food, water, materials, and rocket fuel.
By September of 2029, the ERV (Earth Return Vehicle), a new multistage rocket constructed using parts from already existing vessels, was sitting on its launchpad in Cape Canaveral, ready for takeoff.
Everything changed six weeks later, when the private sector officially stepped up to the plate.
Project HOPE (Humans for One Planet Earth) was conceived in 2016 by a group of former astronauts, design engineers, and rocket scientists who had left NASA years earlier because of the agency’s ‘good ole boy’ policies. Unlike other private rocket companies, they were not interested in launching satellites. HOPE was interested in space as public recreation.
The key to HOPE’s future was a design for a new space plane, one that could take off horizontally like a jet, rise to its maximum turbojet altitude, then use boosters to rocket the passenger vehicle into space. Once in orbit, the paying public would enjoy twelve hours of zero gravity and a lifetime of memories.
All HOPE needed was a major investor, one that could provide factories and the financial backing to launch the company.
Enter Lucien Mabus, CEO of Mabus Tech Industries.
Lucien had inherited MTI, but was bored with running his father’s company. What he needed was a challenge, something he could call his own.
At the urging of his intoxicating fiancee, Lilith, Mabus struck a partnership with HOPE’s directors. Fourteen months later Project HOPE went public, offering investors an opportunity to claim their stake in the future.
The response from the global market was mind-boggling. Opening at 22, the stock closed the first day of trading at 106. By week’s end it had split twice and was still soaring at $162 a share, making majority stockholder and HOPE’s CEO Lucien Mabus the world’s first trillionaire.
Attitudes in Washington changed overnight. Cape Canaveral Air Station, which controlled the barrier island and all launch facilities east of the Banana River, offered to move the Air Force’s Forty-fifth Space Wing in exchange for a long-term lease with HOPE. Lucien Mabus turned them down, preferring to erect a new complex in the city of Cocoa Beach at half the cost.
On December 15, 2029, HOPE’s first ‘space bus’ took off down its new fifteen-thousand-foot runway. On board were 120 passengers, including key stockholders, political dignitaries, a dozen members of the media, and a crew of twelve.
Nothing real or imagined could have prepared these civilians for the magic of space. The sixteen-hour flight was smooth, the service first-class (just eating in zero gravity an experience unto itself) and the view-well, the view was both spiritual and humbling.
Within two months, HOPE was shuttling four space buses a week at a cost of $100,000 per ticket. Even with its high price tag, there was still a fourteen-month wait.
By April of 2032, three more space buses had been added to the fleet, dropping ticket prices to $39,000. By 2033, over eight thousand people representing every nation had orbited the planet.
The residual impact upon humanity was profound. ‘One Planet-One People,’ became HOPE’s mantra. Many believed it was no coincidence that the last oppressive government fell to democracy during the space bus’s reign. Religious and racial tensions eased. The global economy boomed as technology raced to keep up with the exploitation of space, and the exploitation of space created new Earthbound technologies.
By focusing its energies on the heavens, humankind had finally grown beyond its childish adolescence.
Plans were soon revealed for Space Port-1, the first space platform/hotel designed to accommodate the paying public. When completed, SP-1 would contain three main structures, each configured in the shape of a bicycle wheel. The upper wheel, known as the ‘hub,’ would house a restaurant, bar, gymnasium, and, at the very end of the structure, a nonrotating zero-gravity observation deck. Below the hub, connected by a main elevator shaft surrounded by spokelike corridors was the middle wheel, or ‘Spotel.’ The largest of the three structures, the 1,950-foot donut-shaped living quarters, rotating one revolution per minute, would provide guests with a third of Earth’s gravity. Below this massive wheel, connecting to the Spotel through an access shaft were SP-1’s control room, infirmary, crew and staff’s quarters, and the Space Port’s docking station.
Seventy-five private guest modules would afford SP-1’s clientele five fun-filled days in space. No amenity would be spared. All suites would be equipped with videophones, Internet uplinks, twenty-four-hour-a-day room service, and private viewports. Activities would include space walks, guided tours of the command center and engine room, and full-body, gravity-free workouts in the gym. For another $30,000, a lucky few could even board a lunar shuttle for a two-day excursion around the moon.
Advertisements were already flooding the global market: SPACE PORT-1: Join the 220 MILE CLUB. Total standard vacation package (including round-trip launch fare) a mere $120,000 per person.
Six months after its plans were revealed, SP-1’s reservation list (nonrefundable 15 percent deposit required) was already two years long, and three more hotel chains were negotiating with HOPE to build a Spotel on the moon.
Undaunted, NASA’s MP-3 program continued moving toward the successful construction of its Mars Base. With the global economy humming and humanity focused on space, the U.S. Congress increased the space program’s budget to levels previously enjoyed by the Defense Department, allowing for the design and construction of a moon base and lunar observatory/radio telescope.
Not to be outdone, young Lucien Mabus and his new bride announced that HOPE was in the process of completing final designs for its own Mars Colony. The first Mars shuttles carrying engineers and supplies would arrive on Mars in winter of 2047-two full years ahead of NASA.
NASA officials were incensed. Lucien Mabus’s plans were clearly pushing the envelope of safety and science, all in the name of profit.
The Mabuses scoffed. For sixty years NASA had kept the exploration of space to itself. Had the program been run efficiently following the Apollo Program, man would already be living on Mars. Given NASA’s time schedule and its propensity for overanalysis, it might take another six decades before the first civilians could experience the Red Planet’s wonders. Like it or not, humankind was evolving, pushing for new sensory experiences in space, and he, Lucien Mabus, cosmic pioneer and heir to the Mabus fortune, was driving the herd.
Unbeknownst to Mabus and the White House, the frontier of space was about to take on an all-new meaning.
A wisp of thought, in the consciousness of existence.
As the transhuman, Bill Raby, I had managed to use telepathy to open the sealed vault of our alien hosts. Heart pounding, I stepped inside the entrance of the ancient megaplex-a dark antechamber that went instantly ablaze with piercing violet lights, projected from multiple angles.
I was being identified.
The antechamber led into a great hall, and somehow I knew that everything man had ever known about his existence was about to change.
They were everywhere, stacked vertically along invisible shelves of energy. Millions of cryogenic glass pods, eight feet tall, four feet across… specimens in a zoological library, a thin layer of frost concealing their contents.
Approaching the nearest pod, I wiped ice from the outer glass and peered inside.
It was a gangly bipedal humanoid, seven feet tall, floating within a clear liquid gel. The hairless skull was elongated, just like mine, only the bands of blood vessels traversing the scalp were infinitely more pronounced. The skin was mouse gray, more silicon than flesh. Protruding from its lipless mouth was a thick tracheal tube, the hose of which connected to a control panel somewhere within the hidden base of the glasslike container.
The nostrils were plugged, as were the earholes. The eyes were wide-open, the pupils twice the size of our own, twinkling a luminescent azure blue.
Star-shaped electrodes pulsating violet flashes were affixed to the crown of the being’s elongated head, the center of its hairless brow, and along the base of its throat.
Kneeling, I scrapped more frost from the glass, hoping to see the lower torso.
The being was hairless and naked, yet contained no noticeable sexual organs. The five fingers of each hand were long and slightly webbed. From my poor vantage, I could not see the toes.
More star-shaped electrodes flashed over the solar plexus, heart, sacrum, and feet. I recognized these seven spots as chakra points, the body’s energy centers. Hindus had long believed the body’s chakra points channeled spiritual energy.
