day 10 of 30

NanoWriMo2005
J E D Cline

day 10 of 30

In their conversation at the nightclub usual celebration after they had participated in the weekly Leroy Brown Society meeting, Guardiano brought up the subject of the 3Musketeers’ abominably innovative project they called a “Space Escalator Carousel” wanting to know more completely what it was, how it worked, and how it would affect the traditions by which people lived. He knew that it had to do with building big things high up in orbit, things that could not even begin to be economically done with conventional rocket launch vehicles, not even nuclear powered launch vehicles; and therefore was not permitted by Tanfl’s puppet government. Yet the 3Musketeer people were still going ahead on it, claiming it was about all that could “pull the fat out of the fire” for humanity, at this point. How could they be so stupid? Didn’t they know that they were the losers, game over for the 3Musketeers, and the Tanfl RichElite people were all that would survive into the future? Maybe it was time for the Leroy Brown Society to arrange another raid into the 3Musketeers’ pantry, to speed the process up a bit.

Rationallo was more relaxed than he had been in months, having received telemetry from the two implants that had been implanted into Idealiana’s brain, indicating that they had gone into the digestion vats. He felt powerful, one more big problem sent to moosh. Yet the intense competition activities that were ever stimulating the Tanfl Political Corporation people so as to keep them in shape and ever on their toes, focused his thoughts even now, shaping response to his friend Guardiano’s questions.

Rationallo had done deep research into the 3Musketeers carousel-escalator-thing project. Turns out it did not need super innovation technology, as it was mostly based on electromechanical principles used long before the ban on innovation. In fact, the description of the project had been made in obscure papers even before the turn of the millennium. Yet was all too far from the mainstream of moneymaking at the time.

Guardiano was rattling on about escalators. They are either there or they are not there when we need them, end of subject. Use the stairs, elevator, or better yet, don’t bother going up there. Why think more about escalators? He did not have the knowledge or the facilities for building an escalator somewhere even if he needed it. The whole thing was the domain of others, who would only build an elevator if it was going to make them substantial money. Plain good sense. Why build an escalator up to nowhere, where nothing much was?

And space was high up, wouldn’t it take super strong materials to build something that big? And how could it all be economically feasible, it was obvious by watching the powerful launch of the immense rockets that were needed to put a small communication satellite into GEO, that it took incredible amounts of energy to put a little bit of mass into GEO. It was all harebrained, the whole thing. Solar power satellites, total mass-spectrometer type total recycling plants in GEO, spaceport facilities for conventional rockets at GEO, even cities built in GEO. They were all nuts. Yet the word was to support the project covertly, in the long run it would give Tanfl the whole world, for free. So, what was it all about, he asked of Rationallo.

Analysis was one of Rationallo’s things. Escalators were transportation structures that made movement to a high level almost as easy as walking on flat ground, and thus it opened up the land area to almost twice what it had been previously limited to, by the casual movement of shoppers and businesspeople. Escalators were good business, fairly simply multiplying usable real estate area.

As for needing super strong materials to build something so tall with, think about using stored energy for strengthening support. Actually, all strength of materials was through stored energy, that of intermolecular forces within the component materials. In this case, even more energy was input to a structure, and in a dynamic manner that was perfectly formed to support the weight of the structure in the particular environment it was in: the inverse-square-law gravitational field of the planet. The transportation escalator structure would encircle the planet, enclosing stored energy in the form of high velocity mass continually going around and around the planet, the thusly generated outward centrifugal force of the circulating mass being set to be slightly greater that the inward force of gravity on the earth-stationary part of the structure with its loads. Thus the weight of the hugely high structure was supported mainly by the dynamically stored energy within itself. It did not need superstrength materials, in other words. It could be built of plain ordinary strength materials.

Even so, Guardiano stated, it took too much energy to put payload into GEO from the ground. Hadn’t Rationallo seen videos of rocket launches? Absolutely immense amounts of energy obviously being expended there. What is the matter with him, anyway?

