The Space Tower
“The space economy will grow at a rate beyond your wildest imagination once we have a foothold.”
Julian Hartsock. “The Space Tower.” Precipice: The Autobiographical Ramblings of Julian Hartsock. (Chapter) A & A Publications, 2123.
Conscientiousness (Industriousness) — (Hartsock, Julian Q.) 96th Percentile:
Industriousness (CI) is the psychometric score assigned to an individual’s predilection for diligence and task focus. People extremely high in Industriousness are adept at executing plans, taking decisive action, and staying on task. Industrious people seldom waste time. Industrious people tend to be useful and responsive in most work environments, but they especially thrive in careers or environments where tasks are demanding, require self-motivation, and reward persistence.
A score in the (96th) percentile, coupled with the distribution profile of psychometric measures herein, suggests an individual uniquely capable of carrying out difficult, complex work on long timelines. This CI score, combined with extremely high scores in Openness (Proper & Intellect), as well as extraordinarily high Intelligence (G) suggests that the subject would function well as an entrepreneur, innovator, builder, or designer.
This one was in my home and in my blood. No test devised could disentangle nature from nurture on this factor, but MM³ didn’t need to in order to get this score right. I hardly know how to be idle. If I were tied down and forced to sit still, I’d use the time to plan what I was going to do the second I was free to work again. I didn’t ever get to know mom well enough to know how faithfully high Industriousness mapped onto her personality, but Dad is even worse than me. Gladstone et al. had me rated in the 98th percentile, with typical minimal feedback: Extremely high CI suggests an exceptional work ethic.
As sure as the turning of the Earth, there was no way the Earth was turning over again before Aiden Hartsock was hard at work. As long as he still drew breath, no rooster was going to get the drop on Dad. And if there was an eight year old who could sleep through those heavy footsteps stomping all over our ancient farmhouse in the dark hours of the morning, it wasn’t this eight year old. This eight year old didn’t want to miss a thing.
Drones went up at all hours, and the data never stopped coming—the way dad liked it. That way he never had to sit with a cup of coffee in the morning without a spreadsheet to look over. Even in the dead of winter, he’d be looking over aggregations of his trove of data on our fields—month-to-month, year-to-year, even trends on five- and ten-year scales. And that was just the first cup of coffee. The second went right into the tumbler, and the tumbler went out the door with him, usually with me in tow.
It made sense that a farmer’s son was the one to build the space elevator. I’m not sure anyone but a farmer’s son could have. And of all the farmers’ sons to build it, it had to be Aiden Hartsock’s son. Surely it was in the genes, but also surely, not too many mothers would have let him get away with driving that work ethic into me with the intensity he did from such an early age, or perhaps he was simply feeding a beast that was already there. However such things can be distilled, the nurture part wasn’t difficult to spot. He used to say the same thing to me, over and over, “Follow me now Julian: watch and learn.”
That directive meant a thousand different things depending on what dad was doing—where to stand, what to watch, what to think about, why. To explain the complexities of operating a family farm long after the era of family farming was over is no easy task, especially when the vast majority of people have been divorced from the intricacies of their food’s production for so long. Thus, in this telling of the story, it’s probably best to begin where the farmer begins.
Preparing the Field:
A farmer has a field.
What should the farmer plant in that field?
It’s a great question, and one that’s a far more difficult question than a person naïve to farming would usually guess. The question is easier for a farmer’s son, because if the family is still farming, that family already has a pretty good clue. Even a novice might come to a decent answer by looking around at the other farms nearby and observing what’s growing there. But let’s take it from the top for Dad’s sake—the way he taught it to me.
Of all the resources the farmer has, the field is paramount. Without it, the farmer is no farmer at all. A good pair of questions to begin with might be: where is that field; and what grows there?
Most of our fields were in Colebrook, Ashtabula County, Ohio, USA, and we grew corn—an organic seed bred for human consumption called Highback. Yellow, sweet, and robust, commonly used for corn chips, meals, snack foods, and cereals.
