A brief history of flight

Officially, man descended into the heavens on June 17 1869, when a ship constructed of liftwood, with much of the initial work behind it having been conducted by The Reverend Doctor Charles Kingsley, and helmed by Bedford Pim, took off from the ground and sailed upwards into the skies.

Once it become clear that manned heavier-than-air flight was achievable, thanks to the liftwood which had been found on the small island off the western coast of northern England which had also been the scene of that historic first flight, the intrepid pioneers of the skies conducted several tests, during which they learnt both that breathing was still possible even high up in the atmosphere and the presence there of strong winds which seemed determined to lift them even higher.

Working from Thomas Edison's theories on the supposed existence of luminiferous aether, the ageing Isambard Brunel put all of his genius at work constructing an ether propeller which would allow the ship to propel itself through this mysterious substance.

And so it was that the rickety vessel was reinforced for greater durability during longer journeys and rations gathered for what lay ahead, before the ship, christened HMS Roger Bacon, took off to rise higher than ever before, until it finally left the Earth behind and the men aboard it found themselves travelling along what turned out to be an interplanetary passageway that brought them all the way to Mars.

Barely had the men of the Roger Bacon found themselves orbiting Mars before the decision was made to descend onto the Red Planet, a decision motivated in part by the realization that the remaining supplies would not sustain them for their journey back to Earth.

Not only would they go on to find foodstuffs with which to feed themselves on the return journey, but intelligent life as well.

Naturally, word of this huge leap forwards for British science and all mankind got out almost as soon as the men of HMS Roger Bacon returned to Earth, with London erupting in an explosion of jingoistic bliss and its European rivals viewing its latest successes with an equal mix of envy and scorn. What began next was a mad race amongst pretty much all the powerful and the semi-powerful European nations to locate whatever reserves of liftwood that could be found on Earth.

As it turned out, it was the Dutch who could draw from the unusually large amounts of the otherwise scarce material found in their Indonesian possessions and use them to reawaken their glorious explorative traditions as they and Great Britain became the two foremost rivals in the exploration of Earth's neighbouring planets, with the Dutch being the first to get to Venus in 1873.

What followed next however was not particularly glorious, as the Dutch government made use of some of the vast amounts of liftwood found on Venus to create a fleet of airships, the first operational one of its kind in all the world, and used it to their great advantage in the conquest of Belgium that ensued. As the newly unified Germany had no interest in waging a second bloody war in just a few years time to protect Belgium, and France still reeling from its defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, Britain alone was the only country that had could have stepped in to offer any sort of meaningful support to the small, beleaguered country.

But despite Queen Victoria's eagerness to defend Belgium, her government did nothing.

After Belgium had been made a part of the re-established United Kingdom of the Netherlands, the interplanetary race began in earnest, with France joining it through the perfected construction of montgolfiers capable of reaching the aether and the German Empire finally being able to make use of the young Graf von Zeppelins designs thanks to Krupp having constructed the steam engines required to propel them up high enough for them to sail between the planets.

By 1885, man is present on three different planets.