The vast interstellar void is not impassable. The Odysseus probes proved that. It was a technical challenge to build a jump rail to hurl ships across the great distances, but that was an engineering problem. There were some side-effects from it: as the jump rail would tear itself apart launching the ship, it was a single-use technology. Furthermore, you couldn’t steer while jumping. In many ways travelling with jump rail was a bit like boarding a passenger liner, aiming it at the destination hoping that nothing would divert you, and then steaming straight ahead until you ran aground.

With those constrictions, it’s all but impossible to build a working economy. What you can do is to colonize and build the local base for future trade. After all, when the Americas were originally settled by Europeans, the ships they used often never sailed back.

And much in the same spirit as the colonial era, Mankind followed the trail of the Odysseus probes, settled on planets circling distant stars, building colonies, adapting to the alien worlds and living off the land much in the same way as their ancestors adapted to Mars, the Jovian moons and Titan, and living off the land.

All that changed with the construction of the space gates.

The space gates were the logical continuation of the jump rail and the teleportation system. Also, it was the antithesis of the jump rail – with the space gate, small ships were the economical option, as opposed to the giant megaships of the jump rail era. Small ships and reusable space travel meant that interstellar space was open to commercial interest.

The colonial contract was meant to bring order into this frontier chaos, particularly in ownership. The contract followed a claim of a candidate star system recently discovered by the Odysseus probes, and it meant that until a planet was fully terraformed and immigration fully opened, the claiming corporation would be in complete control of the market of the colony.

Through the space gates, Mankind trickled out among the stars.