Cursed Colony
The shortsighted entrepreneurs and billionaire financiers promoting the TRAPPIST-2 Colony Foundation faced considerable criticism for lack of redundancy and backup, in that they put all colonists and supplies into a single ship, destined for a single system, before any scouting reports could make their way back to their point of origin. The one response to the criticism was to build and launch the ill-fated Prometheus, a terraforming ship that was to prepare the potential colony sites before the arrival of Victoria and the colonists. The loss of Prometheus was the first of many failures caused by the lack of central control and collectivist planning essential for success of such a long-duration mission, leading to the common opinion that the Cistercian colony was cursed from its very conception.
—Excerpt from Flint’s People’s History of
Interstellar Exploitation,
Trudovik Press,
Kerenskiy, Trudovik, AA237