The Solar Flare

The Solar Flare (commonly referred to as simply The Flare) is a private Sol-wide mass media corporation headquartered in Manchester, United Kingdom. It is most known for its eponymous news networks and newspapers that aim to distribute news from both Earth and Sol colonies to citizens across space, using their newspaper service to transmit low-cost text and images to remote locations such as on spaceships.

Founded amidst the aftermath of the Great Gulf War in 2045, the Flare struggled in its early years to gain an audience via traditional broadcasting, instead opting to livestream unnarrated raw footage of the war's aftermath to viewers across the globe, occasionally interviewing people such as refugees and former soldiers, holding national governments accountable and ultimately propelling the Flare to global renown.

The Flare made another substantial appearance as the first news company to go to space, with several reporters and crew joining the initial waves of astronauts sent to Mars for colonisation, documenting the process along the way and interviewing colonists. Due to the limited data bandwidth that could be sent between Earth and Mars, only text was sent; as a result the news sent between Earth and Mars came in the form of the newspaper, which had been slowly declining to extinction beforehand. The Flare is widely accredited with the resurrection of the physical newspaper, and it remains the key point of its business to date.