Oct 21, 2025
To:T.Goose
There's not really much more of an explanation in the story as to why the other countries lost spaceflight capabilities. What I was trying to convey here—and perhaps could do a better job with—is that that the technology to explore space has some fundamentally unique constraints, and if you're not concentrating on that in your technological development, you can lose the ability.
It's the reason why if we wanted to return to the moon today, we'd essentially have to start from scratch. Parts have changed, manufacturing processes have changed, the materials we use have changed, and our computers have changed. Even if we could rebuild the original computers, we'd need to get people up to speed on how to reprogram them. Even if we could use the original source code, we'd need people who are able to debug them. We'd need to train astronauts differently, since right now, we train them only for low-Earth orbit missions. We'd need to re-learn how to run mission control for lunar missions. It's not just what's written down, but the experiences built up over practice that were lost. Etc., etc.
The 'Murican Empire and the Soviet Expedition abandoned their space colonies, and as a result, they lost the ability over time, just like we have lost the ability to go to the Moon in real life. I never explicitly state why they did so in the story. I think I left it to the reader to infer that since you see that their defense systems shot down the supply launch to the ISS, that they were shooting down each others' space launches during the war, so eventually both sides gave up.