Rationallo was still in a good mood, and took another sip of Brewstim. It was a good day, and he was in control.

Think a bit about how much energy it takes to lift something, Rationallo said. Sure, climbing a mountain or even a dozen stories of stairs in a building, put reality perspective on it all for a person. Yet, numbers purified the problem, separating out such things that were not intrinsically involved, like if one had had too much to eat before starting the climb.

Back in the 1950’s, it had been shown to the layman that the energy needed to lift something up through the gravitational field of a planet out to an infinite distance away, could be simplified to be equal to that needed to lift the something to a height equal to the planetary radius... 8,000 miles in the earth’s case ... with a constant gravitational field equal to that at the planetary radius, the surface, ground level. For comparison, it is the same energy as needed to impart “escape velocity” to the mass; 25,000 mph in the case of the earth, he pointed out. Anyway, to find out the energy needed to lift only up to some altitude lower than infinity, one needed to do the same kind of calculation, only this time using the “planetary radius” equal to that other altitude, 22,300 miles + 8,000 miles in the case of GEO, and using the gravitational acceleration at GEO as the constant force for that simplification. subtract the energy need to go from GEO to infinity, from the energy needed to go from ground to infinity, and you have the energy needed to go from ground to GEO. Easy as that. There were equations if one wanted to crank the quantity out that way. To the energy needed to lift from ground to GEO, one needed to add the energy needed to speed up the mass to get it going at orbital velocity at GEO, so as to stay up there. The sum was the energy, or work, needed to move from the ground up into GEO. And that amount of energy was 17.2 KWh per pound, and for perspective, at an electrical cost of ten cents per KWh, that is an energy cost of $1.72 to put a pound of something into GEO. Cheaper than the cost of moving it across the country, he pointed out.

Sure, there were lots of variables not considered, like the efficiency of the magnetic levitation track, along which the masses circulated at high velocity within the structure. Lots of variables. Yet, that the energy cost was not intrinsically a problem, was his point here.

And besides, once the thing was up and running and had lifted the construction materials for building some solar power sats up there, some of their energy could be beamed down to the ground acceleration site to power the structure itself from then on, no need to buy energy from somebody else, at their price.

So, he asked Guardiano, what can you build economically when the energy cost of transportation is around $1.72 per pound? It is not rocket science, he added. In fact, quite literally not rocket science, that was the point. And also was the problem, because the industry was based on rockets.

On the table’s computer terminal, Guardiano had been clicking out the numbers for the calculations, following along with Rationallo’s chatter, The numbers were correct. And it was plain sense. Uncomfortably too plain. What would come of the business world if all that new business “real estate” plopped on the market? He used the terminal to order some more Brewstims for each of them.

After a moment, he thought of the basic problem, the huge amount of fuel needed on the vehicle to lift up to space. But Rationallo said that the whole point of the escalator was so that no fuel was needed at all for the trips up and down the escalator. All the energy was delivered to the point of need by the transportation structure itself. In a store escalator, the energy was delivered to the step upon which the person stood. In the case of the space escalator carousel, it was delivered to the spacecraft riding the outside of the structure, which electromagnetically dragged against the high velocity upward moving armature segments, transferring some of their momentum to be upward momentum for the spacecraft with its contents. The spacecraft lifted no fuel at all, no weight of fuel to be lifted by the spacecraft! The energy was all put into the sliding armature segments by synchronous electromagnetic mass accelerators at the ground terminal of the structure, the enormous mass of the earth being pushed against in the speeding up of the armatures passing by. Electrical energy was used, which could come from any electrical power source. And, he repeated that eventually it would come from the solar electric power satellites it itself made possible in GEO, thus in control of its own power source, which ultimately was derived from the constant energy flowing to there from the Sun.

Guardiano pointed out that the whole thing was an abomination, against the laws of business constancy upon which Tanfl was founded. So why were the orders coming down ordering them to quietly support the 3Musketeers abominable space access project?

