Goddard Station

Goddard Station is the oldest surviving space station in the Human Sphere, and is located in Earth's orbit. Constructed by a consortium directed by the United States of America, it quickly developed into the largest and most heavily trafficked of Earth's terminus stations during the 21st century.

After roughly four centuries of continuous use, the age of the station was decommissioned in 2445, as its ports could no longer service most modern starships. Instead, it was handed off to private ownership to be preserved as a museum, a monument to the Golden Age of Space Colonization.

Construction and development
Goddard started life not as a station as planned, but as a failed colonization endeavor. In the 2020s, after riding high on a period of economic prosperity, the United States Congress announced that they had committed themselves to putting American settlers on the surface of Mars by 2040. This was planned to involve to the construction of a single massive colony ship that could undertake the long trip away from Earth without support, engineered by a coalition of private companies that pooled their resources to create the Luna Orbit Construction Consortium (LOCC). The newly-formed National Space Settlement and Infrastructure Agency (NSSIA) was chosen to act as the government department for administrating the project, having been been split-off from NASA for the express purpose of commercializing space. This ship was the basis for Goddard.

Although the design of the colony ship was not finalized until 2031, LOCC had already been hard at work preparing for the giant in the years before. Although advanced components were still manufactured on Earth, it was decided early on to establish several industrial facilities on Luna. Mines, spaceports, and housing were all built in the Oceanus Procellarum, while factories and refineries were incorporated into the drydock, both crewed by specialists trained for long-term habitation on the moon. All these were far larger than what had been calculated to be necessary, as already there was talk within the US government of either expanding the project to include another ship, or move forward with another major space program.

The first steel for the colony ship was cut on 2033, but numerous issues plagued its fabrication, and deadlines were routinely missed. Nobody had built anything of the ship's size in space, and new tools and building techniques had to be developed from scratch. Cost had only increased, as NSSIA's mismanagement led to constant redesigns and new specifications issued for the ship. These problems meant that, when a recession hit the United States during the latter-2030s, Congress was quick to pull funding from their space assets. LOCC was disbanded, the completed Lunar facilities were privatized, and the ship ceased work and was mothballed in orbit.

The ship was eventually sold to Halifax Spacewerx, who resumed the process of completing it. The factories, once used for manufacturing everything from modular habitats to medical equipment for the planned mission, were instead retooled to fabricated specialty machinery for industry in Earth's orbit. The income from this paid for continued work on the ship. Unfortunately, without the US government agreeing to sell the atomic drives needed to propel it, the ship could not be completed.

Instead, Halifax announced that it would be completed as Earth's largest habitat. Space allocated for the atomic engines was now reserved for universal umbilicals able to dock with most rockets and small spacecraft of the time. Upon completion, it was rebranded as Goddard Station.