Argo Astronautics is an industrial design and manufacturing concern located in the United Empire of Earth (UEE). Best known for their Multi-Purpose Utility Vehicle (MPUV) line of spacecraft, the company got its start designing terrestrial mag-lev train cars and has, over several centuries, become primarily associated with industrial spacecraft.
HISTORY
The company was founded as AR-Go Technologies in SEY 2243 by Alana Redmond, an assistant engineer of mag-lev trains. Having grown up alongside the multiple continent-spanning Trans-America rail line, Redmond had a lifelong interest in trains. In her spare time, she invented a tool to automatically repair weak points in the mag-lev tracks. After encouragement from her parents to patent and market the tool, Redmond filed articles of incorporation and accepted investments from interested parties. The commercial release of the tool was an immediate success, and over the next few decades, AR-Go focused on improving rail travel. The company's innovations included the design of a faster cargo latch and lock, new passenger management systems, and a unique vibratory recharger.Shortly after acquiring Todairo Manufacture and rebranding as Argo Transportation, the company was awarded a contract to design and manufacture the entire rail transportation system for the newly-founded city of Port Renatus on Mars (Sol IV). Personally planned by Redmond, the design was a success, and the company went on to produce train networks on other worlds, including the Prime Transit Metrorail on Terra (Terra III) and the Municipal Transit Line on Angeli (Croshaw II).
Seeking to further improve their services and networks, Argo invested some profits from these projects into building a team of designers tasked with identifying and correcting common delay issues in rail cargo. The team found that waiting for unloaders at spaceports led to significant periods of inactivity. In response to these findings, Argo purchased Telluman Shipworks with the intention of building their own loader spacecraft. The result was the Argo Orbital Utility Craft (OUC).
The OUC was capable of unloading stock cargo containers from Argo railways and moving their contents to orbital stations much quicker and more economically than traditional heavy lift transports. This proved attractive to multiple industries, who purchased the OUC and adapted it to a wide variety of uses. In 2619, Argo began offering a new model of the OUC to the public under the MPUV brand name. The sales of this ship were profitable enough that the company shifted its focus from rail work to industrial spacecraft.
In 2665, the company renamed itself Argo Astronautics in recognition of its new focus as an industrial spacecraft developer. Over the next few centuries, the company diversified its portfolio first by offering other models of the MPUV, including people carriers, recovery pods, and repair modules, and then by developing additional job-specific industrial ships. While the MPUV is still its bestselling product, Argo also produces shuttlecraft, low-atmosphere skippers, and reentry pods, among other things.