Orbital telescopes. Planetary scouts. Radio scanners and passing probes. They did bring stunning information.
The Arcturus system was much larger than the Solar System - and much poorer from the point of view of industrialists. The heated aging luminary absorbed the nearby planets, and only a few gas giants with their moons and a scattered asteroid belt remained from the distant ones. Poor planet system could only serve as a source of fuel and energy for ships ... But the ships were expected to be many.
In the Arcturus system on the same distant orbits, there were some more interstellar catapults. Bound with dust and ice for millions of years of their quiet drift on the edge of the system, they still stood out among the surrounding asteroids - at least the spectrum of absorption.
Returning to the Sun a year later, Discovery Two brought this news - and predetermined the fate of Discovery Three, which started in late 2019. After all, the Soviet orbital factories were a wonderful invention.
And how wonderful they were to complement the American lunar mines. Probably, just as the Russian fantasy complemented the American engineering genius, Chinese diligence and other advantages of the rest of the planet.
- Discovery Three - Floyd even remembered his crew's astronauts - Fedorov, Braginsky, Jones, Ultima, Xavier - went through the Haron in two thousand and twenty third. Three years later, the ship returned. Floyd's old idea to repeat the impulse, which was emitted when the LMA-1 was activated and directed to the Catapults, worked brilliantly - the Catapults woke up and allowed the astronauts to visit two more, already unknown stars, as well as to discover that one of the Catapults is asking for something, refusing to just throw the ship to the target.
A challenge to the minds of earthly scientists was accepted. "Di-Tri" was ordered to refuel at Pluto with hydrogen - a good gas station that transforms ice meteorites into the water, oxygen, and hydrogen, a year ago as it worked there - and go back, check out the good thousand ideas that were born in the heads of Earth scientists.
In the two thousand twenty-ninth "Dee Tree" has returned again. One of the ideas was to change a few impulses in the transfer signal. This catapult turned out to be a multi-purpose catapult, reaching several stars at once. That is, not at the same time, but in turn, repositioning each time. The astronauts ejected in the first direction and panicked when they realized that they did not know the code of the Arcturus system in the code table of strangers, and therefore how to return. They jumped over a good dozen of Arcturus' star flow systems before they picked up the code. It turned out that it was enough to enter conditional zeros into the signal code.
And to their return to Arcturus, one of the scout probes returned to the systems where Arcturus Beta and Arcturus Gamma led the catapults. Arrival was not accidental - the return was planned either at the end of the surveyor with very important news. And the news was really important - in the system, where Arcturus-Gamma led, there was a planet that reminded a lot of the Earth.
Terra Nova, as it was dubbed almost immediately, took possession of the thoughts of many people. The second Earth. Without signs of reasonable life, clean and useful.
It is not surprising that after this discovery the program of construction of new manned scouts was curtailed in favor of the "Ark" - a huge ship capable of carrying several tens of thousands of colonists in anabiosis to Terra Nova and everything they need for life. Exploration, on the other hand, was fully entrusted to the unmanned automatic rifles, which regularly flew from the conveyor belt of circum-lunar shipyards - which was quite dissatisfying to industrialists and miners - their mobile factories and asteroid mining complexes had a lower priority.
But Terra-Nova needed to be explored, and explored quickly - and Floyd personally participated in the negotiations. But from Earth to Terra-Nova almost seven years of flight - four and a half years from Earth to "Haron", half a year - between the close-knit Katapults of Arcturus, and two more years needed to fly in a relatively compact system of Asgard, as called the sun Terra-Nova. It was necessary to start exploration as soon as possible!
The "Ark", carrying on board thirty thousand immigrants in anabiosis and a dozen astronauts in hypnosis, launched from the circum-lunar orbit of two thousand and forty. Hell, yes, for the sake of the fact that it is easy to put into orbit thirty thousand people in a few years - and this is even without anabiotic cameras of three thousand tons - had to almost rebuild the transport system on the line "Earth-Cosmos". The old rockets and rocket-plane did not pull this out yet. But the super-expensive government program, comparable only with "Apollo" and the base of Clavius, was to lead to the appearance of the enclave of mankind at another star and many other useful things.