Grinning, Rationallo had figured that one out, too. It was the cities they would build in GEO, he said. Lots of cities, mostly built of structural material from the Moon, and supplied with other material like water, from the usual earth resources. The 3Musketeers nuts were going to have everybody abandon the planet to temporarily live in those cities up there, and then do a drastic makeover of the earth’s ecosystem, then replant the species that had perished, from DNA saved back then. They were going to restore the earth, they thought, and then return everybody to their homes. It was a truly crazy plan; there was nothing needing restoring. Business was good, so long as nobody rocked the boat. So here was the secret, he leaned closer to Guardiano to whisper: when almost everybody was up there or on their way to live in GEO space cities, the Leroy Brown Society was going to raid the women about to leave, and put them in their harems; then lock down the escalator, preventing those billions of people from returning. The world was then all theirs, they win! The Leroy Brown Society would own all the resources of the whole world, for free. What a prize! So that was why they wanted the 3Musketeers crazy project to succeed.

So, Rationallo continued, it was time to also begin the planning for that new world of theirs, how to keep it running with so few people, while their harems built up a population big enough to fully do the job. To plan the way their traditions will be so purely applied to control the whole world, forever more. He took a big slurp of Brewstim, and sat back, satisfied. Life was good.


In his optional time over the next few weeks, Rationallo began to think about what was involved with the 3Musketeers’ escalator carousel projects applications. There was opportunity for business beyond his dreams. Someone had to build the infrastructure to bring components for the cities made of lunar sourced materials. It would be a robotics factory that extended from the Moon to GEO, all of which would be opportunity for shrewd businessmen to squeeze for big profit. So what if it would all go to waste, when the escalator was blocked after the people had all gone up there. The profit would be in the bank down here, in his pocket. However, how would he weasel in on 3Musketeers business?

Artisiana, that is how. She was still a wife of his, a wife-at-large, who had set up the new manufacturing facility that Idealiana had gotten to work again. Artisiana was his secret in with the 3Musketeers bunch. A whole world of new possibilities began to open up to Rationallo’s planning.

Artesiana was coping with her return to the directing manager’s office, so recently vacated by her friend and boss Idealiana. She was cognizant that something big was in the works, that she herself was going to have to get important things done. That Idealiana was still alive but not to public announcement to anybody, especially that could get to the Tanfl people’s ears. Ears that were everywhere; Tanfl left nothing to chance, they got data all the time from anything and everything, even over here in 3Musketeers part of town. They all were going to have to proceed as if Idealiana no longer existed.

Yet Idealiana did exist in a way. She had left a legacy not just in a factory producing copious amounts of sliding armature segments that worked, but also the weird Holovision Presence thing. Walking into the office, she saw the place was strewn with a few things, scattered as Idealiana had made a frantic dash to the door of her office after the stroke hit; a coworker had seen the door open and Idealiana fall, and had called for the infirmary doctor.

