But there was a way. Ion engines were the answer. Extremely high nozzle velocities allow them to deliver more impulse for a given amount of propellant than any traditional rocket. They don’t have the strength to take anything off the surface and it takes a hell of a long time to get anywhere, but nothing matches them for endurance. My company developed a small fleet of ion-propelled spacecraft that stay permanently in space. They could constantly shuttle cargo-landers between the Earth and the Moon, and early on we realized how cheap they were to operate… and how much patience it took to fly on one. While we never had many passenger flights, we began to absorb most of the market for lunar cargo. That’s when they started the second Space Race. 2149 was going to be the year man first landed on Mars. A launch window was chosen by the two competitors, and each would have three attempts to place a manned outpost on the Martian soil before time ran out. The prize would be Mars itself. Colonization rights were set aside for a full hemisphere of the surface, to be chosen by the nation that landed there first. The Americans started planning their Titan Rocket and the Chinese began to develop the equally massive Wenchang Booster System. In the beginning, it could have been anyone’s game.

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	Ignition pg. 3 || 12/3/2010