC reasserted that, by the terms of the agreements that had formalized the projects, they were responsible for governmental oversight for Prosperity and any other colony of the Earth in space, and dispatched the UNSSC First Fleet to Mars. In response, CAS declared its intention to sue for full independence in the ICC, and that UNSOC had violated the terms of the Outer Space Treaty by militarizing space. The UN General Assembly immediately passed a declaration that supported the UNSSC's mission to mars, and the War for Martian Independence was on.

This war took place over the run of a little under a year and mostly consisted of three major battles: the Seizure of Aitken, the First Battle of the Martian Hohmann, and the MEO Blockade. By this point, space was not highly militarized. The First Fleet and the matching CAS Rebel Fleet were the only military spacecraft in the solar system, and the First Battle of the Martian Hohmann did a good job in terms of reducing the number of spacecraft in orbit. However, there was no counter for the MEO Blockade, apart from the consequences of the First Battle of the Martian Hohmann, and the CAS and UN sued for peace. In the end, they ratified the First Earth-Mars Accords, which established Earth and Mars as politically disparate entities, and established rules for trade between them.

The early timing of Martian Independence is largely responsible for the Earth-Mars Wealth Gap.

The Martian Revolution

After independence, the already limited supply from earth for the Terraforming of Mars became even more costly. No more was UNOSC subsidizing the Homesteader or Terraforming projects, and while material export from Mars was somewhat profitable for CAS, the returns on investment were becoming harder to realize. At this point, Mars devolved into a techno-feudalist culture, where survival is expensive and losing one's job and one's life were essentially the same. This situation did not persist for long. Terraforming supply effectively stops as the UN begins geoengineering the earth to reverse climate change, forcing Mars to survive on what it has, what it can recycle, and what it can find from elsewhere.

Eventually, a labour uprising deposed CAS and replaced them with the Martian Union, a social democracy. However, even the revolution did not ease tensions between Earth and Mars. Mars was, by this time, effectively in a cold war with their only meaningful supplier. New resources were needed from elsewhere, and as luck would have it, it is around this time that the Martian Bureau for Spacecraft Design announces the invention of the Luceno Confinement Drive.

The period immediately following the creation of the Luceno Confinement Drive is generally considered the start of the Earth-Mars Cold War.

Colonizing The Belt

While Earth would ultimately replicate (and even lead innovation within the drive class) the Luceno Confinement Drive, the meaningful push to explore and exploit the Asteroid Belt and the outer planets originated with Mars - Earth's presence in the Belt being largely an exercise in astropolitical responsiveness, given the instability on earth itself, especially the early years. Initially, such efforts focused on material retrieval from sufficiently valuable asteroids. The true period of colonizing the asteroid belt began with the establishment of the Martian-Aligned colonies on Vesta - previous to this, no in-belt settlements existed - early exploration was instead mostly based from Scylla Port just beyond the orbit of Deimos, or a comparable station aligned with the UN, in an orbit about the Earth-Sun L4, the Deep Space Interchange Station. Both stations remained in use even after the settlement of Vesta, as they had other economic payoffs. Earth also attempted to establish a colony on Pallas, which catastrophically failed. The resulting intervention of Mars resulted in a period of detente between Earth and Mars, though fundamental political differences between the two planets and the ongoing Geoengineering Resource Contention kept tensions from completely dissolving.

Colonization within the Belt was not merely driven by resource extraction. From Earth, the bulk of colonists were initially contractors directly related to the extraction trade, with extensive corporate backing, but operating under extremely tight United Nations regulations. From Mars, however, the Belt was much more attractive. Regulations were more lax, strongly favouring the right of individual crews in the pursuit of the Belt's resources. Life in the Belt was also not meaningfully more dangerous than life on the Martian Surface, in the estimation of an especially poor underclass. Many Martians saw the value of a "fresh start" in life on Vesta, and after Pallas, no small minority of Earth's underclass saw an appeal in Martian collectivism, and a fresh start for themselves.

From the start of the Earth-Mars Cold War through to the period of cooling tensions following the Collapse of Pallas, both Earth and Mars built up impressive navies - the UNSSC Second Fleet and the Martian Space Security Forces, respectively. The Cold War also saw an extensive buildup in unmanned missiles on both sides, as well as corresponding countermeasures. Fortunately, that war never went fully hot.

The Outer Planets

Exploration and colonization of the outer planets - more specifically, the moons of the two nearer gas giants - was a contentious issue before the Belt was even robustly colonized. In the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the Martian Union saw the opportunity for supply chains that did not pass through earth and arguably did not reduce earth's capacity for geoengineering. Unfortunately, the United Nations OSC saw the opportunity to accelerate their reclamation schedule. These contentions only ultimately got worse as the needs of Vesta complicated matters for both planets.

Exploration - and colonization - of the Outer Planets, without escalating the Earth-Mars Cold War was only possible in heavy collaboration through an intergovernmental framework called the Unified Solar Exploration Compact. This agreement is what allowed Earth to reach rapid parity in drive systems with the exchange of Luceno Confinement Drive research and engineering data, as well as established a shared exploration framework that allowed both planetary-aligned unmanned missions and joint Earth-Mars manned missions - the latter forming what became known as the Olympos Program, which ultimately culminated in the establishment of Tianming Station on and under the surface of Callisto, and a subsequent diaspora.

With the abundant resources of the outer planets at their fingertips, the economic tension caused by the inherent contraduction between Earth's geoengineering projects and Mars's terraforming projects decreased rapidly, and the frameworks developed for intergovernmental cooperation in this matter eventually became the foundational institutions of the Solar Co-Prosperity Union, a sort of supranational entity for resolving disputes between the Martian Union and the United Nations of Earth.

This period continued for a considerable time, eventually leading to a relatively stable solar astropolitics, though it never fully erased the distinction between Earther, Martian, or Vestan populations. Some time after the settlement of Tianming Station, the Collective Nation of the Minor Planets was declared, seeking immediate recognition by, and participation in, the SCPU. Ultimately, they were admitted, but only after the conclusion of the Void Rebellions, which were chiefly caused by Earther and Martian reluctance to give up direct control of resource production on and through these worlds.

9I/Athanor

In the early 2020s, the solar system was visited by a number of Interstellar Comets, which sparked interest in potential deeper exploration or even exploitation of such a resource. Shortly thereafter, the Martian Union and the United Nations of Earth launched competing "Ultra-Deep Space" monitoring constellations - the Eyes of Mars and Homeguard projects, respectively. Detection of interstellar comets continued on occasion, but due to the need to exploit the resources of the existing solar system, little serious effort was placed into actually attempting to reach any such objects that passed through the solar system, neither through manned nor unmanned means.

This changed with 9I/Athanor, an interstellar comet which approached the solar system from well above the ecliptic, quite near to the plane of the galactic equator. This comet was detected by the Eyes of Mars and Homeguard Systems within 24 standard hours of each other, and giving over three years of notice before the comet entered the solar system proper. By this time, the Solar Co-Prosperity Union was sufficiently organized that a joint program supported by all three major polities of the solar system - the Paracelsus Mission - which involved three major missions - Project Negredo, Project Albedo, and Project Rubedo, to visit 9I/Athanor - a swarm-carrier of unmanned orbiters, a Breaking Swarm that brought the object into circumsolar orbit, and finally a manned mission, respectively.

This ultimately resulted in the establishment of a non-governmental organization backed by the SCPU called the Paracelsus Institute, which ultimately lead to the discovery of the Rubedo Effect and, potentially in the future, the ultimate practicality of Interstellar Flight other than by colony ship mission profiles.

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