If the farmer still wants to be in business next year, the balance of the crop must be sold to a buyer at a profit that clears the sum of all the farmer’s overhead—fuel inputs, fertilizer, machine costs and maintenance, mortgages (if any), family bills, etc. This means two things—the farmer must know the market for the crop, and the field must be able to meet the buyer’s expectation in volume and quality.
To put it succinctly: the field must yield.
To ensure that this happens, the farmer must not only know the proper seed to sow, the time of year to sow it, and the intricacies of doing so, the farmer must know the soil.
For Aiden Hartsock, the soil was everything. All that data was information he wanted, but he was in his mid-thirties when I was born, which meant he had decades of experience in those fields. He’d been poring over readouts, but more than anything, the numbers—mostly multispectral and hyperspectral readouts—confirmed for him what his senses were already telling him. He’d walked those fields with Pop from the time he was my age. He knew the feel of the soil and the plants and the air.
Farming, he used to say to me, is a yearlong gamble. And we Hartsocks had been placing that same bet every year for generations. We bet that we can grow something the market will need, and we will deliver it on time in sufficient volume that we can cash in and buy the inputs for next year’s crop.
The most crucial input for us, always, was the seed.
I was eight the year Dad decided to teach me about the principles of farming, which, to him, were indistinguishable from the principles of economics. He told me I was going to test a new crop to see how it would do in Colebrook. “Maybe we shouldn’t grow corn anymore, Julian. What do you think, could we grow a different crop?”
“I don’t know, Dad,” I said. “What crop?”
“That’s the right question,” he answered, and he plopped a large pouch of seeds down on the kitchen table—dried peas.
“We don’t grow peas in the garden.”
“This year we do,” Dad replied. “I’m setting aside a test plot just for you, Julian. Those are your seeds, and this is your logbook. I’d like you to keep track of all your time, the plants, the weather—everything you think is important to know.”
It was an empty paper notebook with a green cover. I took both the notebook and the peas upstairs to my bedroom, tucked them away safely in my top drawer, and started thinking about how to grow peas. I’d absorbed enough knowledge about farming growing up on a farm that I knew different crops required different conditions to thrive and behaved in different ways. But we didn’t grow peas, so I began where I often began—videos. How to Grow Peas in Your Garden; Easy Peasy, Growing Your Own Produce; A Kids Guide to Gardening: Peas.
Peas are a cold-weather crop, I learned, so I’d need to start them early. Dad knew this, of course, and had handed me my seeds just about a month before they needed to go in the ground.
We sat and we talked about it at dinner.
“Before you grow anything, Julian,” he told me, “the field must be prepared.”
We read about it together—what types of soil peas thrived in, how it needed to be prepared, row spacing, seed spacing, and, in our garden, based on the number of seeds I had, how to calculate the space we’d need to plant them.
When the time came, Dad said, he would till the garden, and I would measure and mark the rows. Everything would go in the book.
A child planting peas in Ashtabula may seem light years away from building a space elevator, but many of the principles are the same. They are economic principles. The market must exist for a space elevator to be practical. The inputs are staggering; thus, the yield must at least promise to be more staggering in the long run. That much is an easy story to tell.
That story begins with the bounty of our vast solar system. The entirety of the Earth is so tiny compared to the total mass within our solar system it’s difficult to envision. The math here is not exact, but a fairly decent way to think about it, from a perspective of mass, is that the whole solar system’s mass is an elephant, and we are a flea. The entirety of the Earth is that flea, mind you—the core, the mantle, the crust, the oceans, the atmosphere, the ice at the poles, all the volcanoes, mountains, and canyons—all that: a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam, floating around the ass of an elephant.
The relevant question with that fact in mind, is how big is the world’s economy, because a flea can have no designs on devouring an elephant. The math simply doesn’t work.
But it isn’t even as simple as that, because even if one could snap one’s fingers and make a space elevator appear, it would still be far more difficult to go get gold from an asteroid than it would be to get it from a gold mine in Tanzania. To Dad’s point, the field must be prepared.