Now, a bag of jellybean stimulants lay on the floor. Picking them up, Artesiana looked over at the mysterious Holopresence device’s nook in the office, which had been added here since the office had been hers. She walked in and sat down in its chair, activated it. A sudden deluge of sensory impressions came seemingly out of nowhere; she touched the table in front of her, found it also in the new world of impressions. In moments she integrated the visual and kinesthetic physical world impressions of the nook and its contents, together with the weird extra sensory-like impressions. So this was what it was like, a real trip. But what was it good for? It was a lot of work and expense just for entertainment, an escape from reality at break times. Idly, she turned on the terminal that accessed the manufacturing plant’s monitoring systems, to catch up on the production data. Why was the terminal in here, instead of on the main office desk? As the terminal sprang to life, showing the schematic of overall production flow, she discovered that her new sensory impressions expanded into vast new worlds, which flashed into being as her eyes scanned over the parts of the production plant’s schematic on screen. It was like the details of the area in which she focused her eyes, became pictured all around her in a time flowing three dimensional complex world all around her. There were grayed out areas, getting denser at the incoming material receiving dock, and gradually getting clearer the further down the production line the material went, until at one stage the armature segments suddenly sprang into being, when their material was combined with something in one of the production steps. And from then on, she could track that armature segment, no matter where it went. In fact, she could sense bunches of the armatures beyond the plant, in delivery vehicles ... ships in the harbor ... in Ecuador ... and suddenly she could see them in a huge loop string, all around the planet, touching ground area in Ecuador and circling around back to Ecuador site again, on the way reaching high into space on the farside of the planet. So this was the space escalator carousel! And she could see it, somehow sense it, even from here. Amazing. There was another bunch of detail around the earth terminal site, lots of stuff. Apparently to be seen in this system, things had to be painted with something; but after that, it was everywhere visible. Quite a show; she had not guessed that Idealiana had a craving for movies. She deactivated the device, and went over to her desk. It was the same desk she had before the miraculous return of her former boss. A boss now again almost as mysteriously gone again.

And she, Artesiana was now boss again. Manager of a production plant that had totally frustrated her before, making armatures that had not worked. But they worked now, thankfully. All she now had to do was make sure it all stayed the same, kept working, kept churning out those “3 mm sliding armature segments” that had gotten so much of her attention in the past year or so.

She sighed, managing was not her thing. She was a woman of action, a person that made things happen, and if possible excitingly, even artistically if possible. This office stuff was a drag. But it had to be done by someone, and she was the one to do it now. She resigned herself to a boring life from now on.

Going out to her other office to bring her belongings back to her new office, she found that the secret communication system had a message for her from her “husband”, she being one of Rationallo’s wives-at-large. What did he want? She moved her old office stuff in and merged it with the new office, then activated the secret communication link. And she discovered that her moments of boredom were to be few, as Rationallo had things for her to do. Big things, worthy of a woman of action, she could tell. For starters, she had instructions to go out and buy up all the land she could get nearby, to total 2 square miles. That was a lot of city space in which to do something.

She was paying more money for property than most of the residents had ever seen before, and they were eager to sell. And besides, better yet, she had promised that a new equivalent of their living space, stores and small manufacturing plants would simply be given new quarters as part of what was to be built there next. The area had been mostly slums and dismal stores and factories, populated by malnourished people fed by the secondary output of the digestion vats, laced with heavy metals and toxins which were not easily removed in the digestion process filters. The people ate it, rapidly accumulated the toxic stuff, died early, went to the digestion vats, and the metals and toxins thusly released went on to the next people to eat the stuff; a repeating cycle.

Before the bulldozers demolished each slum dwelling, Artesiana personally went to visit the original dwellers there, provided them identification as owners of a new home to built somewhere in the new complex, and paid for temporary shelter until that new home would be given them. Same treatment for each store owner and small shop; each had a ticket for an equivalent (or better) facility as part of what was to be built there, although probably on an upper floor.

One side of the newly purchased area bordered along one of the gateways between theirs side of town, and the RichElite side of town. The gateways were opened at 6 in the morning and processed over 3 million workers crossing over to work in the RichElite factories, or as menial workers in homes. And the same gateways let them pass through at night, closing by 9 at night. Going through to the RichElite side, they were searched for weapons; going back to their side, they were searched for possibly stolen things. It was a dreary wait in line each morning for the crowds of workers waiting to get through the inspection gateways.

So Artesiana moved the shops and stores that were being built anew as part of her purchase agreements, to be placed along the route the workers had to stand to cross over each morning. The caffeinated jellybeans were a popular item bought by the waiting crowd. A place was provided freely where amateur musicians could play for the crowd, entertaining them. The replacement residences were built over the top of these small businesses. And in her overall design for the manufacturing facilities space per Rationallo’s requirements, she added more living space on top of them, for more residents. She had an idea that Rationallo would eventually want more land bought, and more local workers to staff them, and she would need immediate homes for those workers and displaced people.

