Prelude
In the early 2060s, humans took their first steps on Mars.
It was done by Nasa in partnership with one of the lucky space travel companies who received exorbitant government money to fund their manufacturing of a spacecraft and its software. Earth was becoming less and less habitable and the rich wanted to secure their future by abandoning the poor and colonizing a new planet. What they didn’t expect was for the US government to see the first successful round trip to Mars and construction of the first outpost, and decide to fund Nasa enough for spacecraft manufacturing companies to be rendered obsolete. In response to this, these corporations went out and petitioned other countries’ governments to use their spacecrafts. In return for government funding, they would show them the stars. Some rejected their proposals, many didn’t. And thus the space race began anew. China was the second country to put humans on Mars, and shortly after, Germany began construction on the first martian space station. Within decades, the first martian settlements had formed and martian space stations, called ports, allowed for the refueling and restocking of ships hoping to travel further out into the abyss. Spacecraft manufacturing saw an opportunity and began constructing cheaper and cheaper spacecraft. Eventually, a century and a half after humans first set foot on another planet, spacecrafts had gotten cheap enough that smaller companies and wealthy individuals could easily buy them, and fast enough that, at the right time, they could travel between Earth and Mars in a matter of weeks, and from Mars to Jupiter in less than a year, leading to the formation of countless factions with various goals and interests. Some profit related, some focused on exploration.