"United" Nations of Earth Timeline

Sometimes, certain things can stay remarkably similar over four decades... but sometimes other things can turn out to be wildly different than anyone had ever expected. For the period of time between 2017 and 2057, this has been as true as it has ever been.

2017-28: Incremental advances in the performance and availability of aerospace technology lead to the proliferation of space companies and space agencies not only in traditional strongholds such as the United States, the EU, and Russia, but across a very large portion of the world. The world is on the cusp of the next stage of space exploration, it just needs a breakthrough.

2028: The world gets one such breakthrough: Thanks to the effort of a brilliant young engineer at the Indian Space Research Organization, Indian satellites and orbiters are able to be launched with far more efficiency in mass and fuel than anywhere else, leading to launches being far less expensive and climactic of an affair. It's not long before a combination of inspiration, attempts at imitation, or outright design theft spread this technology through the world.

2028-2039: Spaceship technology continues to improve, and scientific satellites, probes, and even manned missions to the rest of solar system become fairly common events. The United States of America establishes a moon base... and so does the Russian Federation. Tensions rise, and power blocs start to congeal, a mere further step in a process that has been accelerating for decades already. A new company emerges onto the world stage, led by the genius ISRO engineer responsible for 2028's breakthrough, Saral Gupta, egotistically named the Saral Gupta company.

2039: While the world hasn't achieved practical fusion energy yet, it has achieved something that is most certainly good enough. Nuclear fission reactors are, with advances in the isotopes and elements used in the reactors, made smaller, more efficient, and safer. It's in this year that the first spaceships start being sent into space with fission reactors, capable of long-term missions back and forth in space. The International Spaceport is constructed, where ships can dock, resupply, or even sometimes be built.

2039-2047: The scope of space involvement once again expands. Tentative industrial forays are made into asteroid mining, and research bases and stations become fairly common fixtures. Space starts to become, figuratively, a crowded space, and eventually ships start to be militarized, sometimes even armed with missiles, just in case... in some cases nuclear missiles. Though the nations of the world condemn this new development, they also can't seem to prevent themselves from designing these ships themselves. Tensions further increase and increase.

2047: Finally, something happens to cause those tensions to snap into something more vicious. The Orbital Blast incident occurs, where an Iranian spaceship and an American spaceship get into a confrontation that results in an exchange of nuclear missiles, short and brutal, and highly destructive. Not only does the exchange destroy both ships, debris damages the International Spaceport to the tune of millions upon millions of dollars, and many satellites in the area are rendered nonfunctional, some electronics down in Southeast Asia even seeing damage. After a flurry of sanctions, threats of war, and more than a little panic, a solution is reached.

The United Nations Space Mandate is created, giving the United Nations responsibility and command over all military space endeavors, such as pirate hunting, and significantly boosted scientific involvement. The United Nations also sees massive restructuring: instead of the former voting groups and the former structure of the General Assembly, now that the UN has significant authority over something that matters it has been restructured so that the Secretary-General has significant amounts of power over the Space Mandate, and voting power ends up more focused around power blocs than simply one vote for one country. It's a contentious arrangement, but these power blocs have now been around for decades, and they want their power.

2047-2055: The United Nations Space Mandate succeeds in preventing further armed conflict between nations in space. It is an abject failure in just about every other regard, as the various blocs of the UN cannot cooperate enough to keep the UNSM funded and functioning. The first Secretary-General under the rearranged United Nations refuses to run for a second 5-year-term for the sole reason of sheer frustration, and though the second Secretary-General sees more success plotting to further centralize the UNSM, he sees little success.

2055: The world is shocked: a joint endeavor between several African nations and the People's Republic of China sees a practical faster-than-light engine developed, as well as a suspiciously similar engine developed by a European-American joint enterprise. Noone can seem to agree on who stole from who, but what everyone can agree on is that this allows for the largest jump in space capability in human history since Sputnik: humanity now has the capability to escape the solar system, though these engines are not cheap. The second Secretary-General of the new United Nations puts his plans into place, and though the UNSM still has strong dependencies on the various UN blocs, it at least has the capacity to perform some actions without international agreement or votes.

2055-2057: The UNSM does its work more smoothly now, with UNSM forays into mining, research, and energy collection taking place. The state of the art scientific ship [i]Goddard[/i] is created, as well as the construction ship [i]Polaris.[/i] Initial excursions into neighboring stars are made, though no longer-term exploration yet occurs. The remainder of the second Secretary-General's term also sees a profoundly large amount of arguing between said Secretary-General and the various nations of the world; the feeling has sprung up that the Secretary-General desires to take away national sovereignty.

January 1st, 2057: His term runs out, and though he runs for re-election in the extremely contentious Secretary General election that follows, he fails to secure the nomination. The third Secretary General with control over the United Nations Space Mandate is selected