One of the oldest American idiomatic expressions for government or corporate waste is the metaphor for a “bridge to nowhere,” which I think may have been coined by a newspaper regarding a boondoggle of a bridge built a couple centuries ago in California. But if we say for the sake of argument that a bridge was built to a part of California that no one wanted to go to, the other side of that bridge was still somewhere—some extremely remote part of California, presumably.
A space elevator, on the other hand, is far more of a bridge to nowhere than anything one could build terrestrially. There is no resource of obvious value in proximity to the Earth—not even air—so what exactly is the point? The answer is that if you only build a space elevator, there is no point. Relative to the existing space economy at the start of the Clearwater Project, we were building the world’s largest bridge to the world’s tiniest island. For a bridge that large, the economy on the other side of it was non-existent.
That field would not yield.
Further, imagine if you will that somehow, magically, there were an asteroid in the belt made of pure corn. And let’s also stipulate that it was both relatively easy and affordable to go and retrieve all that corn, shuttle it down our space elevator to Florida, and bring it all to market the following year. What exactly would the implications be?
For the Hartsock family, other farms like ours, and the corporate growers in competition with us, such a massive shift in the nature of such a huge market would be a disaster. But it would change the amount of corn consumed worldwide by very little. There are, after all, only so many mouths to eat all that space corn. People aren’t going to completely alter their diet to be 100% corn overnight simply because there’s a market glut.
I use the corn example, because it’s a little easier for ordinary people to follow the corn than the raw materials in space in similar abundance—such as gold, titanium, iron, platinum, cobalt, carbon, silica, et cetera; but the principle remains the same. There are only so many corporations that use those raw materials as inputs for their products. And it’s a very relevant question to ask whether it’s easier to get those materials here on Earth.
When you tell an international conglomerate of banks that you think it would be a very good investment for them to give you trillions of dollars to build a space elevator, they are going to ask you questions like this. I know this from experience. I swear I had to catch myself from telling them, “Dear bankers, I promise you won’t be getting peas.”
Sowing:
I did my calculations in the book, settling on standard recommendations while considering the number of peas I had in the bag. Four rows, eighteen inches apart, four pea plants per foot. Dad’s garden was gigantic to an eight year old. It seemed like the rows went on forever, and even with the soil tilled, Dad still insisted on my taking the garden fork down the row in a straight line so that there was a little trough to fill in over my peas after I’d sown them. While I worked, he was preparing his fencing, digging posts with the old tractor’s auger and laying out sections for the other early crops. It was April, so it was still cold, but we worked to keep warm and had hot soup for lunch.
I was excited. I loved the idea that this miracle of life was just outside our door. Put a seed in the ground and nurture it, and months later, we got food. Real food you could eat. We didn’t eat the corn crop. That got used almost exclusively as an input for processed organic products that were primarily corn-based, but Dad always had several rows of sweet corn that he liked in our garden. When it was time for me to plant my peas, Dad was still a few weeks away from sowing many of those warmer-weather plants in the garden, but that was the miracle: select the right seed for your area and your taste, and you could eat your fill of what you liked. You had to tend to it, though. Dad taught me that.
So I sowed my rows all by myself, setting down a yardstick and measuring out each space. Dad had told me that if I wasn’t accurate spacing the peas I might run out. So I was meticulous: pea seed, three inches, pea seed, three inches, pea seed …
“Now what?” Dad asked me when I’d finished planting.
“Now we wait,” I answered.
“Have you logged your hours, Julian?”
I hadn’t.
“How much waiting do you see me do around here?” he asked me.
“Not that much.”
“Not that much,” he agreed, shaking his head. “Go log those hours. You won’t stay a farmer long if you don’t know what your time is worth.”
I knew the fool’s version of farming at that point. Plant a seed and wait. Collect crop. Good enough for an eight year old.
What I didn’t know was the economics of it. What sort of market was there for peas? Did I have a buyer lined up? How much work would it take me to deliver my crop to a buyer between now and late June when I expected to harvest?
