The Discovery of Subspace -- Humans
From SOTS
The first subspace traveler, Blasky Yao Hsiang, was a solar physicist assigned to the Sol Prima research station. Early in the year 2371 Blasky was assigned to perform the first penetrating scan of Sol's deep core using an experimental high-energy resonance beam. One of the station's hardened research pods had been fitted with the ring-shaped scanning array; the pod was launched from the station with Blasky aboard to operate the controls while the rest of the station's 18-man crew eagerly monitored their screens.
The moment that Blasky's scan was initiated however, the tiny research bell disappeared from view and was no longer detectable by any means available to the Sol Prima monitoring station. Fearing that the scientist had suffered a catastrophic equipment failure or lost power the station quickly dispatched a rescue team to search for his bell and the precious scanning array, hoping to recover the man and his equipment before a decaying orbit could drop both into the sun's corona.
After several minutes of frantic scan-and-search, Sol Prima received a feeble signal from Blasky's pod. The scientist's calm voice was heard from a distance of over 800 million kilometers; in less than ten seconds he had been miraculously transported from a close orbit of Sol to a close orbit around the nearby gas giant Jupiter.
For the next two hours, as his team of solar scientists desperately attempted to find some means of reaching and rescuing their comrade, Blasky made a series of burst transmissions to the nearby Storm Watch probe in Jupiter's orbit. The full-length recording of these transmissions is still played to first-year students of Node mechanics and can be a highly emotional experience for those who have never heard them before. As Blasky's probe slowly descended into Jupiter's atmosphere the scientist gave a highly detailed account of his experience in subspace, describing the gravitational "current" which seemed to pull him away from Sol's orbit with blinding speed. He expressed his regret in having expended so much fuel fighting this astounding gravimetric pull and speculated that his pod might have traveled much further had he not engaged thrust to fight the current within the "starstream".
When Blasky could add no further detail to his description of subspace, he calculated the volume of fuel he had expended in resisting the gravitational flux and the distance and direction he had traveled. His tentative conclusion was that the force acting upon his ship had been the gravitational pull of the nearby star Wolf 359; later experiments in subspace travel proved him correct as Wolf 359 was the nearest node in Sol's subspace chain.
After carefully re-checking his data, including the level of energy he had used to initiate his solar scan, Blasky ejected his data core with the ship's tracking beacon attached. He died several minutes later in the crushing depths of Jupiter's liquid hydrogen sea. The amazing discovery and tragic death of this remarkable scientist became the planet-wide impetus for a return to manned space exploration; it was often argued in the months immediately following that the budget cuts which had forced ISA to place an unmanned probe in Jupiter's orbit, rather than a manned research facility, had cost Blasky Yao Hsiang his life.
