Slingshot : Building the largest machine in human history (3rd Trade Hardback ed.)

Revised Second Edition

NABE Pinnacle Book Achievement Award Winner!

     Slingshot is a love story - about a man, a woman, another man, another woman, some gender-bending...and a machine, the largest ever built. Slingshot is a mystery - about a missing aviatrix, a conspiracy, a true-believer.

     Slingshot is an adventure - about following a dream, the ocean-deep, outer space. Slingshot is about constructing the first space launch-loop stretching 2,600 km between Baker and Jarvis Islands in the Equatorial Pacific. It's about high finance, intrigue, unlimited ambition, heroism, fanaticism, betrayal...and about opening space to the common person. The setting is the day-after-tomorrow. Technology has advanced, the web is more pervasive than ever, but human ambition and greed remain unchanged.

     In Slingshot, Alex Regent, Margo Jackson, and Klaus Blumenfeld reach for the stars as they blend their skills to create the world's first space launch-loop, backed by major software money. Environmental fanatic Lars Watson with his team of young eco-terrorists are funded by opposing financial interests, who will go to any length to halt the project. Reporter Lori Kutcher indiscriminately applies her own personal skills to ensure it is she who reports the unfolding events to a watching world. With a cast of 69, Slingshot takes you from Seattle's world financial district, to the ocean bottom at 5,000 feet off Baker Island, to the edge of space 80 km above. You play with dolphins and battle sharks. You fly and sail and dive, you work and play and love across the vast panorama of an Equatorial Pacific being put to leash to serve humanity's surge into outer space.

     While its accurate science and precise engineering will appeal to hard science-fiction buffs, Slingshot's major focus is the grand journey, the opening of outer space to the common person by men and women who loom larger than life as they work, play, and love.