Shepardsport Pirate Radio is part of the Grissom timeline, an alternate history in which Neil Armstrong’s astronaut career ended in Gemini VIII and Gus Grissom escaped the Fire to become First Man on the Moon.
This timeline is marked by the development of genetic engineering and human cloning as Cold War black-budget projects on both sides of the Iron Curtain. This change was the result of Trofim Lysenko falling out of Stalin’s favor, which allowed Andrei Zhdanov’s son Yuri to put an acceptable Marxist-Leninist spin on genetics.
As a result of the application of genetics to Soviet agriculture, the USSR was sufficiently more wealthy to mount some serious competition to the US space program in the Space Race. Because it became a marathon rather than a sprint, both sides developed a substantial presence in space, and each side offered generous support to their allies (the People’s Republic of China for the USSR, and Japan and the various NATO countries’ European Space Agency for the US).
By the 1980’s, there were multiple permanent crewed space stations in orbit over Earth. While the Soviet Union was still struggling to establish a permanent moonbase, the US was using its own moonbase a staging point for missions to Mars and the asteroids.
By this point, the inherent contradictions of Marxism-Leninism were bringing the Soviet Union to the breaking point. In 1984 everything came crashing down in a spectacular social upheaval that would come to be known as the Lanakhidzist Revolution. In the process, the Soviet cloning program became known to the world, leaving the US with no choice but to publicly own up to its own cloning program.
At first all seemed to be going well. The Shadine Commission investigated the abuses in the US program, and the worst offenders were publicly punished. But under the surface, suspicion was simmering against the “unnatural products of Frankenstein science.”
It would explode to the surface in 2010 in the aftermath of the Arizona Memorial Incident. Although there was no substantial evidence that Mitchell Sandoval’s biomods played any part in his psychotic break, it allowed certain partisan interests to beat the drum of moral panic against everyone born of America’s Cold War biotech programs. Using the public demand to Do Something about the perceived threat, they rammed through harsh legislation that stigmatized these “Sharps” in various ways.
However, these partisan interests failed to anticipate the pushback they woudl receive from people who refused to accept such stigmatization. For the next decade the Flannigan Administration would be locked in a sort of civil cold war with several governors and the various organizations that came to be known as the Sharp Resistance.
This conflict reached a head in 2019, shortly after the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the first lunar landing. Hoping to bring about peace, the aging Tsar Joseph the Lightning-rod of Russia had offered to take in America’s unwanted Sharps.
The tsar had intended his offer as a voluntary migration. Instead, the Flannigan Administration ordered all Sharps rounded up and shipped off to Russia. Children were separated from their parents and loaded onto planes to major Russian airports with no assurance there would be anyone to take custody of them on the other end.
However, NASA did not want to lose their substantial investment in their astronaut clones, and decided to remove them to the Moon. Wanting to keep them out of public view, the NASA senior administration decided against sending them to Grissom City on the Sea of Tranquility or Coopersville in Shackleton Crater at the lunar South Pole. Instead these clones would be sent to Shepardsport, on the far side of the Moon.
Shepardsport had originally been built to support the various scientific outposts on Farside, including the Far Side Optical Telescope and the Far Side Radio Array. It only became a place of exile in the wake of the Angry Astronaut Affair , when the NASA Administrator decided to assign Reginald Waite, a clone of Alan Shepard, thee to ensure he could not “wave the bloody shirt” as he might have been able to had he been dismissed from the astronaut corps.
Waite settled in and made Shepardsport his home, developing its agricultural and industrial base. Although he was aware of what was happening on Earth, he avoided commenting publicly upon it, although he does appear to have corresponded privately with his father and other family members.
All that changed as the youngsters started arriving in droves. After the destruction of Luna Station and the Kitty Hawk Massacre, Waite had to choose sides. Instead of ending the Sharp Wars, the Expulsions had succeeded only in shifting its locus. And the pirate radio station that some of the kids had started as an Internet streaming service would become one of the most important communications organs of the new Lunar Sharp Resistance.