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2030 AD: Welcome to Midway

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Message-ID: <9839523afa32ecaa4b23e523-02ab523d@mailhub.ell-one.sol>
Date: 23-Apr-2030 17:48:06 -0000 (UTC)
From: "Dr. Pavel Vukovic" <vukovic.pavel.esa@admin.ell-one.sol>
To: "Naomi Fullerton" <nf212@prague.isunet.edu>
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Subject: Welcome to Midway!

My Dearest Nim

Thank you so much for your vid and kind message. Your aunt and I are so proud of you, and so pleased at your choice of career.

The new Prague campus looks beautiful, I must say. I only saw it when it was under construction, but the new Engineering building is particularly fine, isn't it? That one-tonne nodule of asteriron in the foyer looks very nice now it's all polished up. I will be certain to visit once this tour is over. I think old Zhdanov will want me to give a seminar or two, at least!

Yes, I saw the fluff on the feeds about there being a thousand people in space. I've seen the figures, and they counted daily suborbital traffic as well, which in my opinion they shouldn't have done. Still, we're well on the way, and by the end of the year I reckon there should be easily over a thousand people on-orbit. The recent rollout of the Skylon-F3s and Krunichev Volga's has opened the floodgates, and now that the first phases at Clarke and Goddard are almost finished, most of them seem to be headed in my direction!

You're quite right, my dear, and very perceptive, I might add. Uncle Pavel is feeling just as much out of his depth here as you did on your first day at university! You see, pretty much everything has changed since my last tour Out.

You'll have heard all of this from your lecturers and the feeds, no doubt, but humour an old man. You see, it's all down to a misunderstanding. We thought we had a deal, you see. We thought the commercials would do the routine taxi, fetch-and-carry stuff like good little employees, and leave the grand and noble mission of pushing back the frontiers and exploring the solar system to us, the space agencies. We were wrong. Boy, were we wrong. We were stuck out here in our little deep-space ivory tower, and I can tell you, I swear those guys made an audible WHOOSH as they shot past us.

Last trip, I was happy to be a planetary scientist: take my magnetospherics readings and calibrate the micrometeoroid flux detectors. Now, I'm getting used to being town mayor, harbourmaster, agony uncle and cop. As your grandma Effie is fond of saying in her funky twencen way, "Shit just went non-linear, yo".

Last rotation, I was takked to a wall in a single hab eating my dinner from a tube. Now there's a mess hall that seats thirty and we're eating in shifts. The biggest group here are the leapabouts from Bigelow-Boeing, AngloSekur and Mitsu Heavy, who are doing the hard manual work of assembling and maintaining the habs and support systems. They're a roughtough bunch, but good people if you make the effort to get to know them.

The new Samsung habweaver bots are certainly making their jobs easier, but there's still a hellish amount of work to do, like the SPs and the port and depot expansion. Cloverleaf One is finished and beaming to Aristarchus and Medii (I guess you can see it with a good pair of binocs). Once Two is finished, the work at Tycho can start properly.

We've got a deputation due in next week from Virgin Selene -- they're already spooling the fullerribbon for Hoop One in their Cambridge plant. Hey, by next rotation I could be sleeping in a proper bed and working in a proper office! Just have to dodge the crowds of hotel guests, that's all...

Um, who else? Well, there's the brains-trust guys from SARPA in their smart blue uniforms, in transit out to L-2 to build *something*, no-one seems to know exactly what, and they're not telling. Flying saucers? Mars in a week? Who knows?

We've got researchers from the Stern Institute and National Geographic, who want to go down to Medii and take 3Ds of the lava tubes in their native state before they get capped off and pressurised. There's a team from Komatsu and Norsk Astro doing a teleop survey of the bedrock for the Tycho massdriver. All of them are yelling at me because the infrastructure simply can't keep up. The Armadillos are running at full stretch, and the SuperEagles aren't even prepped yet. I'm often in vidconfs with Seoul, Denver and London multiple times a day, alternately pleading and bullying.

The one group I'm pleased *not* to have to deal with is that sad, withered appendage to the National Parks Service. Fortunately they seem to be occupied in LEO earning a few nickels showing tourists round the ISS Historical Exhibit. If one of them showed up here and bleated about a dozer getting too close to one of the Sacred Sites, I'd fully expect him to be summarily bundled out the nearest lock, without the benefit of a suit.

What's happening here isn't formal, it isn't organised by central committees or plotted on gantts. It's noisy, chaotic, disruptive and gloriously, quintessentially human. It doesn't matter what UNSA and Treaty Group pontificate about in their high councils, this stuff is happening *anyway*. Life will out.

Hand on heart, Nim, I love it, and I wouldn't want to be anywhere else right now. This is an honest-to-Heinlein frontier boom town.

"Welcome to Midway, Crossroads of the Solar System!"

Much love to you and your dear mother.

Uncle Pavel

Dr. Pavel Vukovic
Director, ESA Segment/Chief Commercial Liaison
Lagrange-One Station/Facilities Cluster


%%message ends. Thank you for using the Interplanetary InterNet. IIN is a joint venture of AT&T, NTT and BT Space Systems.
What if space travel saw the same revolutionary changes in the next 20 years, as computers and the internet saw in the last 20?

Just a little bit of fun for those interested in space hardware :)
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mattwo's avatar
my only beef I have with this is I don't think AT&T will make interpantary commuications. Dunno who NTT and BT are, but if my guess is right, and they already exist, then I doupt they will either. I don't think samsung has any hold in the robotics industry either. Maybe the guys who made the robot arm type ride for Fast and Furious, as well as the future Harry Potter Park.