Restart Point: New Frontier [Episode 47168]

Space, the Final Frontier.

 

Okay, okay, I know. It’s corny, but fitting. Even more so after the 13. August 2003.

 

At that day, she appeared. Someone had called her Rama, after the ‘ship’ in Arthur C. Clarke’s

‘Rendezvous with Rama’. And that name has some meaning even now. But one step after another.

 

Rama appeared sometime around 2 pm GMT in L5. From the outside it appeared to be some kind of closed O’Neil-type space station, with a length of 8.4541 kilometer and 840 meter diameter. Her mass was estimated with 9.1 billion metric tons.

 

That was the beginning of the dubbed ‘Second Space Race’. The Americans on one side, and the Russians, Europeans and Japanese on the other. Well, if the Columbia hadn’t been destroyed and caused the NASA to be even more paranoid over the lives of their Astronauts, they would have won it. For Japan, Europe and Russia to win the race was the result of German and Japanese perfectionism and Russian improvisation. They where able to reactivate the Russian Buran and equip it with modern technology.

 

Nearly one year after the appearance of Rama the Atlantis and the Buran were launched. Even if the Atlantis was launched ten minutes before the launch of the Buran, the Buran had one advantage. The Energjia-Rocket didn’t only use four Proton-Booster like in the first launch, but eight Booster. So it had 50 percent of the fuel to reach Rama nearly 12 hours before Atlantis. The Buran-crew found an access-lock and went inside.

 

The result was, that the Texan was more bitching around than usual and demanded access to the technology. He even threatened to use force to get the technology. As a reaction, the Russians, Europeans and Japanese sold the found technology and were giving out the information over Rama.

 

Rama’s original Name was ‘Babylon 5’, the last of a series of five Deep Space Stations, build by humans and financed by alien governments as some kind of neutral ground. After 25 years duty it was scheduled for destruction, but before it could explode it somehow was transferred into our universe. But Rama still is the more official name for the station.

 

The technology found on Rama had caused a new crash of the stock exchange market. Big companies where going bankrupt and new where founded. Only after nearly 5 years it went back to normal, with a complete assimilation of the found technology into normal life. Somehow it was like in Japan in the 19. century.

 

Than on the 21. Mai 2009 the second big thing happened. Exactly on ‘Launch Day’ of the first ten Corvette-class ships. The sensory systems on Rama measured a big gravimetrical disturbance that didn’t come from the Hyper Gate, but from lower earth orbit. A big ship appeared in that disturbance and entered the atmosphere. Some data from old keyhole satellites was showing that the ship was damaged. It crashed on Macross Island.

 

An international crew found some survivors and were able to talk with them, before they died. The only disturbing thing about them was the fact that they where humanlike and over eight meters tall. At least some of them. The Macross, dubbed after the Island it crashed on, was taken apart and the technology analyzed. After that the UN scheduled the Ship to be rebuild and refitted.

 

The Macross gave us a very advanced technology to build robots and other robotic systems and an energy source called Protoculture, but it is not as good as the Minbari-technology of the Quantum-Singularity Reactor.

 

Around 2011 the UN took over the governmental duty from every UN member state, forming the Earth Alliance. Every military force was combined in the Earth Force.

 

2012 Mars was colonized, together with the Moon, Europe, Ganymede, Callisto and Titan. We had build five Hyper Gates to move between Earth, Mars, the Asteroid Belt, Jupiter and Saturn.

 

2014 the first ships of the Hyperion-class, Nova-class and Omega-class ships left the docks of L1 and L2. 2016 the first Warlock-class ship was completed.

 

Now we have the year 2018. This year the Macross is scheduled to launch and take a place in Earth Force.

 

For myself? Well, my name is…