why am i getting unable to authenticate on the STO launcher i have now been tring to log in for an hour

Works first try here, check to make sure star trek online.exe isn't blocked in your antivirus or firewall software on the pc.

Does your account look OK here?

http://www.startrekonline.com/user

yes everything is fine with my acc and my firewall and av are not blocking the program
i now get unable to authenticate or attempting to connect to the control tracker then back to unable to authenticate

Try running the Cryptic network connectivity tool http://files.champions-online.com/nettest.exe and see if anything fails.

Copy and paste these results in a reply for us to review if you are not sure what to look for.
Comment out your Local IP address when you paste it here to the forum.

Also look in the STO install directory and see if errors.log has any date and gmt time stamp liness that match your auth attempts.

I received that error message when the website was down a few days ago. Before that I no problems logging on to STO. I wonder if the game is linked to this website in any way?