Star Svensdotter is building a habitat for a space colony in Terra-Luna-Sol orbit at Lagrange Five, and she’s by God going to finish it on schedule, no matter how often fanatical Luddites, Space Patrol generals, Terran Alliance bureaucrats and her sister Charlie try to get in the way. You hear?

I wrote this book in response to the Challenger blowing up, a story about a space program that worked. Rage is a great motivator. I love you-are-there books, and I especially love you-are-there-in-space books. The first sf I ever read was Between Planets by Robert Heinlein. Man, I wanted to be Don Harvey. I sure as hell didn’t want to be `whither-thou-goest Isobel,’ but that’s a topic for another day.

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Book excerpt

Extra vehicular activity had not always been such a first
fine careless rapture. My duty at Luna Base had been so frantic with activity that I had had no time for the esthetics and so when I first went spacewalking at Ellfive I was agog with anticipation, thrilled at the prospect of occupying the all time front row seat. I, Star Svensdotter, Mrs. Svensdotter’s little girl from the wrong side of Kachemak Bay, would have the universe at my feet and, moreover, someone was actually paying me to look. I might even write a poem in celebration of the event, dedicated to my father in elegant prose.

“On First Looking Into The Face Of The Universe” (heroic
couplets, I thought, or perhaps an Italian sonnet) would have to wait. I spent most of my first EVA dodging space cranes, reaction tugs, honeycomb clusters of 30,000 kilogram steel and aluminum external fuel tanks from the first STS shuttles, half finished solar cells and free floating stockpiles of LIMSH. True, it was all left motionless relative to the orbit of Ellfive. What weren’t motionless were approximately one thousand solarscooters which, zipping through the maze with happy abandon, took turns trying to run me down. I ducked one that came back for a sporting second try and a torqueless wrench set in motion by a careless rigger tumbled so close to my visor that my first EVA was very nearly my last. “I felt like I’d wandered into the middle of a vidgame,” I told O’Hara, “and after I made it back inside alive and changed my shorts I told a few people how I felt, and I fired a few others, just to get their attention.”

Dad said you couldn’t have done anything better to endear yourself to the average Ellfive working stiff than to pin the ears back on a few jet jockeys, Elizabeth said.

“I wasn’t trying to be endearing, Elizabeth, I just wanted to survive my next EVA.”

“That must have been when you set up the Warehouse Ring,” O’Hara said.

“Yeah, I moved all construction materials to an orbit sixteen klicks out from Ellfive’s axial equator. Then I restricted scooter traffic to twenty four klicks an hour within that ring and set minimum altitude at three hundred meters above Ellfive’s surface. I pulled a reaction tug from the Lagrange-Luna route and rededicated it full time to moving materials at minimum speed from the Warehouse Ring to Ellfive proper on a strictly need to use now basis. The logisticians squawked but I could pretty much do what I wanted to back then.”

So what’s different now?

“Quiet, brat. And then Simon worked up a traffic control program to monitor and police all traffic, jetpack, scooter, tug, shuttle, TAVliner, Express, mass driver capsules, before I went EVA again.”

And then Paddy wrote “The Day Star Went Nova.”

“What,” O’Hara said, “is that a poem?”

A song, Elizabeth told him, and a good one, too.

I hoped she hadn’t heard the same version I had.