If Rationallo wanted to make a manager of her, she would be a Go-Getter type manager, she told herself.

But then, the managerial decisions suddenly got harder. Rationallo wanted a new gateway to be built, directly into the new facilities where it bordered with the RichElite part of town. The new gateway would operate in the opposite direction, to let engineers and managers come to work from the RichElite side of town. Artesiana did not think that the 3Musketeers Political Corporation was going to like that.

At the next meeting of the Board for the 3Musketeers corporation, Artesiana discovered she had new status. And lots of questions were asked of her. No longer just content with relief that new money was flowing to their side of town, questions were being asked as to purposes of what was going on, where was the money coming from, were there strings attached to that money. Artesiana told them that she was a wife-at-large for Rationallo, and was supplied with money to make a profit making venture over on the 3Musketeers side of town. So far, it had raised the standard of living for a lot of workers, and had enabled the sliding armature segments to be built again, essential to the escalator carousel’s success. She did not know what the new facilities would be used for, however; she had not yet been told. But she pointed out that she had steered the facilities to provide for the displaced residents and shops, and that she intended to insist that kind of thing be continued. All in all, it seemed a good deal for all concerned.

But the 3Musketeers board of directors were quite suspicious. Why would their arch rivals suddenly try to make them a success? Just to make them a better sport for their supremacy games? Was a kind of takeover in the works? Autonomy was one of the few things the 3Musketeers Corporation had been able to retain during the struggling years, and they would not accept loss of it. It would not be the first time that easy money from the rich had been used to lead the impoverished to their downfall. And it looked to them like Artesiana had a lot of easy money with which to play.

Then she told them of the demand to build another gateway, one that would allow Tanfl engineers and managers to directly enter the new 3Muskateers manufacturing facilities, to provide engineering and management beyond the skill level of available 3Muskateers people, for a large new manufacturing capacity of undefined products. That threw the meeting into an uproar; they saw it as an invasion by the enemy, to destroy them from the inside out. No way, they declared. No way!

Back in her office the next day, she felt stumped, defeated. Resolving obstinate demands from opposing sides were not her thing. During break time, she wandered into the Holopresence terminal’s nook, and activated it, lacking clear path for something to do about the situation. Her expanded sensory system, now somewhat familiar with the ins and outs of the thing, wandered around the schematic of the systems and facilities of the building. She noticed that it extended to the infirmary, even to an odd area a bit through and beyond the infirmary. She discovered there were people in the holopresence! One was the company doctor. The other was ... her missing boss! Idealiana was clearly aware of Artesiana’s intrusion, and she simply sat there and pointed at something, a bag of jellybeans. Stimulant break time? Artesiana remembered there was a sack of those things that had been dropped on the floor; she got them, and munched a few, while attempting to understand what was going on here. They had a slightly odd flavor. And so, within a few hours, she became part of the Holopresence system too. And there, she could talk directly to her old boss.

They discussed the current situation. Idealiana said that it did not surprise her. Clearly, Tanfl Political Corporation had some top people that were secretly hurrying along 3Musketeer’s space escalator carousel project, for unknown reasons. It was reasonable that lots of things would need to be built to be sent up for construction of the many facilities to be built in GEO, once the carousel was fully sized. Should they look a gift horse in the mouth?

Make a deal, she said. Put up a little fight. Request being given that which it would take to educate 3Musketeer people to become capable engineers and managers as soon as possible, even to quickly take roles in the new facilities while they had on-the-job training to be fully capable engineers. Request that the new facilities be built such that all workers always had new training in job skills beyond their current tasks, and education to broaden their knowledge, their perspective of the larger picture. And request that some jobs be created for some of the most impoverished and currently unemployable people among the slums of the 3Musketeers side of town. Use the opportunity to raise the standard of living and the skill capacity of people on this side of town, as part of the deal with Tanfl.

