This is an outline, fleshing out the story later.
Havelock vs Puck. It was the biggest event in sports entertainment, ever. Millions of users followed the make believe race between these two heroes, flying solo on their ships, The Adonis and The Marksman. The two were racing between the planets to get to a recreational psychic phenomena testing space station, known as Experia. Apparently in orbit around Mimas, the pockmarked Moon of Saturn. That the whole thing, including the space station, was pure imagination, was a closely guarded open secret.
StarDash was not the first space based reality show, but it was the most successful. The network never publicly admitted that the whole thing was make believe, and carefully cultivated the suspension of belief in epic proportions. Superfans such as Phoenix Guevara hosted discussion sites that propagated the myth.
News sites that covered the developments of the show, unintentionally played into the whole charade. While they would merely report on what was happening within the show, on the Internet, it was interpreted as things that were actually happening. The history of space hoaxes and conspiracy theories somehow made it easier to believe that Experia was a real thing.
StarDash started claiming increasingly impossible things, and the public would believe it. They claimed that Mimas was visible to the naked eye. A non believer would point out to the bright, unflickering blue dot that was Saturn, and ask a believer to point at Mimas. The believer would then imagine that they could see a small moon. The fever reached such a pitch, that some fans imagined that on a clear night, they could even see the rocket trails of the Puck and Havelock ships, through a pair of binoculars.
Oscar Ramsey, a young fan put together a home brewed kit of electronics, and used over the counter chemicals to construct a rocket for himself. The whole operation and the orbital mechanics involved were planned out using thumb tacks and pieces of string, which the police later found. His plan involved retrofitting a fourth stage ISRO booster left in space, with the capabilities of making an interplanetary hop. On board his own rocket were life support systems, and essentially little else. Ramsey wanted to make a daring dash towards Experia, on his own hacked together ship. Satellites and ground based systems could track the sudden new trajectory of the discarded rocket booster, but since Ramsey had taken no communication systems, there was no way of knowing if he was dead or alive. The world watched in dismay, as Ramsay's "ship" successfully executed a slingshot manoeuvre around Jupiter, and headed towards Mimas. It was a complex operation for any sixteen year old. The sad part was, even if he survived the hop, there was no Experia waiting for him.
The network came clean, and put up a prominent disclaimer that specified that the show was fake. Guevara took down the discussion site and disappeared. The fan community slowly died out, and although a few additional seasons were released, the public lost interest in Experia. Even Puck reaching the colony and winning the race did not manage to get back the lost audiences.
Above Mimas, a fleet of discarded space junk and dumped stages began to assemble, into the skeleton of a space station.
