Living in Tomorrow, Facing the Past

Welcome again to MoonMonth! It started four days ago and will go until I’ve said all I can say. We’re looking at the space industry in Vekllei. This is just a quick piece I’ve done between some larger things.

The Copette Science Basin and Rocket Factory launches sixteen rockets a day. Those rockets are packed with robotic mining equipment and are sent chasing asteroids floating through our solar system. The robots return sometime in the following year with an asteroid rich with metals in tow, where they are incinerated upon entry and many tonnes of metals are plunged into empty drop zones in the Atlantic.

For Vekllei, a resource-poor island country with an insatiable demand for steel and uranium, extraterrestrial mining has allowed the country to fund projects of great national pride. These include the moon tourism programme, the Faroe military bases, and large atomic airships for work and pleasure.

The Copette Basin is a mountainous region far enough from Copette proper to launch rockets regularly. The flower-tundras that frame them are caught at once between the incomprehensibly ancient tectonic landscape and these visions of tomorrow. Old and new; agriculture and futurism — these are marks of Vekllei’s schizoid relationship with the present.