The station’s denizens could now walk its corridors as easily as they walked on their home planet. In 2031, an artificial gravity system was installed. By 2029, every country on this third planet from the sun had at least one scientist on board to represent them. More nations had ventured into the stars, and wanted to be part of this symbol of unity. Its population had swelled to eight thousand. Eight short years later, the station had grown enormously. The station was fully established, and the distant stars looked on as Earth’s united glory and passion fueled Alpha’s boom. They continued to shake hands against the vast panoply of the starfield. Humanity continued to work for peace and cooperation on Earth, while keeping their eyes and hearts attuned to the siren song of space. What many on Earth had said could not happen, did happen. Later historians would mark this moment as the end of international tension, and the beginning of what was the first Great Age of human cooperation. The captain of the Alpha Space Station, one thirty-year-old James Crowford, enthusiastically greeted his Chinese counterpart Wuang Hu, who himself could not seem to stop smiling. In the year 2019, China’s massive Tiangong-3 spaceship was warmly welcomed when it came to take its place at Alpha. Space was no longer the province of a few tiny humans, but was rapidly evolving to belong to humanity. When the European Hermes spaceplane, proposed in the same year as that first historic handshake, arrived to dock at Alpha, it represented a coalition of nations.
What happened in 1998, at Alpha Space Station in orbit around the blue-green world, was not merely two nations meeting.
There were smiles and joy and a sense of connection, and the two men became and stayed steadfast friends through the decades that unfurled. The momentous handshake in space, both a literal one and a figurative one, occurred between astronaut Brigadier General Thomas Stafford of the Apollo, and Alexey Leonov of the Soyuz. For the first time in Earth’s history, two ships would be joined together, and the inhabitants could move freely between them. Much had their judgeless gazes witnessed in the system ruled by Sol, especially the activity clustered around the third planet from that star.īy that world’s calendar, in the year 1975, something momentous occurred above it.įrom separate places on this planet, known to its inhabitants as Earth, a pair of nations had launched what would later be deemed primitive space vessels. The stars were not eternal, but they were ancient nearly beyond reckoning.
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