But I was on my way. Dad commended me for sticking with it, planting all four rows, measuring so that I didn’t run out of seeds, keeping my lines straight, not losing focus, finishing the job. I’d done good. I logged that in my book.
The logbook I kept at A & A was slightly more sophisticated. To be fair, I wasn’t strictly the bookkeeper as much as the audience for the actuaries who did keep track of our inputs. The world’s economy couldn’t shift overnight the way it might if we hauled in our hypothetical corn asteroid. We needed to shift it far in advance in order to get the project functioning.
The inputs for our space tower were two of the most expensive going—energy and metals. We needed both in proportions that were going to shift markets. Imagine the steel bill for a shipyard building a single oceanic cargo carrier. Now think about stacking them on top of each other until you got to space. That analogy wasn’t exactly one-to-one, because our designers and engineers put a lot of thought into how to reduce materials inputs per section. It isn’t a terrible way to think about it, though.
Essentially, we were building an enormous prefabricated tunnel and stacking it vertically. Through that hollow tunnel, our elevator car would travel up and down along magnetic rails. The sections themselves, too, would support each other through an intricate system of magnetics that buoyed the tower from the ground up. That network of magnetic fields required a phenomenal stream of electricity that could never be cut. Put that way, it was far more like we were using the tower itself to build a framework for an intricate cylindrical tapestry of magnetics that spanned from the ground to space. Thus, electromagnetic energy was a far more important component than any physical aspect of the tower. We were such an energy hog that we could have pulled the supply from every data center on the East Coast and still have been wanting.
Those types of demands move markets. Make demands like that, and bankers are apt to say things like: “All this seems ambitious, Mr. Hartsock, but what sorts of returns can we expect if you pull this off?”
In the space elevator business, Dad doesn’t plop a sachet of seeds on your kitchen table. The seeds don’t even really exist. You need to build power plants and foundries and compete with every shipbuilder, construction firm, military contractor, and commercial manufacturer in the hemisphere for raw materials. And you need to do it about five years in advance, because they all have contracts already.
What I told the bankers was this: “The space economy will grow at a rate beyond your wildest imagination once we have a foothold. We will dominate raw materials markets, and the markets we don’t dominate outright will need to pay us for access to space.”
And yeah, I had estimates in my sophisticated logbooks. It was going to be the most transformative two decades in the history of the world’s economy. A bridge to a post-scarcity world.
Growing:
Having planted seeds, there’s a special joy to see that first tiny hint of green spearing its way through the surface of the soil. On a cool spring morning, there are few better feelings no matter the age of the sower. Germination is a miracle, a reminder of the uncanny, inherent force that life is. A spark among the right conditions can release remarkable arrangements and transferences of energy, and in the case of the plant, ordered growth that will eventually yield sustenance.
Even at eight, the magic of this process was not lost on me. There wasn’t much else magical about my young life in rural Ohio, so I saw it clearly whenever something magical emerged. It wasn’t just the peas in the garden. I waited with even greater anticipation this year as the brown of the rain-soaked fields began to show their first hints of green, the tiny spears of corn stalks beginning to poke up from the earth, each day growing darker, taller, more prominent, changing our landscape.
By the time the corn was starting to come up, my peas needed to climb. Dad and I discussed this quite a bit. The pea plant puts out tendrils that grasp taller plants or structures around them, facilitating the plant’s crawl upward, toward more sunlight and elevation above the moist surface of the ground. So together, Dad and I settled on a plan to use bird netting, stringing it down each row, so the tendrils could grab and climb upward. Dad helped me to estimate how high the peas would climb, and then he left me to figure out how to configure the netting.
That year, we were beset by heavy thunderstorms earlier in the spring than usual. High winds whipped across the fields and through the garden. My netting, suspended on bailer’s twine from bamboo stakes, held up surprisingly well. Dad helped me to tighten the twine after the wind pulled a bit more slack into the line than we wanted, causing our netting to sag. The peas, though, seemed quite content.
