2048 AD

Within two weeks of receiving the signal, the Space Foundation signed off on three trillion dollars of investment into the Daedalus project. As far as the field of space exploration was concerned, the timing was perfect. The Space Foundation had expressed added confidence in Daedalus after the outstanding success of the Mars Lander mission that returned to Earth in 2029.

After work began on the immense spacecraft, the budget swiftly doubled to six trillion dollars and many politicians and government treasurers began to question the merits of the project. Searching for justification amidst rising costs, caught between a rock and a hard place, where tax payers and private sponsors wanted confirmation that their money was being well spent, and scientists kept asking for more and more cash for their systems testing.

The bureaucratic turmoil lasted for seven years, during which the ever-impressive Daedalus was built, piece-by-piece in space using the immense NEO Rig.

The massive NEO Rig structure was four kilometres in length. Shaped like a huge g-clamp orbiting four hundred and twenty kilometres above the Earth, its shape could be made out from the Earth’s surface. On a clear night it could be seen hanging in the sky like a man-made star.

The huge base began its life as the infamous International Space Station. The ISS project began back in the late 1990’s and was finally completed in 2015 amid harsh political wrangling. It seemed to many as though mankind back then wasn’t really able to overcome prejudice and the burden of history to unite in a common goal, as a lot of lives were ended and careers ruined putting the ISS in the sky.

When, after twenty-three years of service, the ISS went the way of the Russian Mir Space Station before it and became almost uninhabitable. Rather than shunting the metallic heap of junk into a safe orbit, or burning it up in the Earth’s atmosphere, ideas for its further use were called for, and after much deliberation, it was converted into a construction Rig for future spacecraft building. The NEO Rig began its new life in late 2043. The term ‘Rig’ however was really a bit of a misnomer. Due to the microgravity environment, falling around the planet, it wasn’t really necessary to ‘hold’ anything up in order to prevent it from dropping away. The term was adopted merely from the point of view of accessibility for the engineers and scientists who were involved in the construction of the ship.

Prior to the Daedalus project, four Space Shuttles and the Hubble-NextGenST5 had previously docked with the Rig for repairs and additions. The Daedalus however, was the first craft to be built in space and launched using the grand structure.

There were distinct advantages to this. Up until the Daedalus mission, all spaceships had been built and launched from Earth, and all constraints in the ship design reflected that. Due to the expense of blasting even the lightest object into space; crew habitation modules, workshops, food pantries and hygiene facilities had to be made small, cramped and functional; a less desirable design aspect which any astronaut who had flown in the previous hundred years would verify. The Daedalus however, was the first craft to break the mould.

Admittedly, all the materials that made up the Daedalus still had to be hauled into space from Earth, as the mining of raw materials in space was a technology yet to be employed by mankind. So, like the ISS before it, the Daedalus was built in stages.

But, to coin a phrase, the whole was greater (and so much more majestic) than the sum of its parts.