Artesiana put the agreement before the 3Musketeers Board of Directors. What did they think? A lot of grumbling went on; they were quite battered from years of arrogant hazing by Tanfl “winners.” A tiger did not change the color of his stripes. Yet they already had seen a huge improvement in the lives of hundreds of 3Muskateers people, due to the sliding armature reconstructed facilities. People would be angry if they had to forfeit all that. They began to see some wisdom in Artesiana’s proposal: if they got people educated, higher skilled workers, as part of the deal, and a faster construction of the GEO facilities, they were willing to take quite a bit of risk of deception by Tanfl. They agreed; now it was up to Artesiana to convince Tanfl of the terms.

Again, this dealing was not her thing. She took time out, got away from it all, while taking the special paint that Idealiana had pointed out to her, and painted areas of the new, still empty, manufacturing facilities with it. It was at least doing something physical, even though it quickly became a bit dull to do. Eventually she tired of it, and went back to tackle the job of convincing Rationallo, a man who normally controlled everything, almost compulsively.

It was easier than she imagined. Rationallo seemed a bit distracted; he had a full time job over there, and was willing to let her do more of the managing; if the 3Muscateers crowd wanted higher skilled employees made of their own, it would make it easier to get the huge upcoming tasks done. It was a deal.


The new gateway portal was built, breaching through the wall that had long defined the boundary between the wealthy and the poor. It was built right into the new manufacturing facility, a special entrance made for the engineers, technicians, and managers that were starting to come over to work in the new 3Musketeers production facilities.

These new employees did not all look happy about going into 3Musketeers territory. At first they marched into the huge empty new buildings, sketched out plans for their offices, and per agreement, for each of their offices, was an adjacent one for an essentially ignorant 3Muskateers employee, that was going to learn to be an engineer, manager, or highly skilled technician. Part of the deal was that each of the Tanfl engineers and skilled personel was going to be a tutor, a teacher, for a companion 3Musketeer person. Many of the Tanfl people considered it disgusting, degrading, even unpatriotic, to be teaching the “enemy” how to “win.” But Rationallo and Guardiano paid them well, and made clear those extra teaching duties’ importance.

Offices took shape, terminals set up, engineers sat in them wondering what next. 3Musketeers insisted on building anything they were capable of making, instead of importing from Tanfl territory. One of those things was the paint. The 3Muskateers people painted everything with their own paint. It covered everything, the office walls, the desks and chairs, shelves. Tanfl employees considered the 3Musketeers compulsive painters; a bit weird, but harmless.

Thye new huge buildings were sectioned off. The first one was assigned to design and build the next generation of sliding armature segments, for the next layers of the increasing girth of the carousel. 6 mm sliding armature segments, these. It was not quite merely a matter of scaling up the size of everything. The mechanical properties of the component materials remained unchanged, while the overall dimensions did change. Magnetic fields were limited by the saturation levels of the component materials, and distance the fields had to traverse got greater. Shape of the designs thus had to change: the sliding armature segments had to become flatter, to adequately couple their vfields to the magnetic levitation tracks, and to the couplers of the spacecraft that tapped momentum from the high velocity armatures. They too got the paint, except that it was modified and migrated into the armature surfaces, not just painted on.

Artesiana paid them all visits. She liked making the rounds, talking with peon and engineer alike. And she always seemed to have new suggestions for improvements, corrections for the fledgling designs being created.

Another section of the building was set up, this one for the tube tracks for the armatures. They had the magnetic levitation tracks built in, all an integrated assembly, with the sensing and control electronics for synchronous interaction with the passing of every high velocity armature segment sliding through on their way to beyond.

They kept track of the trends of changes needed with increase in sizes of components, which was used when the next increase was requested, 12 mm armature segments. These were quite flat, and were to be the final outer layer of the carousel structure, along which the huge traffic was to move someday.