In late May, Ashtabula County had a set of tornadoes come through. We watched from the safety of the storm shelter as the drones monitored the horizon until they too had to come in. Then it was satellite feeds, weather apps, and the fixed cameras on the house and barn.
“I hope it doesn’t get the garden, Dad,” I remarked. “The peas.”
“The corn,” he said back to me, “the corn, Julian.”
“Yeah, the corn,” I agreed, the weight of the problem sinking in.
That is the bet. All your crop, inputs and outputs, field and yield. And fickle nature comes along and decides one day whether to drop an F-4 tornado onto your only real asset.
We Hartsocks won that bet that day. Our immediate neighbors did as well. Others weren’t so lucky. That set of storms killed six people, which made it into media reports. I never did get an estimation on the number of acres of crop lost to the storm, but images of the multiple touchdowns streaking across the county showed it to be significant.
My peas, though, continued to climb.
There wasn’t much to see in Florida over the first five years of the project. I suppose those were the sowing days, building those foundries and manufacturing facilities that would put together section after section after section of the tower until it was all solidly locked magnetically into place. People didn’t come to see us build power plants, dredge the coastline or drill down deep into raw bedrock to anchor our base.
People didn’t come until the growing days. Can you blame them? It was the same excitement as seeing the shoots poking out of the soil. Our logisticians had done phenomenal work. Their work never would have happened without our bankers and lawyers hammering together the contracts and financing, all of which would have been for nothing if we didn’t have the best team of engineers in the world to make the structure not only conceivable but buildable.
Almost exclusively, the Florida Space Ladder was composed of identical segments that stacked all the way to space. There were a handful of unique sections, though, which were specifically designed for people to use—three atmospheric research levels, which brought in significant government science grants; Winds Over the World, a tourist level forty thousand feet above sea level; as well as six maintenance access levels; and finally there were the two most critical levels—the foundational segment, which would serve as the primary ground-level port upon the Space Ladder’s completion; and the terminal segment, which would interface in space with Apogee, humanity’s first genuine spaceport.
So in addition to the added engineering complexity of lifting any connecting section, there was the fact that our very first lift would be the terminus, a special design. People came to witness the lift, both because it was the first and because it was the one that would be up there, the final link in the chain to our spaceport. That section would spend its life connecting us to the heavens.
There were sixteen different assembly bays along the coast manufacturing the steady stream of space tower segments. The closest manufacturing bay north of Clearwater had the specialized personnel and equipment to assemble the terminal segment. So our first trip on the water was a much shorter journey than the regular sections, all of which were transported half-submerged along the coast, each by a flotilla of barges, tugs, and airbags—making their way from our coastal manufacturing facilities to the waters near the Space Ladder’s foundation just outside Clearwater.
There, the segments would then be lowered onto a submerged set of magnetic tracks that extended out onto the floor of the bay. Once secured on the tracks, only a fraction of the segment was still visible above the water’s surface. The magnetic rails would then draw each section along the newly dredged channel that ran directly to the base of the space tower itself. These magnetic runners, concealed from sight as they were, deep beneath the channel, gave the appearance that the segments were almost swimming into place of their own accord, pieces of a seemingly self-assembling space tower. And they would travel along these runners for nearly a half mile, until they came to the back end of the channel. Once they were in position, the section would be mechanically lifted ninety degrees until the section was vertical to the space tower’s base. There, the four base pillars would magnetically hoist each section into place, nearly four hundred meters above sea level. Then the process would repeat, over and over again, for five straight years, until that first terminal segment was in space.
The day the terminus rose—that first green shoot emerging from beneath the Earth—I was almost as amazed by the monumental size of the crowd that gathered as the spectacle of the lift itself. We allowed ordinary people to come onto A & A’s grounds to witness the start of our tower’s climb to the heavens. The aerial shots from the company’s drones that day reminded me of Dad’s flock of data drones, hovering over the fields in the early spring, noting the colors, the hints of green.
