History
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:
- The Apollo Program continuing onward through 20 named operations.
- The Soviets pursue the Zond Program and Lunosoyuz Program, conducting multiple crewed lunar landings.
- The success of the Apollo-Soyuz Mission lead to the accelerated development - and earlier start to construction - of the International Space Station.
- The Soviet Buran Program was more successful and saw multiple flights
- The United States does not abandon the Space Shuttle Program and maintains a native capacity for manned space flight.
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 the center of the Mare Imbrium on the moon's near 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.