President Chaney’s ‘vision’ speech moments before Jacob Gabriel’s murder was turned into a rallying cry that recommitted the American public to the space program. Two months after the Gabriel twins’ death President Marion Rallo and a new team at NASA announced its Manned Mission to Mars Project (3-MP), an ambitious 143-billion-dollar project designed to establish a series of habitable hubs on the Red Planet’s surface by 2049.

Mars is the only other planet in our solar system endowed with the natural resources necessary for human civilization. Its soil possesses carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, as well as water frozen as permafrost. Its atmosphere is dense enough to protect inhabitants from solar flares, its solar light ample for greenhouses.

The 3-MP’s mission was based on an exploration approach developed in 1990 by Robert Zubrin, then a senior engineer at Lockheed Martin. The key to the ‘Mars Direct’ plan was to travel as light as possible, with rotating crews establishing habitats that would allow them to live off the land. The soil on Mars would provide for food, water, materials, and rocket fuel.

By September of 2029, the ERV (Earth Return Vehicle), a new multistage rocket constructed using parts from already existing vessels, was sitting on its launchpad in Cape Canaveral, ready for takeoff.

Everything changed six weeks later, when the private sector officially stepped up to the plate.

Project HOPE (Humans for One Planet Earth) was conceived in 2016 by a group of former astronauts, design engineers, and rocket scientists who had left NASA years earlier because of the agency’s ‘good ole boy’ policies. Unlike other private rocket companies, they were not interested in launching satellites. HOPE was interested in space as public recreation.

The key to HOPE’s future was a design for a new space plane, one that could take off horizontally like a jet, rise to its maximum turbojet altitude, then use boosters to rocket the passenger vehicle into space. Once in orbit, the paying public would enjoy twelve hours of zero gravity and a lifetime of memories.

All HOPE needed was a major investor, one that could provide factories and the financial backing to launch the company.

Enter Lucien Mabus, CEO of Mabus Tech Industries.

Lucien had inherited MTI, but was bored with running his father’s company. What he needed was a challenge, something he could call his own.

At the urging of his intoxicating fiancée, Lilith, Mabus struck a partnership with HOPE’s directors. Fourteen months later Project HOPE went public, offering investors an opportunity to claim their stake in the future.

The response from the global market was mind-boggling. Opening at 22, the stock closed the first day of trading at 106. By week’s end it had split twice and was still soaring at $162 a share, making majority stockholder and HOPE’s CEO Lucien Mabus the world’s first trillionaire.