The AI estimated two-point-seven million people came over the course of those first two days. We had underestimated the size of the spectacle. Our security, both human and automated, was woefully inadequate. There were many nervous executives, myself included, when the scale of the crowd grew self-evidently problematic over the course of that first early morning—as though we and the entire engineering team didn’t have enough to worry about.
Yet I didn’t hear a word about it until nearly a week later, when I requested the security reports for those first two days. I was stunned. There were no reports of major disruptions, no violence, nobody even tripping and falling to the ground. So I summoned my Chief of Security for the main campus, Wes Capobianco.
“I’m looking at these numbers and then the summary of security incidents. Wes, is this some kind of miracle, or what?”
“Mr. Hartsock, we’re working on a logistics plan to make sure people who come to watch can do so safely as the build progresses.”
“Yes, that’s all fine, Wes, but how do you explain this?”
He shrugged and said, “We sent out a PSA to every device on the campus—everyone who came in. We told people to be courteous, that the engineers were hard at work and that any disruptions on the grounds would make it harder for you people to do your jobs getting the tower to space. Everyone just behaved.”
To my dying day, I’ll chalk up that miracle to the miracle of germination—the wondrous magnetic pull of witnessing so many green shoots poking their way out of the earth.
Harvest:
Inch by inch, the peas pulled themselves up by their tendrils, reaching skyward. There was work as they grew, two thorough weedings of the rows, and, yes, I measured each plant in two-week increments to track progress. I added compost once, and Dad helped me to test the soil three times throughout the growing season. I noted when blossoms and pods began to appear, and I even made observations about which rows were doing better and talked through some theories with Dad about why.
As the weeks moved along, I started to get anxious about eating my peas, reaping what I had sown. Maybe it was all a cruel trick to get me to eat my vegetables, but I almost couldn’t resist picking a pod or two just to try them, and I didn’t even like peas.
The tallest plant grew to three and a half feet by late June. As I walked up and down the rows, filled with pride at the crop I’d nurtured to near-maturity, I almost couldn’t believe how many pods there appeared to be, three and even four large pods on some plants. I estimated an average for how many peas per pod and then counted my peas before they hatched. It was a huge number to me—several thousand. What a bounty!
Dad and I compared a few video guides on when and how to harvest peas. I didn’t want to screw it up at the end by picking them too early or leaving them out too long. I wanted to get it right, so I leaned on Dad’s expertise.
Each time I asked him whether it was time to pick the peas, he’d never give me a straight answer, “What do you think, Julian? It’s your crop. You’ve got to make the call.”
I followed the signs the videos told us to look for, fully grown pods that were still green.
When I told Dad I thought I was ready, he told me to pick a few and taste them. Right out of the pods they were sweeter than any peas I’d ever eaten—the same sort of sweet as Dad’s sweet corn from the garden. I was ecstatic, but I couldn’t pick them yet: all the guidelines said to pick peas in the morning. So I waited till the following day, a rainy late-June morning. Dad asked me what I wanted to do. It was raining pretty hard out there.
“I want to go pick them,” I told him. “I’ve got rain boots and a raincoat. Plus, I’d rather deal with rain than horse flies.”
“Good boy,” Dad said. “Off you go then.”
He gave me a bin and a bowl with a nice handle on it and sent me out the door.
I was picking pea pods in the rain for about an hour before Dad must have felt bad about my being out there alone. He took time away from his other work to help me harvest. I’d made it about three-quarters of the way down the second row when he showed up. I was soaked to the point my pants had saturated through, the water running down my legs into my boots. I might as well have been barefoot out there, but I wanted to keep picking.
We finished about an hour later. All those pods barely filled that bin a quarter full. My great bounty.
We went inside and dried off, and Dad insisted I log my work before I began shelling the pods. As soon as I was dry and my work logged, I started figuring out how to get my eight-year-old hands to pick those pods open without sending those precious little green orbs flying in all directions. Patience was the word of the afternoon.
Slowly, slowly, slowly that bowl with the handle began to fill with peas. The bounty at once became real, in that I finally had peas, but at the same time it seemed less and less significant. With the pods stripped away, the volume became increasingly less satisfying.
