The Mirondians were true to their word... sort of. There were changes from Year Four. The first noticeable change was that the Mirondians got hard-nosed in their bargaining on contracts -- they wanted more for less. Clearly, the spaceship was expensive even for the deep-pocketed Mirondians. The hard-nosed bargaining was their way of passing on part of the cost.
The second big change was announcing the opening of what the Solar System community called Mirond University -- MirU for short. A campus would be built at Showroom Asteroid, and there Solar System people would learn from MSE's about advanced Blip! construction and management, and about other things that the Mirondians felt star travelers should learn. The university was going to be big. It would teach thousands of students. The university started operation six weeks later, and it appeared that the Mirondians emptied their MSE barrel to staff the university. After it got started, MSE's switched around from project to project, but very few new ones came on the shuttle from the mother ship.
The programs taught were "Blip! short" in duration -- Masters and Doctorate equivalents took six months each. They were short, but effective. Graduates came out with distinctly different ideas on how to get things done... and the social friction grew once more.
In Month Nine of Year Five, a series of demonstrations spread around the Solar System community, and then turned violent. The turn to violence was spooky. Earth communities have had long experience with protesting demonstrations, including those that turn violent, so this wave was handled with average disruption. But protests and demonstrations were new to the other Solar System communities. Previously, the communities had been too small and the peoples of the community too familiar with each other to need them. And the idea of doing random property damage was sacrilege on the colonies. In the colonies, you might get angry, but you never took it out on "stuff" because stuff was what kept you alive. The strange actions that happened during these violent protests shook up the off-Earth Solar System communities deeply. "Earth's bad habits are spreading out with their immigrants!" was the word-of-mouth gossip.
The protests lead to many community leaders calling for a cooling off period. For three months the Mirondians stopped generating new contracts, and when they started again, there were some socially protective provisions included in them.
It was in this Year Five Crisis that Foursmoots began to shake the Solar System. You remember John Foursmoots, right? He was the grad student that first predicted that the gamma ray star was an incoming space ship. Following that, he continued to do impressive, but not memorable work. He helped with the innovations that boosted the .5G drive to a 1G drive in the first year of Mirondian trading. In recognition of his work, he was invited to be part of the charter class at MirU, and he accepted. But when he graduated, he complained bitterly about his experience.
"The Mirondian systems are alien, and they are dehumanizing. We need to back off and reexamine what we humans want out of this relation." he said to a talk show host after his graduation.
What John wanted to do was continue his work in "Big Astronomy" -- examining far away stars and galaxies using big telescopes and other expensive equipment. But with the arrival of the Mirondian Encyclopedia, funding for big astronomy had dried up.
"Why should we fund Big Astronomy? It's all in the Mirondian book." argued the grant-givers.
"That is nonsense! Only 1% of what we look at with our telescopes is in Mirondian space. They don't know anymore than we do about the rest of the galaxy or other galaxies. Their knowledge should make no change to our funding." argued Foursmoots. But he argued in vain, and funding for his proposals dried up. He found himself on the losing side of the Great Change.
Losers lose in many ways. Some piss and moan, some drink themselves into oblivion, some yell and shout and rail against the world, get laid, and then drink themselves into oblivion. John Foursmoots chose to analyze and write, as well as piss and moan. He wrote blogs, books and videos. These days he is most famous for "The Alienation of Mankind", in which he analyzes why Mirondian goods and technology are dehumanizing humans. The highlight of the problem, as he posed it, was the communication-intensive aspects of Blip! techniques. First time viewers of Blip! techniques in action always left with their jaw dropped. To first time viewers Blip! processing looked a lot like a Betty Boop animation of the 1920's in which everything is moving, and everything moving is perfectly synchronized with everything else moving. Kids seeing a Blip! process in action for the first time would squeal in delight, and, in fact, several children's museums put obsolete Blip! machines on display for just that reason.
Getting that kind of coordination required intensive communication. Much of the communication was machine-to-machine, but MSE's, and later humans, were also in the loop. They got into the loop using "Blackberry-on-steroids"-style devices that could open up two or three communications channels simultaneously. Adapting to these devices and Blip! techniques was a "separate the men from the boys" activity. The range of success humans had in adapting was large: some people could do it well, some a little, and some were hopeless. Foursmoots argued that those who could do Blip! the best were soulless nerds, and so humanity was being dehumanized by its adaptation to Blip!.
He was not alone in coming up with new ideas as to why the human condition wasn't getting happier, and he wasn't alone in coming up with ways to fix the quandary. In calmer times such people are called "cranks" and "crackpots" and mostly ignored. But these were stressful times, so people with these strange ideas were listened to, and they attracted followers.
The Mirondians were not perfect. They made mistakes, too, particularly social mistakes. The big blunder in Year Five was proposing to build the starship using the Moon... as in, Earth's Moon... as the staging area. There were a lot of good engineering reasons for picking the Moon.
To Mirondians the Moon was just another satellite. What was important was: "their baby" -- the ship -- should be gestated somewhere safe and as convenient as possible.
To Earth people the Moon was something very different. It was the unchanging Goddess of the Night. As the scale of the starship project became clearer, and the huge mountain... no, mountain range! of trash and pollution it would create became obvious, Earth people went ballistic.
"Mirondians Plot Moon Trashing" screamed headlines
Not only would the starship orbiting the Moon be an eyesore for decades, the Moon would develop a dusty atmosphere from all the pollution. The surface scars created would be visible to the next species!!
The Mirondians recognized their mistake quickly, and the building site was changed to a large anonymous Earth orbit-crossing asteroid. "When we are finished this asteroid will no longer be a threat to Earth." announced the Mirondians in an effort to do some damage control. But a lot of image damage had been done. This gaff spawned the coalescing of scattered radical groups into a serious anti-Mirandian movement.