Human Space Exploration

The USSR's Mir space station was the first continuously-inhabited space station built and operated by humans. It orbited Earth for 15 years until orbital decay caused it to crash as planned into the south Pacific Ocean in March of 2001.

The International Space Station was humankind's first collaboratively-built modular space station, beginning assembly in 1998 and remaining continuously occupied by humans from November of 2000 to its decommissioning in 2052. Having been succeeded as the primary point of human access to space in low-Earth orbit by Earth Orbital Spaceport, the ISS was gently towed to its present resting orbit around Earth-Moon L4, where it remains as a historical monument like its sibling, the International Lunar Research Station.

In 2005 CE, the core module of the International Lunar Research Station was delivered in Lunar orbit by the Artemis III mission as part of the Artemis-ILE program. Built cooperatively by NASA, ROSCOSMOS, ESA, CSA, ISRO, JAXA, and AECS, the ILRS was completed in 2008 CE and served as the base structure for the Deep Space Gateway. After nearly sixty years of service, the ILRS was decommissioned in February of 2064, having been succeeded by Lunaport as the primary lunar orbital station a few decades earlier. ILRS was gently retired to Earth-Moon L4, where it remains as a historical monument much like the ISS.

The International Lunar South Pole Surface Research Station (ILSPSRS), usually just called Shackleton Base, was established in 2010 CE as part of the International Lunar Exploration Program founded by NASA and Roscosmos in the 1990s. Auspiciously, Shackleton Base was established just days after the formation of the United Nations Aerospace Coalition. Shackleton Base, with the crater's vast store of water ice, was instrumental not only in paving the way for future permanent lunar settlements, but also for the orbital refueling system within Earth-Lunar orbit that allowed for much greater human exploration of the solar system.  

The Europa Clipper was an unmanned interplanetary mission to Jupiter's moon Europa spearheaded by NASA, comprising of an autonomous orbiter and smaller lander. The Clipper was launched in June 2023 and arrived at the Jovian subsystem in October of 2029, making 75 orbital passes by the moon before correcting for a death plunge into the Jovian atmosphere. In early 2030, the probe flew through an active water plume and detected complex organic molecules (including amino acids) during spectroscopic analysis of vapor samples. In 2033, the probe also dropped its lander, the first human-made object to touch the moon's surface, which discovered further chemical evidence to support the existence of life in the Europan ocean: the first indication to humans of life beyond Earth.

As part of the extended Constellation program to enable extensive out-system exploration, the United Nations Aerospace Coalition planned a permanently-occupied station in low Mars orbit to follow up the Ares missions. In 2029, the core module of the International Mars Research Station arrived in Mars orbit. Additional modules were delivered by unmanned commercial spacecraft over the course of the early 2040s, and the IMRS received its first crew of 4 on April 16, 2045 to begin regular crew rotations.

Operation Hearth was an ambitious space exploration initiative conceived and operated by Minerva with the goal of establishing a human presence on the asteroid 4 Vesta, a large metallic asteroid in the Sol asteroid belt. Hearth was part of a much broader, longer-term vision: the creation of a complex network of human settlements in the Belt in order to utilize its resources. Launched in late 2035, the Hearth fleet arrived at Vesta at the end of the following year and began to set up the self-contained habitat later christened Hestia Base. With this successful and monumental achievement under their belt, the Interorbital Operations Division began to plan an even more formidable feat: transferring their asteroid mining program's base of operations from Vesta to the dwarf planet Ceres later in the century.

Earth Orbital Spaceport (EOS), constructed from 2039-2048, replaced the aging International Space Station as humanity's primary port of call for deep-space operations. Completed in 2048, EOS remained a fixture of low Earth orbit for well over 75 years, until its eventual replacement by the even larger (and far more permanent) Gaia Station in 2125. It was officially decommissioned in 2133, and like its predecessors was towed to rest in a stable Earth-Moon L4 orbit where it remains as a historical monument. Its acronym, EOS, was also the name of the Greek goddess of the dawn, and was elegantly symbolic of its place in history: the dawn of permanent human presence in space.