I couldn’t finish them all that night. I had to pick back up the following day, until finally, early that afternoon, I’d almost filled up that collecting bowl with peas. I measured them out carefully, nearly thirteen cups.
“Well, Julian, what do you think?” Dad asked me when I gave him a report.
“I think we should eat them for dinner,” I told him. “I think they’ll be pretty good.”
“That sounds like a great plan,” he told me. “I’m looking forward to it.”
In Florida, too, there was work to do as our tower continued to grow. We couldn’t relax for one second once we had the infrastructure for the build churning. With the tower now climbing skyward, we had another mission—to build a space economy that made the tower’s existence practical and profitable. There were two camps within A & A as we were working through the complex initial financing concerns. The first camp believed that our primary business should be charging prospective corporate partners and governments for affordable access to space. That was a twenty-five-year road to profitability with a lower risk profile. The second camp argued for leveraging the cost advantage we had with access to the elevator to build out the most complete profile of astronautical products in history. That strategy aspired to build a division of A & A that dominated every aspect of the emergent space economy—from shipbuilding and zero-G construction to mining outposts to space-based solar arrays to scientific research. Camp 2 argued that we should have a hand in everything. That was a much higher risk profile, but our partners almost unanimously agreed it would be foolish not to leverage our great advantage for a faster return. The management of the space tower was then segmented into A & A Terrestrial, while the space-bound elements of the project shifted to A & A Cosmos.
At first, the reaction from our rocket-fueled competitors was cautious optimism: nobody really believed we could build the Ladder. Not until they saw it climbing with their own eyes. Initially, when those first few segments began to rise, the entire industry was giddy at the prospect. Access on that scale meant they could plan to grow their space operations exponentially once the Florida Space Ladder started sending up cars. A completed space tower would mean that they could send up personnel and cargo from Earth on an industrial scale every few hours. Projects that would’ve taken decades to complete could be finished in months. Then, A & A Cosmos made our initial pronouncements, laying out our intentions to be the major player in the space economy to come. The reaction from the astronautics firms already entrenched in space was deep trepidation, even threats to counter with anti-trust suits.
Up in space, though, for five years, there was no sign of us—no rockets paving the way, no satellite delivery service, no lunar shuttles, no missions to Mars. And I suppose there grew a quiet comfort with the thought that they still had time to stretch out into a dominant position, expecting that it would be some time before we could get a foothold. All the while, the Space Ladder climbed, continuing, inexorably, to pierce the sky, section by section, day by day.
They had no conception of our designs. In six months we would have Apogee framed. Within the year, we would have the first working shipyard in space. Components would come up that ladder in a steady flow with the engineers, welders, fitters, and shipwrights to assemble them into a fleet that would quintuple the number of humanity’s spaceships within two years of Apogee’s opening.
We had pop-up mining outposts already under construction in Florida. Vehicles were being designed and fabricated—specialty gear, space robots, and astronauts by the thousand, all with specialized training and designations. We had gold and precious metals deposits targeted for extraction and delivery, and more importantly, contracts on the table and ready for signatures. A & A Cosmos would be bringing in money almost immediately and delivering materials at rates our competitors would never be able to match.
It was all out there for us—an entirely open field, ripe for the picking.
Market:
Unsurprisingly, I wasn’t much of a cook for an eight-year-old. Dad was a great cook, though. He opted to lightly steam and judiciously butter and salt my bounty of peas. They made for a nice side dish alongside a sauteed chicken thigh and mashed potatoes. I had seconds of my garden peas and so did Dad.
When dinner was over, he asked me for my logbook, and once that was on the table, he walked over to the freezer, and he pulled out a bag of organic peas he must’ve bought from the grocery store—a big bag that had to have been five pounds or so. To my eyes, it looked like that bag might have filled my collecting bowl about three-quarters full.
Dad was never a warm man, but neither was he cruel. What he said to me that night wasn’t to wound, to belittle, or to shake my morale. It was more to educate me on the scope of how far I had to go.