Initial vehicles were next designed and built in more parts of the huge building. These vehicles had to operate at high speeds both in the atmosphere and in the hard vacuum of distant space, so they were streamlined. And until more confidence was established, each were designed to be a lifting body heat shielded glider, and had chemically fueled maneuvering thrusters built in, in case they had to be released from the carousel in emergency, and make their way back to the earth surface on their own, with their precious cargo.

There were limits to the sizes and weights of anything that they could build. The carousel could lift vehicles of limited mass; and the pathways up the Andes mountains to the tunnel where the earth surface terminal was located, were limited as to capacity. And this all established the sizes and mass of anything that got built to be sent up the carousel for construction purposes.

Next were built facilities for building more solar power satellites, scaled up from the original ones that now powered the carousel, and were supplying electrical power to a few parts of the world for a good price. The carousel was finally providing pay back for the investment, at least a little bit.

Components for a prototype mass-spectrometer type total recycling plant was next most urgent. It was first used to recycle some of the most toxic of the digestion vats sludge accumulation, and its component elements were completely separated out, including the heavy metals. Most of the thusly purified chemical elements were shipped back to the earth surface for new manufacturing uses, but some of the raw hydrocarbon components were saved and used in sunlit optically illuminated experimental chambers, where lichens, bacteria, and algae were putting the raw elements back into more complex hydrocarbons from which food could be made, free from all toxic contamination; this foodstuff brought the highest prices from the best restaurants in the RichElite section.

A small version of a Stanford Torus space Settlement was next built, using technology created for the earlier processing of biologicals for food; this first space city was mostly agricultural. Yet it also was of immense value in debugging the interaction of the myriad mechanical and living systems intermeshed in the slowly rotating city, a 1/2-gee inner surface only, due to its smaller diameter. Yet that artificial gravity was enough for people to walk in the gardens, plants to grow “upward”, and toilets to be conventionally useful.

It was time to look to the Moon, once again. The science that had piggybacked on the space race to keep the Moon from being used as a launch site for nuclear rockets aimed at other nations, back in the 1970’s, had found raw material elements including those useful for making structural ribs, wall plating, glass windows, the major large components for full sized stanford Torus space cities of 10,000 people each, to be built not in L-5 but in GEO instead, appropriately modified versions of them anyway, first designs. The carousel itself would be quite busy bringing up people and their household belongings; so the major structural and passive shielding materials were best to come from the Moon, maybe eventually some materials from the asteroids. The first GEO spaceport was built; from there the first manned lunar landings since the 1970’s were launched.

Lunar habitation had long been discussed, and so were built. Getting the lunar materials to the site of construction was a different task than that envisioned in the 1970’s; O’Neil’s mass launcher and catcher buckets were only one of the delivery systems considered. A wayward flung mass striking the carousel could be a great disaster indeed, however. So competitive designs were made, including the O’Neil mass launchers, the Mooncable anchored fiberglass space elevator through L-1 toward the earth, and a modified space escalator carousel design for lunar use.

There was tremendous pressure for what to do next with the transportation capacity of the carousel. People all around the world wanted more solar power satellites, to beam abundant cheap clean electrical power to them, to power their digestion vats for cleaner foods, as well as power all their daily life things. Others wanted more total recycling plants built instead, to clean up some of the most offensive waste accumulations on the ground; even to provide materials for a fantasized totally clean livingspace area the richest elite wanted built, and now theoretically possible. Others wanted to finally make a manned Mars expedition, fully equipped in huge vehicles efficiently launched from the high GEO spaceport. And still others craved to get going on building the full 1-gee interior surface self-sufficient cities in space.

A dozen years had gone by. The entire 3Musketeers quarter of the city had become built over by the manufacturing complex, with fine living space homes built atop the manufacturing levels; every person in the previously poverty stricken city was now educated to their best capacity and multiply skilled, and no end to the demand for their work.