SAK

SAK is the Latin short form of Союз авиации и космонавтики. Transliterated, that is Soyuz Aviatsii i Kosmonavtiki. The English equivalent, taken word for word, is Union of Aviation and Cosmonautics. A looser English rendering is Union of Air and Space. In Cyrillic the short form is САК. Read as Latin letters, those glyphs look like CAK.

In 2141 the world tells one story. SAK was a Russian company. It had nothing to do with where the UAC came from. The firm that came out of it is Titan Off-Planet Construction, shortened to TITAN, and TITAN is a UAC subcontractor, not a corporate giant.

Thakur Cross (ARRIVAL) keeps that story to a mention. Earlier SAK mega-projects raised both the Solar and Northern Railway grids.

Records collected on Hell maps say something else. There, SAK is an earlier form of the UAC, which would make the UAC a company with Russian roots. The two accounts do not agree. The point of leaving them side by side is the question they force: which one is true?

The reading is that, by 2141, an artificial intelligence falsifies historical records that can be tied to the UAC, and so builds a different story of SAK. The public story is the product of that rewrite: a Russian firm that became a minor subcontractor, with no bearing on where the UAC came from. What a person can look up is under that control, so the picture of the past available in 2141 can be false. The Hell records sit outside that rewrite, which is why they can still carry the other account.

PDA Contents

The public file is titled Union of Air and Space.

A Brief History of SAK: Part IIn 2034, "Soyuz Aviatsii i Kosmonavtiki" (SAK) was founded in Novosibirsk, Southern Russia. The company specialises in the ongoing maintenance and technical development of Russian military technologies. SAK's operations focus primarily on former Soviet states, including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. The firm's non-public portfolio is rumoured to include discreet, though questionable, "not entirely ethical" hacking services. By 2036, SAK secured subcontracts for Russian state-commissioned space work at Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome. Russia pays Kazakhstan $115 million USD annually to lease Baikonur until 2050, guaranteeing SAK 14 years of stable revenue.

A Brief History of SAK: Part IIEvents accelerated rapidly onward. The 2037 great tsunami in the Bay of Bengal devastated India's Satish Dhawan Space Centre. China's Tiangong Project Phase III increased its space interests, exceeding the current Chinese domestic launch capacity. This boosted demand for space launches in Central Asia, much to the pleasure of the Russian State. SAK responded to the call. By late 2037, SAK announced affordable space travel via reusable rockets, similar to SpaceX's design. Tests started in Feb 2038. SAK achieved a surprisingly high success rate during the tests, securing immediate orders and many launch bookings from China. This revealed years-long development on a system that greatly resembles mature SpaceX models, but uses Russian and Chinese parts.

A Brief History of SAK: Part IIIFrom August 2, 2038, the second phase of SAK's spaceflight project began: commercial rocket launches at a high frequency. Even during those opening days, rocket launches were already taking place several times in the course of one single week. From the 2030s onward, Kazakhstan made serious progress in renewable power. Huge wind farms and solar parks were built there. Frequent launches led SAK to fit a self-inflating shield over solar panels, guarding them from falling debris on affected ground. Within a few years launches came so often that solar panels on that ground stayed covered for 85% of their operating time. SAK then bought those affected areas and began developing remote-controlled solar panels that open and close automatically.

A Brief History of SAK: Part IVIn 2040 Russia ended the Baikonur lease with Kazakhstan. SAK then leased that ground for 99 years, at a relatively low price. SAK undertook two pads newer than Baikonur, at its own cost on Kazakh land, recognized ownership, and leased them while building. In exchange it asked for the lower price and, so that security would hold, for the right to raise a defense force of its own. SAK-guarded leased ground and bought folding-solar tracts formed a long strip from Baikonur to the Kazakh-Chinese border. It cut an ugly wound across Kazakhstan, but it militarily kept spacebound cargo intact from the Chinese border to the launch site. After a short six years, the third phase of SAK's history began as strategic carrier of Russian and Chinese space missions.