Part 2: Lipponen's Folly, by Flat Earth Games originally published by Objects in Space Website

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Arriving in the outskirts of the new central solar system of Sagan's Lights, the Cassandra did something she hadn't done in ten years - use her enormous conventional propulsion systems. With her support fleet disembarked, her giant RCS suite - each engine easily as large as a normal freighter's main drive - turned her to face the right direction, and her main drive fired, beginning the slow process of bringing Cassandra into orbit of humanity's first colony beyond the mythical "ten light-year limit" of human colonization up to that point.

Then, while the first landing robots and a manned expedition landed on the Lagrange, command of the Cassandra was officially and permanently handed over from Novari, the Mission Commander, to Niklas Lipponen, the engineer who would begin the final part of Cassandra's life: her dismantling. Over two months, as more and more people began to land on Lagrande to prepare the site of the first colony, Meier, Lipponen and his crew began to disassemble Cassandra into its constituent modules. Each one fully self-sustaining, soon the largest ship ever built had instead become twenty-five.

Three months after planetfall, Lipponen began the most dangerous part of the expedition since the first jump - the first attempt to de-orbit a million-ton metal craft safely, without significant structural damage. If this failed, it would spell almost certain doom for a large number of the population.

As the de-orbit burn began, hundreds of thousands of people, now crammed into a space smaller than what they'd had for the long ten-year journey, watched in fear and hope. Four minutes later, great one-use solid-fuel thrusters fired, softening the landing of the first segment of what was once the Cassandra to become a perfectly-engineered pre-built arcology.

Once initial scans showed that the arcology was settled and safe, the first scientific & engineering teams entered the space to ensure it was, indeed, ready to become Lagrange's first permanent human settlement.

Leading this expedition was Maria Van Der Vat, a young, brilliant scientist who had almost literally just graduated - she had received her PhD in formal science on the Cassandra's own university several years before planetfall - had been working as a scientific adviser to Captain Jason Navari as the Cassandra ploughed ahead towards her destination.

Van Der Vat would later famously state that it was on this day, in her hazard suit, stepping out of the rainy, stark, gray-tinted landscape of Lagrange and into what was to become Meier, the capital city of the whole cluster, she knew she was in love with Sagan's Lights, and would do whatever she could to ensure it became a beacon of light - a symbol of what humans could accomplish. Van Der Vat was 28.

"I have to admit, I felt a surge of pride. Ten years of travel to a planet no human eyes had seen, and yet taking off my re-breather as I entered the metal structure... breathing in the stale air... but it was ours," she said. "We had brought this here. Our technology, and our drive... it was the contrast between this potential-laden but lonely world, and the empty, metal walkways I found myself inspecting for physical defects. Back then, that world and those walls lacked everything. But I knew then we would make them our home."

The next months, despite what some would later claim, was full of hardship. The process of bringing hundreds of thousands of people from orbit down to Meier was tough - and dangerous. One craft, the Elfan Tsiang, suffered a catastrophic power failure during re-entry and 135 people died as she impacted at over 600 kilometers an hour into the side of a nearby mountain. To this day, the Tsiang Memorial remains a sobering place to visit for anyone interest in the Apollo Cluster's early days.

Within six months, two of the Cassandra modules had been properly re-fitted under Lipponen's expert care to become Tyson Station, the first permanent space station in the cluster - and the primary travel point for anyone visiting or leaving the new colony of Meier.

The anniversary of planetfall, marking the beginning of the year known as '1a' - A for Apollo - was also marked by good news: the nearby planet of Kepler turned out to have, to the delight of the colonists, an atmosphere rich in CO2, and early tests proved it was a perfect place to begin growing plants brought from Earth even if humans couldn't directly breath the atmosphere. The small greenhouses erected on Lagrange worked fine, but had also proven how inefficient it was really going to be to grow food on a large scale without more planets like Kepler.

And so, in a slight change of pace, Lipponen and the botanist, Dr. Silvia Chang, begun a project to do something which had not been intended until several years later - the colonization of a second planet.With the shipboard greenhouses being re-purposed as part of the colonisation effort, as the second year since planetfall continued, food became slightly more scarce. Rationing grew more extreme, and people began to get disgruntled with the increasingly bland protein bars which made up the majority of their diets.

Geological reports from scouting missions to the nearby clusters of Carruther's Circle and Tega showed largely barren worlds, with no places ideal for growing food like Kepler. Chang was quick to assure people this was not a problem - after all, Earth alone was enough to feed 12 billion people - one whole planet could easily feed a million, even if it took a while to create the infrastructure. And failing that, there were always the protein bars. This latter comment was not met with much rejoicing.

Towards the end of the year, work on colonising the solar system continued. Two, three, then four more modules landed, with one more on the increasingly-industrial world of Lagrange and the rest becoming the first colonies on Kepler. Within six months, Chang announced, the first plants grown on Kepler would be harvested.

Towards the end of the second year, two pieces of bad news came at once - within a week of each other.

First, the exploratory mines being built across Lagrange had shown up almost entirely negative. While common materials like iron were easy to find, it had begun to appear that the preliminary scans which leant astrogeologists to believe Lagrange was home to the important "rare-Earth" minerals which would be needed to build EarthGate, were quite wrong - Lagrange was a barren rock, with no breathable atmosphere and no precious minerals.

To make the situation more desperate, the final piece of news broke: the scout ship Toulouse, with a complement of geologists, chemists and explorers, had fired off an automated SOS from the cluster of De Vass' Star. It had been struck by asteroids on entry into the system. De Vass' Star however, the second 'most likely location' for the mineral required for EarthGate, was marked on maps as a 'red zone' - too dangerous for ships to approach.

Thirty-five people were lost, nobody would visit De Vass' Star again for decades... and food was beginning to run low.

Gregor Halsey, still serving as First Office of the mission at this point, would later describe it as the worst year the colony would ever face until the First War, years later. He explained that despite their best efforts to keep hope alive, colonists stuck on the ships above, unsure where they were to be settled and, like most humans, most happy when they had found a villain to blame, had begun to call the Apollo Cluster by another name: Lipponen's Folly.
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