TL31 - California Air and Space Administration

The California Air and Space Administration (CASA) is an independent agency of the Californian federal government, responsible for overseeing its civilian space program as well as its primary aerospace and aeronautics research and development agency. Despite this wide overview, many people primarily associate CASA with its space program.

CASA was founded to create a civilian arm of the nation's space research programs at a time when the military had been experimenting with high-altitude rockets. Where Europe had geniuses like Wernher von Braun, California executed "Operation Meal Ticket", picking up out of work Soviet rocket engineers such as Sergei Korolev and Vladimir Chelomei to lay a foundation for their own programs, leading to the launch of Echo-1 in 1962, which was effectively a large inflatable balloon designed to bounce radio signals off of. Satellites eventually became more advanced over time, such as the Panoptes-1, the first camera satellite, in 1968.

In 1963, California launched a dog, nicknamed "Layla", into orbit, where she orbited once and touched down safely. Later that same year, a chimpanzee nicknamed "Geoffrey" carried out 2 orbits before he was returned safely to Earth. In 1965, CASA achieved a new milestone with sending Alexander Graham into orbit, the first man to enter space. More orbits and more advanced means of space travel were achieved, along with orbital docking and practice for maintaining a space station. Finally, in 1969, CASA announced the "Artemis Program", a race to beat the German space program to the moon by 1975. The program advanced slowly, mainly with testing designs for ships and return, but it was dealt a setback with Artemis 4, where in 1972 the return capsule suffered a mechanical malfunction and the capsule broke up in the atmosphere, killing all three men.

Undeterred, the mission was improved and redesigned, which led to the greatest achievement of mankind: Artemis 10, which had the assistance of other NAU nations, touched down in the Fra Muro crater in 1976, leaving the flag of California behind. Another landing was carried out in 1977 with a German mission landing not long afterward, and a third landing was carried out in conjunction with the second German mission. Artemis 12 served as the last of the Artemis missions, after which CASA shifted priorities to the new "Space Ferry" program, a reusable vehicle for launching to low Earth orbit and returning.

CASA has also pioneered longer-range expeditions, such as the two Aphrodite landers on Venus, the single Hermes lander on Mars, and the many different landers and rovers on Mars, from the Viking probes to the Columbus landers and the famous Intrepid and Dauntless rovers. Its longest-range mission so far is the Odysseus-1 and Odysseus-2 probes, launched in 1977. The first of these two probes recently became the first to cross the heliopause and enter the interstellar medium, carrying out operations initially believed to be out of its operational capacity.

Near Earth, CASA has operated space telescopes, assisted in constructing the Columbia space station jointly owned and operated by various NAU members, and has recently pioneered the Space Ferry Mk. II to replace its existing ferry. CASA also has a leading role in the global effort known as the Ares program, an effort to launch a manned mission toward Mars by 2030. As one of the world's leading space programs, CASA often works both alone and in tandem with other programs to achieve marvelous feats of ingenuity and engineering that could only have been dreamed of decades before, and its plans intend to carry on with this out for years to come.