25 October 2017

Titan Run Trilogy World Building: The BPOE

I wrote this brief essay to provide some background on one of the central organizations to the world of The Titan Run. If you've read "Breaking Orbit" you've already met, but you'll still enjoy this brief read. If you haven't read yet, then hopefully this whets your appetite.


The Benevolent and Protective Order of Explorers (BPOE, a/k/a "the Order" or "The Bolt Patrol" (pej.))is an interplanetary organization whose charter mission is to catalog all objects within the influence of Sol's gravity and maintain a detailed ongoing analysis of same. Specific attention is paid to those items known or discovered to be hazards to intra-solar navigation. The Order is also charged with rendering aid or assistance to all spacecraft in the course of discharging that primary duty.

The BPOE was founded by a mandate of the Solar Council* (which at the time was comprised of the Earth, Luna, and Martian governments). The mandate, one of the first unanimous votes by the Council, was issued after several craft were lost or damaged by high relative-velocity impact. The impactors were both man-made and naturally occurring debris. The initial surveys found these objects littered within the most advantageous routes between the worlds of the inner solar system.

The original mandate was only for the surveying and maintenance (removal of navigational hazards to safer orbits) of existing routes. It has since expanded to include the entirety of Sol's gravitational influence due to vastly increased growth of space travel for purposes of business, infrastructure construction (terraforming efforts), and pleasure.

Per mandate 23.358, the Inner Worlds Terraforming Alliance of Mars and Future Venusians maintains a joint sovereignty over Saturn and its moons for the purpose of harvesting these natural resources for use on the more hospitable inner rocky worlds. The BPOE does not maintain a constant human presence in this area, but does perform routine sweeps of the area from automated listening posts in the Jovian Trojans.

As Uranus, Neptune, and the outer limits of the Kuiper Belt and Oort cloud are still up for grabs and technology and human patience have not advanced far enough to expand to these worlds in any real capacity, Only the BPOE travels this far up Sol's gravity well for the purpose of conducting survey missions of those outer elements so that they will be well understood when the rest of humanity does come out his far. These survey missions are multi-year cruises and all BPOE crew who are assigned to Deep Space Survey duty are given extensive psychological screenings and post-screening training to prepare for the extended isolation.



*The Solar council has since grown to include Ceres and the Jovian Confederation as members.