All worlds discovered were uninhabitable by Man without terraforming; most of the lacked life altogether, and what little native life that was found was only in the microbial stages on young planets.

Terraforming is an expensive high-risk high-yield business. You have to start with a rock planet or moon with the gravity of Earth, orbiting a single sun in “Goldilocks’ zone”, neither too close nor too far from its sun. Double- or triple stars won’t do – the climate will be unstable if there are any planets at all that haven’t been torn apart and swallowed by the suns’ gravitational pull. An atmosphere makes it a lot easier, and you need water. A magnetic field is also very useful. Given that, all you need to do next is to adjust the atmosphere to get the right pressure, oxygen level, moisture, and temperature.

To do that, you employ a lot of megascale and microscale engineering – nuclear bombs to throw dust up in the air, reflectors to increase or decrease sunlight, ice harvesting on distant comets, bio-engineered microbes, algae and bacteria to process and release the right kind of atmosphere, et cetera. Terraforming a world can take centuries.

The grand prize would be a planet that had some billion years to evolve its own eco-system – life terraforming the planet to suit itself – and ripe to settle by Mankind. That prize remained elusive until a second generation Odysseus probe discovered Calypso.

The Odysseus probe created a base matrix that built robots that built cities and infrastructure for future colonists. Data about the discovered planet slowly trickled back and revealed that the grand prize had been found: a new world, teeming with life.

However, the probe did not build a jump rail at once to continue its journey. It stayed in orbit around Calypso for several standard cycles, and there are no files explaining this delay. The strange delay in the probe's voyage gave the planet its name: according to a very ancient human tale from Earth, the sea nymph Calypso waylaid a homeward-bound hero named Odysseus for seven years on her island. The name of the nymph was considered most fitting for a future market campaign.