He explained to me that everybody’s work had a price, including mine, and he showed me what he’d paid for that bag of peas. Then he explained that the grower only made a fraction of that price, because the grocer and the distributor needed to be paid for their work too. And we sat together and went through the calculations—what was my bounty worth per pound of peas, and even what each pea was worth, roughly, if we presumed that bag he’d purchased to be a good market cost. Fractions of a penny per pea was the answer. All that work I’d done boiled down to about the same measly cost of that one bag of peas we could have bought at the grocery store.
Then he took it a step further. We went through the book and added up our hours, and after we’d subtracted the cost of our inputs—the bird netting and the seeds themselves—we calculated my earnings per hour.
I wasn’t upset. In fact, Dad and I had a good laugh about it. “So what is your expert recommendation, Julian,” he asked me, “taking everything into account, do you think we should stop growing corn and grow peas next year?”
“No, I do not,” I told him. “I think that would be a disaster, Dad.”
“I do believe I’m going to take your recommendation, son.”
“They were the best peas I’ve ever had. I will say that, though.”
“They were the best peas I’ve ever had too,” Dad said, nodding his approval. “I’m proud of the work you’ve done. You definitely earned every fraction of a penny you’d have made us, Julian.”
We ate those peas for the rest of the week. They were so good we grew them again the following year and the year after that.
A & A’s stock price on the day the Florida Space Ladder opened was so obscene it was hard for me to fathom it. There are cases of absurd overvaluation in history, usually with emerging technologies. Similar overvaluations occur with fraud. I asked around. I had some serious financiers on the board, as well as friends of the same ilk outside the company. None of them were even thinking about selling.
In the decade since we’d secured the initial funding tranche, the space economy had grown nearly ten-fold. The Florida Space Ladder wasn’t a bridge to nowhere anymore. If anything, the initial investments looked shockingly modest compared to the returns we were calculating for, especially if A & A Cosmos hit our benchmarks in the first couple years.
Before any of our corporate partners, the financiers, and the government players from around the world came to cut the ribbon, I and a few of the principals had the chance to go up. It had been the policy of the builders and logisticians—a policy I endorsed as well—that no one be allowed up without a specific contracted construction purpose. There was a tight schedule, and horizon gazers offered zero benefit toward helping us hit that mark.
There were so many people on the ground who deserved to go up with us. I cut a hard line at board members and company officers for that first unofficial ascent. It was an easy line to draw, and everyone would get their turn eventually.
It wasn’t my first time in space, so for me, the awe I felt was more about the moment than the truth of that almost sacred sight one is greeted by at the cusp of our cosmic shore. The last time I’d seen that terminal section with my own eyes was in the few weeks after it rose from the channel beneath us in Clearwater. Now there was an elevator car in it, and we’d begun to float inside.
After the compartment was sealed and a pressure lock secured, the doors opened to a weightless environment. Our board and officers, almost exclusively space virgins, all transformed into laughing children who’d once dreamed of being astronauts. Space had that effect—of turning grown men and women instantly into giddy kids, not unlike jumping on trampolines or lighting off fireworks, and it was fun to see which seventy-year-old financiers still had a kid in them.
I and a few of the topside coordinators helped our VIPs along, up one level to the rudimentary beginnings of Apogee—to the windows. This, after all, was a 22nd Century pier, neither land nor water.
That night, my eyes gazed back from that pier, down to the Earth, toward land and toward water. Outlined in bright lights against a penetrating darkness, I could see the long shoreline of Lake Erie. I imagined that among all those lights down there, which from this height had all merged into one dull orange hue, I somehow could make out a field just to the south of that long shore. And I thought for a moment, that maybe, somewhere down there, a few rows of peas were beginning to climb.
Turning toward the other window, gazing out into space, the reality of the moment set in. A farmer has a field. My God, this was our field now. No one but a farmer’s son with a CI in the 96th percentile ever would’ve believed it possible. The yield of this field will be unfathomable. The very Earth herself irrevocably changed.