The interiors of these spinning settlements were maintained to provide pleasant weather and beautiful landscapes that were often more pleasing than what remained on Earth. The habitat of choice for humans turned out to be giant pressurized cylinders, spheres, and tori that spun to create gravity. While early visionaries imagined cities on the surface of Mars or the moon, the first outposts in those places faced debilitating challenges-the economic hardships of living on Mars were as severe as the Martian climate. Even so, getting from Earth to near-Earth asteroids or Mars could take weeks. Fusion-powered propulsion systems allowed for quicker trips through the solar system than was possible via the rockets used in the Apollo era.

When humans travelled to and from orbit, however, they still used spacecraft that were little changed from the ones developed in the early 21st century. The traffic on the space elevators only went up. Since it was much easier to send mass up than to bring it back down, massless power and data were the main products sent from space. The physics and economics of space elevators also shaped the flow of goods. Used as space elevators, they reduced the cost of lifting mass into space by orders of magnitude, though they suffered from being relatively slow-it might take a week for a cargo pod to climb into geostationary orbit. The clean and virtually limitless power from these satellites helped stand economic theories on their heads humanity lived in an era of abundance, not scarcity.ДЄnother connection to space was more tangible.Д®normous ribbons of crystalline graphite reached from port facilities along the equator to massive counterweights in orbit. Those stations, glinting like diamonds in geostationary orbits that are rarely eclipsed by the Earth, collect solar radiation with kilometers-wide arrays and then convert that power to microwave radiation that gets beamed to antennas on the surface. For instance, the economies of those countries relied on electric power beamed from orbiting stations. Representatives from Alaska, Finland, and Patagonia returned to a planet unbreakably linked to space. Listen to the podcast about the Engineering of the Lunar Module The problem was that space technologies were so commonplace and so critical to human society that it was impossible for anyone alive to fully appreciate the triumph.ДЄfter the commemoration, the invited guests returned to homes shaped by space engineering far beyond what the Apollo engineers could accomplish, but which had been foreseen in the first decades after the first Moon landing. ItвЂ™s not that space exploration had become unimportant over the intervening centuries-quite the opposite. If the Moon landing in 1969 was a cause for worldwide awe, the 500th anniversary in 2469 was somewhat subdued. It was exactly 500 years to the moment that he first said those words.

After an interval, Neil ArmstrongвЂ™s familiar lines crackled through the radio. The dignitaries in spacesuits stood in a moment of radio silence, gazing across the powdery, footprint-marked field of Tranquility Base Monument.

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