On May 29, 2051, after just under three years on course through deep space, the eight-member crew of the Aeolus I mission reached Jovian orbit and began initial observations. Following roughly a day of Jupiter observation, the Janus entered orbit of Callisto and spent the next several days deploying the surface equipment. The crew disembarked on the landing craft and began their 336-day residency on the outermost Galilean moon. While in the Jovian subsystem, the Aeolus I crew performed thousands of experiments across dozens of scientific disciplines, from analysis of Callistoan ice cores to studying the behavior of Jupiter's radiation belts.   The resounding success of Aeolus I ensured the continuation of the program at least until the end of Janus IV, after which the program was delayed slightly due to technological challenges.

Due to the unprecedented duration of the humans' Janus IV mission to the Saturnian subsystem, it was clear that the Janus program's expeditions would need a large orbital base station to reside in and launch cronilunar excursions from. As a result, the UNAC commissioned Minerva, the builders of Juno, to construct an identical station for the even longer-lasting missions to Saturn. Construction began on the Orbital Platform for the Exploration of Saturn - Opes - in orbit of Vesta on March 18, 2076. It was completed two years later, and after two years of rigorous testing Opes was launched. The station arrived in Saturnian orbit on March 16, 2088; roughly nine months before the Janus IV crew arrived to claim it as their new temporary home.

After the Janus program's end, Opes was unstaffed until the UNAC arranged a schedule of regular round-trips with the BIFROST in the late 2100s.

Operation Ebisu was, in essence, the "sequel" to Operation Hearth, being the seven-month-long transfer of Minerva's asteroid mining headquarters from the asteroid 4 Vesta to the dwarf planet Ceres, accompanied by the establishment of the settlement aptly dubbed Proserpina Base. During an exceedingly rare long-duration close pass of Vesta and Ceres, heavy equipment and habitat modules were launched from Hestia Base on Vesta to the surface of Ceres; this was an unprecedented length of continuous, complex interorbital travel in the Sol system not even matched by the much later Ishtar missions.

After SHEO's mapping of the Proxima Centauri planetary system and the Breakthrough Proxima mission's initial survey, the probe Copernicus was launched in mid-2139 to explore it in more depth. Copernicus, with its new Xiuhcoatl fusion drive, reached a brisk 0.3c cruising velocity, arriving in the system just after New Year’s Day of 2054. The probe slowed to orbital velocity and parked around Prometheus, making detailed scans of the planet’s surface and taking high-resolution images to send back to Earth. A year later, after Copernicus’ onboard AI had determined a landing site, the surface probe was deployed. The results were stunning.

Shortly after the results of Albert Einstein’s survey mission to the Sirius system returned to Earth in 2096, a new probe was launched to follow in Einstein’s relativistic exhaust trails. Dubbed the Odyssey, its 30-year mission was to study the Sirius and Procyon binary stars. After launch in 2200, the longest leg of its mission was the 12.7-year relativistic journey out to the Sirius system. Once there, it studied the Sirius binary stars and refueled on antimatter over a three year period. Upon completion of refueling, Odyssey began its 7.8-year trek to the Procyon system, where it spent the rest of its operational life studying those two stars. The data gathered by the Odyssey probe was crucial to understanding the behavior and life cycles of high-mass stars, and helped engineers to design the baseline structures of the Romulus and Remus city-stations.   The Odyssey mission was the test bed for early experimental antimatter tech, equipped with an antimatter-catalyst fusion engine modeled after the Sagitta drives. Odyssey was also the proving ground for fully sapient artificial intelligence. For a mission with such a long range and duration, scientists created an adaptable self-aware digital program capable of learning and running the mission on its own, dubbed Heuristic Onboard Managing Electronic Researcher (or HOMER). HOMER was a marvelous success, although his inclusion in a craft with a one-way trajectory was a hotly debated ethical controversy. In the end, however, the Odyssey was recovered from its wide stasis orbit around Procyon and HOMER, after an upgrade, was integrated with Remus’ systems.

The Aeneid II mission of 2222 - 2243 was a 21-year expedition to the planets Fortuna and Concordia in the Alpha Centauri system, being the followup to Aeneid I and humanity's third crewed interstellar voyage. Ten humans aboard the newly-built UNSS Cosmic Dawn were sent to Fortuna shortly before their predecessors departed on their return journey. Their continued study of Fortuna laid the groundwork for the planet's permanent habitation, in many cases quite literally.