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, 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 colonization mission would be undertaken in a single colony ship that could operate for up to two years without additional support. This vessel, known as the Goddard, would have room for a thousand colonists, medical and fabrication bays, and two surface-to-orbit shuttles of the latest design. The Goddard was planned to be two orders of magnitude larger than anything previously built in space, and so its construction required the development of Lunar industries under 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.

The design of the colony ship was not finalized until 2031, and it was both more and less ambitious than the original plans called for. Goddard's engines had always been nuclear, but new breakthroughs in nuclear engineering meant that gas-core fission engines could cut nearly a month off of the colony ship's transit time. In the meantime, LOCC's development of Luna was proceeding apace. Although advanced components were still manufactured on Earth, Lunar mines produced an abundance of material that could be pre-processed and launched into Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) for pennies on the dollar. 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. These operations were considerably larger than Congress had initially authorized, but the LOCC foresaw new customers and a permanent Lunar presence. As of 2029, there was talk within the US government of either expanding the project to include another ship (Tentatively titled the Von Braun), 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. Most of the hard lessons of manufacturing in space, from moving fluids in microgravity to management of waste heat, were learned in the construction of the Goddard. 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.

Many of the engineers and some of the foremen involved in the construction of the Goddard bough up the pieces of LOCC, when it seemed like Lunar mining was a fad whose time had come and gone. Together, these men formed Halifax Spacewerx and purchased the Goddard and its drydock from a disinterested US Congress. Completion of the colony ship would be a difficult task. Less than half of the ship's hull was finished, and even if the work was completed, the crew and expertise was supposed to be provided by the NSSIA, which had disbanded the program. Still, Halifax Spacewerks ploughed ahead.

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. Business was slow at first, as the recession had ravaged the whole space sector, but a breakthrough arrived when a team of millwrights and engineers designed an ironworker, a class of space construction vehicle. Though far from the cheapest of such vehicles, the Halifax Ironworker was the most capable. The overnight success of the ironworker allowed Halifax Spacewerks to recapitalize and expand operations, and soon they were pouring resourced back into completing the Goddard. 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.