Sci-fi story - anyone want to pick up the baton?

The rise and fall of empires is systematic throughout the course of human history.  Civilization reaches a peak, unseen by the world thus far, yet it cannot last.  Soon, the civilization will crumble from within and die as another takes its spoils for their own.  For the Han Chinese, infighting and rebellion transformed the centuries old center of philosophy, mathematics and engineering into three shadows of its former self.  Athens, jewel of the Balkans was rotted out and destroyed by the Peloponnesian War.  Rome spread across the Mediterranean but after a mere thousand years of existence it too faded.  The Abbasid Caliphate birthed the very numbers we used to reach the stars were crushed under the feet of the Mongols. 

The modern age changed that.  For the first time, global monarch Great Britain steped down in friendship with its successor, the United States of America.  Outside threats from the Red Scare did not weaken this hegemony, it strengthened it and America pushed global society further.

Yet at its waning, the United States very nearly brought humanity back onto the destructive path of rise and fall of empires, as it stubbornly refused to pass the baton as Great Britain had done two generations prior.  Like the civilizations that came before it, it chose to resist the changing world and rile its people with fear of the unknown hegemony of another.  But unlike the Mongols or the Spartans, the peoples of two civilizations that could not be more different from the western Earth, were an educated population with histories spanning from beyond the birth of the written word to the present.  Rather than war, the Earth countries of Zhongguo and Jomhuri-ye Eslāmi-ye Irān challenged the United States to battles of economics and science and they pushed humanity further.  

In this chapter, you will study the fall-out of the "Rocket Heard Around the World" event and the development early Moon colonization missions.  Key points to note are:

• the ascension of Premier Xi Jinping and the impact on his tenure of Bo Xilai and the attempted assassination of his daughter by British supremacists
• the reelection of President Barack Hussein Obama and the rise of succession-ism leading to the Great Divorce of the American States following the Rocket Heard Around the World
• the launching of the first Iranian Moon mission using a fission powered rocket, known as the Rocket Heard Around the World

Medhi Zheng tossed the textbook aside for now.  He loathed distant history, finding it impractical for the modern era and entirely in conflict with the facts of high school life.  Americans distrusted Iranians?  Unlikely.  Roya Fard was the sweetest girl to walk the halls of school and the only person to talk to if you needed help on your homework in M-theory.    The Chinese were going to take over the world with cheap labor?  How is it Lu Yanghei refused to scrub the oxygen filters unless he got paid? Chris Stern and Rebekah Martin didn't complain when it was their turn to join the community work day, but then again, maybe that was because they never really learned putonghua properly.  Confederates seemed to stay in their cultural bubble as much as possible and Mehdi doubted they spoke Mandarin at home.  The few federalists he knew weren't much better, but at least they learned how to pronounce the name of the colony, Khune.

His parents were, of course, no where to be seen as the colony prepared for nearly 40 hours of night.  His mother, Neda Amiri, had been at the Jupiter-side research outpost for the past 60 days conducting her studies on planet-satellite electromagnetic interactions.  His father, Zheng Xiaowang an astronomer and a poet by trade, had left to join his wife and take pictures of a spectacular Jupiter horizon.