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couch in the waiting area. Being one of those people who was uncomfortable just sitting around without something to read, he absentmindedly picked up one of the brochures that described the company’s history.
    The Space Excursions headquarters in Lexington, Kentucky, was everything one would expect of a company founded, owned, and managed by a man who had made his billions in coal. Rich, thick carpet and high, ornately carved ceilings adorned every room in the twenty-five-story building that served as the global headquarters of both Space Excursions and Coal Tech, Inc. The glass and steel building might not be the tallest in town, but it was certainly one of the most striking. A French architect, whose name no one could recall without resorting to looking it up online, had designed the building and reserved the top floor for the company founder and CEO’s pet project, Space Excursions. A dedicated elevator running up the north side of the building served to remind all visitors that they were leaving coal country and entering the twenty-first century.
    Gary Childers, having lived through sixty revolutions of the Earth around the sun, as he liked to put it, was a genuine space geek. Born and raised in Kentucky, he had made his fortune in coal. Of course, having started with a smaller family fortune certainly helped. He made his money and career in mining, shipping, and selling coal, but his heart was always in space. His interest became his business after the success of the first commercial human space flight back in 2004 with the launching of the Paul Allen and Burt Rutan project, SpaceShipOne. While other companies were forming to send people to Earth orbit, he decided to do them one better and offer a commercial ride around the Moon. Space Excursions was born.
    He hired the best and brightest engineers and scientists from America and around the world to make his vision a reality. With a manufacturing facility in Nevada near the Las Vegas Commercial Spaceport, Space Excursions quietly took the lead in the next step of space tourism. Over a thousand people had now paid over two hundred thousand dollars per person to make suborbital flights with his competitors, and several millionaires had paid the Russians to take them to orbit. Now it was his turn. Five people had paid twenty-five million dollars each for a seat on the maiden flight of Dreamscape, the flagship of Space Excursions. Twenty-five more had made deposits for the next flights, the first of which was scheduled to occur within six months of the first. It had taken a little over fifteen years to get to this point, and Childers had selected Paul Gesling to be the pilot and commander for the first flight.
    Thumbing through the rest of the brochure, Gesling saw the usual corporate mumbo-jumbo marketing and financial statements as well as some pretty pictures of the Space Excursions Nevada facility, at which he had practically been living for the last three years. He glanced over the section called “Company at a Glance” and saw listed the other two divisions of Space Excursions that sold their wares to either NASA or the Pentagon. He didn’t have anything to do with those operations. Commercial space was his sole interest. The NASA work was done mostly at the Nevada facility. The work for the Pentagon was performed just outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
    Gesling was still thumbing through the brochure when Childers’s door opened and the company president waved him in. He tossed the brochure back into the stack and entered the office.
    And what an office it was. First of all, it was large. It had the usual corporate furnishings of desk, meeting table, and bookcases, plus obligatory corporate photos along the walls. What made it stand out were the models. Models of virtually every piece of space hardware that had been flown by the United States, the U.S.S.R. or Russia, China, Europe, a few from India and even Iran. They were everywhere. Suspended from the ceiling