First Contact, accidentally

by axg

The Federation developed unharmed by Earth, in another Quadrant of the Galaxy - and now a recon mission finds our little backwater planet to be incredibly interesting.

2. Prologue

Prologue

The period following the 2010 decommissioning of the Space Shuttle Orbiter was a hard time for NASA, the Spaceflight Agency of the United States of America.

The proposed Shuttle replacement, which was meant to carry Astronauts not only to Orbit, but to the Moon and beyond, went the way of most massive engineering tasks of that era - it came in way over budget, under powered and ultimately - the Year was now 2020 - too late to be really useful for what it was intended.

After the United States lost the capacity to send Astronauts to the International Space Station themselves for nearly a decade after decommissioning of the Shuttle, the only way to reach the Station was by hitch-hiking a ride on russian-made Soyuz- or european-built ARV.. which came at an even higher price - a price the dwindling resources that also ill-fated the Orion Spacecraft and it's two booster Rockets, Ares I and V - was too high for NASA to pay on a regular basis.

This led to the unfavourable situation that the ISS - merely finished by the Year 2010 - never really reached a level of usefulness needed to further justify the immense upkeep of keeping the station manned and running - it got decommissioned only four years after it was finished, and no real innovation was gained from the project.

The Station was de-orbited and broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean in a field of burning debris - this was also the last event of manned space flight that most Americans even noticed, since public interest in exploring Space - nearly reached Zero. The costs were too high, the public sick of "pretty pictures" which cost billions of dollars -

it was time for NASA to accept that their once-glorious achievements were used up in keeping a reason for them to still operate. And so NASA essentially was shut down, save for a few unmanned satellite launches no-one cared about. The built-but-never-used Rockets from the Ares and Orion program were stored up, no-one really thinking they would ever return to them in a Lifetime.

No-one except one man, who was born on the day Man first set foot on the Moon - and he intended to once again fuel interest in spaceflight in the general public with the boldest mission ever untertaken by man - and his company, basing their concept on old NASA research done in 2006 - was only a minute away from gigantic breakthrough in propulsion technology.

The Name of the project?

Antimatter.