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Mission board · First Footing

FF-XF-001 · Aster's Wake

The first exploration-flight request on First Footing's tide board: a poor, stubborn colonist compact already coasting dark toward the Sol Ring, asking Sefa's brand-new outfit to get to Green Delta first and prove there is a place to land. We're there before you are.

386colonists aboard
88 daysto the Sol Ring
~182 daysto Green Delta 1 arrival
~164-170 daysFirst Footing ground window

The client

Aster's Wake Compact is a mixed Belter/Earther/Martian religious-agricultural charter: 71 household groups, 58 children, 33 elders or medical-risk settlers, and a work mix heavy on hydroponics, water reclamation, pressure-hab construction, medics, teachers, and toolmakers.

Their faith, the Saint Aster Fellowship, treats water as common inheritance. Their politics are pro-Union, anti-corporate-landlord, and suspicious of anyone who says "exclusive extraction rights."

Client speakers

  • Mina Velez-Adebayo, compact speaker and former Ceres water chemist.
  • Brother Ilyan Petrov, Saint Aster lay preacher and household-vote wrangler.
  • Nami Qarni, convoy quartermaster; knows which parts cannot be replaced.
  • Rafi Sayegh, teenage mesh-runner for the convoy kids.

The convoy

HullRolePeople
Pilgrim's Measurecommand / med / school132
Candle in Vacuumhydroponics / seed stock126
Tamarind Arktools / hab membranes128

The ships are cold, quiet, and poor: good enough to coast, bad enough that a failed first landing week could kill the charter.

Travel clock

At ~150 km/s over ~20 AU, the Sol-side dark coast takes about 231 days. The convoy is already 143 days into that coast, leaving ~88 days to the Sol Ring.

After gate transit, Green Delta gate to Green Delta 1 is 4.89 AU. At ~90 km/s, the settlers need about 94 more days. If the Anne Bonny leaves Medina now, her 0.3 g crossing gives First Footing about 164-170 days on the ground.

Destination read · Green Delta 1

AtlasKnown before the flight
Gategate-0011 · Green Delta
WorldGreen Delta 1, sealed-town candidate around buried aquifers.
Gravity / pressure~0.69 g; thin atmosphere around 0.24 atm. No open breathing.
WaterTrace hydrosphere; buried aquifers are the settlement prize.
HazardsDust-front cycles, weak magnetosphere, active plates, flare blackout risk, provisional microbial biology.
PoliticsCorporate water-monopoly claim and labor-strike code in the wider charter packet.

Footing deliverables

  1. Verify two aquifer sites and contamination controls.
  2. Select storm-sheltered first-build ground and landing ellipse.
  3. Lay beacon chain, abort field, and cache markers.
  4. Seed medical, membrane, water-treatment, food/seed, and power caches.
  5. Verify whether the corporate water claim is legal, abandoned, fraudulent, or armed.
  6. Return a plain-language settler handoff packet.

Flight loadout

  • 6 sealed cache pods; 18 survey beacons; 6 hardline repeater spools.
  • 2 aquifer thumpers, 1 drill head, field spectrometer, microbial quarantine kit.
  • Pressure-membrane pallets, patch kits, portable shelters, spare water-plant membranes.
  • Ebb and Flow if the surface can take them; drones first if the ground lies.

Pay and hooks

Gross: 31,000 Union scrip equivalent. First Footing keeps 40 percent until the company survives its first successful delivery; crew pool is 18,600 on accepted footing report.

Campaign hooks: Vandemeer-Kline Hydrology's shell claim, a broker who may have sold the aquifer map twice, a sick convoy child, dead labor-strike beacons, and the question of whether the best shelter site sits on something the compact considers sacred.