Forum:Federal States/Space Program
I'd like to open discussion here of the Federal States' space program.
I think the best place to start is to mention some aspects of the real-world source-concept that are specifically worth emulating. NASA, in the US, has been, historically, a highly decentralized agency in geographical terms - like most US agencies. Hence there are NASA facilities all over the US map: Florida is well-known, but there's Houston, Huntsville (Alabama), multiple in California (JPL Pasadena, Vandenburg, Edwards, Ames Mountain View), etc. This decentralized aspect is worth emphasizing and even extending further in the FSA, because it allows mappers of different states to each have a small piece of the agency.
That said, it is understood that prior discussion (which had been either in discord or the old wiki, and not archived that I can find), the main "launch facility" will be in Cosperica. That makes sense - it should be as close to the equator as is reasonable in FSA's geography. Because of coriolis forces, early launch facilities were typically positioned "facing" eastward - the rockets would take off in that direction, and you want failed launches to land harmlessly in the ocean or desert rather than population centers.
Setting that aside, can we discuss some brainstorms for all the different and diverse facilities that would support that? An initial list, based on my very limited off-hand knowledge of NASA (no research done here):
- Mission Control (Houston)
- Research (Ames, JPL)
- Training (Huntsville)
- Shuttle-style vehicle staging (Edwards)
- ?
I think there's room for a greater level of decentralization, with some brainstorming.
Once we outline a rough number of main facilities, we need to set up an application process.
I suppose all this parallels the process discussed for military facilities. In fact, it might be easiest to just add "Space Program" onto the military - it's a historical fact that NASA and the US DoD have a deeply intertwined history anyway, and so the same is probably true for FSA's Space Agency. We could even make it simpler and leave it as an autonomous military branch for its entire history (a la the recent invention of the "Space Force" but projected back into history to the origins of the space program).
Having said that, except for this page here (Collab:Federal_States/Military) - which seems badly out of date - it doesn't appear there's much current discussion or coordination of the distribution of military facilities either. So let's do that too!
Some other points worth discussing:
- Name of Agency?
- Logo design
- ?