What circumstances would cause a 10 year cycle of shipments from Earth to another planet

Looking into fleshing out my world story. One of the things I had in mind was an infrequent but consistent shipment of supplies to a planet from Earth. For simplicities sake, we'll use 10 as the number of years between shipments, but this number could vary. The key is that a lot of time passes between shipments, time enough that a missed shipment could be catastrophic or at least mysterious. My world is sort of western, slightly mystic, but with hopefully realistic explanations. I think of Firefly a little bit, how they land on a planet that looks like it came from the old west, yet they also fly to massive space stations. The technology level would be similar.

So my main question is what would/could cause so few visits from Earth (or any other large Entity/Government), given that Earth was not in ruins?

Please let me know how I can make this question more answerable.

posted over 6 years ago

Premier Bromanov‭

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