With the ‘new’ Starfleet that we have today, it’s hard for many of the Federation's younger citizens to truly understand how close the organisation was to the brink of irrelevance only 20-odd years ago.

Do you know what the Hera, Ciaphus, Equinox and Olympia have in common?

Of course you’re not. Nobody would expect you to be.

They’re all Starfleet ships that went missing before Voyager. The Equinox and Olympia only by a matter of months/weeks. But none of them got nearly as much public interest or attention from Starfleet. Just look at the search for Voyager, it officially went on for over two years! Of course after about 6 months it was just a public front for Starfleet's search for Maquis bases in the Badlands. But the fact that the public accepted the reasoning for that use of resources, even while the Federation was in active war with the Klingons, speaks volumes.

Before Voyager, if a ship was missing most of the Federation just accepted that it was part and parcel of the risks of going out into space. What else would you expect from a populace raised on grandiose stories of starships engaging in gladiatorial games for the amusement of more powerful species, encountering Greek gods and hopping through time? But Voyager was different.

She wasn’t an old ship that had her time, she wasn’t on a milk run or heading off into deep space. She had just launched with a fresh faced crew on what, for all intents and purposes, was a glorified training exercise and shakedown cruise. What’s more, she had the children of not one but two admirals onboard. Even if Thomas Paris had fallen from grace at that point, the report that the ship was missing caused shockwaves throughout the command structure because that ship, that crew, was close to the admiralty in a way that many other ships weren’t. As harsh as that may be to say.

On top of all of that, was the mystery.

Before the ship made contact in 2374, some Federation universities actually had to implement a soft ban on Voyager as a topic for students' final dissertations. It’s a miracle that the Maquis were actually able to run their operations out of the Badlands with all the civilian vessels that were chartered to go out there to try and prove, or disprove the popular theory of the month. A few traders even built entire businesses selling forged ‘authentic Voyager artifacts’. They were all fakes of course.

The mystery was so enticing because there really wasn’t anything left of the ship. Just some initial reports unusually high concentrations of tetryons and odd graviton readings. If there’s one thing that reliably captures the imagination, it’s the absence of information. Everything from the return of the Iconians to a new Maquis superweapon was hypothesised.

On top of that, we also know that Starfleet's interest also stemmed from the fact that the ship was intended to be the lynchpin of their Gamma Quadrant exploration and trade route security plans. Starfleet Operations were forced to fall back to using the Defiant and its limited sensor suite. They had hoped to keep the ship closer to Deep Space Nine for defence, especially after its first disastrous run into the Gamma Quadrant.

A replacement was requested, but then the Klingon war kicked off. The Gamma Quadrant, and all initiatives associated with it, took a back seat.