Excerpts from "ESTE TERCEIRO MILENIO---A Condensed Textbook for Students" by Álvaro de Medeiros e Castro, Ph.D., D.Sc., H.Soc.Bras., etc.70Please respect copyright.PENANAU8vhKjhm7n
(The following are taken from the revised microfilm edition, dated 14° Dia da Segunda Estação, Ano 581)70Please respect copyright.PENANAY2bcpvIv99
70Please respect copyright.PENANAQhzWBMq8Z8
70Please respect copyright.PENANArQk0wclvod
...Thus, by the year 1995, the first fully manned orbital station— Marechal Santos Dumont—had been established as a ponto de partida for manned exploration of the Solar System. From that modest beginning grew the systematic Programa de Expansão Solar, coordinated successively by the United Nations and, later, by the União Pan-Brasileira after the administrative reforms of the twenty-second century. By the close of the year 2100, exploration—and, in several favorable cases, colonization—of more than half the planets and principal moons of the System had been accomplished. Outposts on Mars, Venus, and the Jovian satellites were already functioning as permanent research and resource stations, forming the foundation for what would, in time, become the Autoridade de Viagens Interplanetárias: the agency that carried humanity beyond the Sun’s dominion and into the nearer stars.70Please respect copyright.PENANAOlo3q85Z8C
70Please respect copyright.PENANAwH6rsHcwe7
******70Please respect copyright.PENANAySNZJe33jo
70Please respect copyright.PENANAoItEPJGwTy
...At that time, it was generally assumed that humanity’s reach would end with the Solar frontier. The engineers of the early twenty-second century spoke confidently of Mars and the Jovian moons, but only poets dreamed beyond the Sun. Not until the year 2200—some two centuries after the full occupation of Luna and a mere fifty years after the unification of humankind under the Federação Terrestre do Brasil—did the conquest of Espaço Exterior cease to be a theorist’s fancy and become an engineering proposal filed, stamped, and funded. The decisive advance came with the revolutionary Teoria Quantogravitacional, a conceptual leap as far beyond Relativity as Einstein’s own equations had once been beyond the medieval superstition of “natural gravity.” The new theory discarded the ancient limitation that “at or past the velocity of light, mass must become infinite.” Once that constraint was shown to be a mathematical artifact rather than a physical law, the path to practical interstellar travel lay open. It remained for such minds as Dr. Afonso Pereira da Costa, of Bahia Orbital University; Prof. Anil Rao de Goa, of the Instituto Indo-Luso de Física Avançada; and Dra. Mei-Ling Soares, of the Macau Research Collective, to convert the elegant mathematics into laboratory fact. Their combined work culminated in the first functioning QG Drive (Propulsor Quanto-Gravitum), the foundation of every viagem interplanetária since—and the beginning of humanity’s true expansion beyond Sol.70Please respect copyright.PENANAvz33YZAJjo
70Please respect copyright.PENANAgrQY7njQiJ
70Please respect copyright.PENANAwLjOmzWVXu
*******70Please respect copyright.PENANAOc3y7vqoKm
70Please respect copyright.PENANANS6nevQF9x
...By the middle of the fourth century of the Era Paulista, the first tentative viagens beyond the Solar frontier had already been accomplished. At first these expeditions were little more than cautious probes, crewed by volunteers of uneven nerve and funded by ministries of still shakier budget. Yet, year by year, the design, construction, and performance of naves interestelares improved—each model a little less noisy, a little less explosive, and somewhat more likely to return with its crew intact. What had begun as desperate ventures of science soon settled into the well-regulated, invoice-stamped enterprise that today we call the Autoridade de Viagens Interplanetárias.
70Please respect copyright.PENANAT9lZovaZ6P
*******70Please respect copyright.PENANAqaavYEX3pg
70Please respect copyright.PENANAYGa3FkdGFR
...The early era of penetração do Espaço Exterior was, as might be expected, abundant in episodes that have since taken on a legendary sheen. Chief among these, at least in the public imagination, remains the remarkable chronicle of the two expeditions to Altair, the great main-sequence star of the constellation Alfa Alquilae. The first of these ventures—aboard the nave terrana Belerofonte—was launched from Base Lunar Mare Tranquilo on the Décimo-Oitavo Dia da Primeira Estação, Ano 347 da Era Paulista. Its mission objectives were characteristically ambitious and its results characteristically disastrous. The second expedition—dispatched exactly twenty years later to the minute—departed under the seal of the Autoridade de Viagens Interplanetárias, aboard the cruiser VIA São Paulo.....70Please respect copyright.PENANAq2WR7yyoKA
70Please respect copyright.PENANAMMAOrFxrYi
70Please respect copyright.PENANA8wzvz7h7KW
*******70Please respect copyright.PENANApMXZ8bdGCY
70Please respect copyright.PENANAoWDNJHTDM6
In the long and occasionally heroic annals of História Espacial Humana, few accounts have provoked more argument than that concerning the fate of the VIA São Paulo upon her arrival at the planet Maluva. Even in an age accustomed to bureaucratic misadventure, malfunction, and metaphysics, the so-called “Caso Maluva” stands apart as a study in both technological triumph and psychological ruin. Like most Viagens cruisers of her class, the São Paulo carried a complement smaller than the old naves terranas of the pre-Authority era—merely twenty-one souls, selected for endurance, adaptability, and tolerance of canned coffee. Command rested with Comandante João Jaime Adams Filho, veteran of the Lázaro Sector surveys and regarded by his peers as “moderately reckless, for a Brazilian.” Serving under him were Tenente Jayant P. Farmandé, Astrogator—an Indo-Lusitanian mathematician whose navigational tables were said to contain more jokes than errors; Chefe de Dispositivo e Engenharia Alonzo Quinn da Silva, a Hiberno-Cariocan whose machines obeyed him only out of curiosity; and Major Médico Carlos Xavier Ostrowicz, ship’s surgeon, diagnostician, and unofficial philosopher of the expedition.....


