United States Space Administration

United States Space Administration (USSA) was the agency of the United States federal government responsible for the nation's space program.

History of the space program
On May 5 1961, Captain Carl Bell of the United States Space Administration (USSA) became the first human in space. This claim was disputed by both the Soviet Union and China. Captain Bell's flight in Space Capsule Defiance 7 lasted twelve minutes and seven seconds, and made a full revolution around the Earth. Bell died when the capsule crashed on its return to Earth.

On July 16, 1969, The Virgo II Lunar Lander "Valiant 11" with USSA astronauts Captain Richard Wade, Captain Mark Garris, and Captain Michael Hagen landed on the Moon. The astronauts became the first humans to walk on a celestrial body other than Earth. On November 14 of the same year, Virgo III Lander "Valiant 12" also landed on the Moon.

In 2020, the Delta IX Rocket was commissioned by the USSA. The Delta IX Rocket was the last of the manned rockets to the Moon. The longest recorded spaceflight in a rocket of this type was the 17-day Zeus 12 Mission to the moon. Almost 15 years later, the Delta IX Rocket was converted for U.S. military purposes. Crew and instrument sections were replaced with a nuclear warhead. The last manned mission to the moon, which recovered the Valiant 12 flag from its surface, occured in 2052.

In 2073, the Bloomfield Space Center was in the process of building a rocket that would go to Mars. However, as nuclear proliferation reached an all time high, the U.S. government completed a space station/satellite that housed two-dozen nuclear missiles each carrying four warheads as a reaction to possible nuclear threats, Named the Ballistic Orbital Missile Base, or the B.O.M.B.-001, it was considered the ultimate offensive weapon. The only things missing were the main power reactor and launch instructions and codes. However, since all other space and rocket facilities already used up their resources constructing the missiles for the station, and launching the cargo rockets to carry them to the base, the U.S. needed to scramble to get the much needed codes and a power reactor to the station. Their answer was to convert the Mars rocket into the vehicle that would carry the codes and reactor to the base. The conversion started in 2074.

In August 2076, the Hermes–13 space rocket was completed and ready to launch at Bloomfield. Unfortunately, by October, 2076, funding for the rocket and Bloomfield had to be drastically cut and diverted to Vault technology, thanks in large part to the rising world tensions and imminent threat of nuclear war – the launch of Hermes-13 had to be put on hold. All personnel, except for a skeleton maintenance crew, were reassigned to other locations. Bloomfield, B.O.M.B.-001, and Hermes-13 were essentially mothballed. In November, 2076, the Enclave seized control of Bloomfield Space Center. They knew nuclear war was just around the corner, so they tried to refit the Hermes-13 and convert it into a vehicle that would take selected personnel (mainly themselves) off-planet, destination yet to be determined.

Unfortunately for the Enclave, the bombs started dropping less than a year later. All were either relocated to "hot-spots" or took cover away from Bloomfield. The last people to leave shut down the sub-reactor to Bloomfield and abandoned the facility, letting Hermes-13 and Bloomfield to brave the elements.

The Enclave's plan
The U.S. government's real plan to survive a nuclear war was simply to find another planet to live on after blowing up this one. A spacecraft designed to ferry the human race to another planet was either under construction or ready to go before the War. The plan was for the government to flee to the Oil Rig, wait out the War and then pack up the populations of the Vaults to go into space. The Vaults were funded by the U.S. government and, accordingly, the government had control over them. Ostensibly, they were intended to allow a selection of privileged United States citizens to survive the Great War. Secretly, however, a large part of the Vault Project had a far more sinister goal.

Any voyage to space would have been very difficult and fraught with unforeseeable complications. Thus, to test the aptitude of the average American person to travel to another planet, many of the Vaults were designed to have some sort of critical flaw. Vault 12, in Bakersfield (better known as the Necropolis), had a faulty Vault door that wouldn't close all the way, allowing dangerous radiation to leak in, leading to the creation of California's ghoul population. Vault 15 was built normally (the rockslide that buried its control centre was accidental), but it was populated with a diverse mix of races and peoples to see what sort of tensions arise when varied backgrounds are packed into a small environment.

Eventually, due to either a change of plans by the Enclave's leadership or the spacecraft being destroyed, the Enclave abandoned their initial goal of settling on another planet, and decided to resettle the one they already had.