The palatial mansion of Lilith Mabus, widow of the billionaire Lucien Mabus, stretches along a private ocean lot in Manalapan, a small island town just north of Boynton Beach, Florida. The thirty-one room, three-storey home features a seaside swimming pool complete with waterfall and swim-up bar, two tennis courts, a fitness center, a 1,200-squarefoot grand salon illuminated by a six-thousand-pound crystal chandelier imported from a nineteenth-century French chateau, an observatory dome and an eight-car garage, its floors paved in Saturnia marble. Each of the six bedroom suites has its own balcony facing the Atlantic, the mansion’s windows self-cleaning, made with a thin metal oxide coating electrified to help rainwater to wash away loose particles. A small NiCE electrical station is located on the northern grounds, harnessing power from the sun and wind.

The newest addition to the oceanside luxury home is a configuration of satellite dishes situated in a concrete bunker on the south lawn. The receivers allow Lilith Mabus and her intel team to pirate a network of Pentagon surveillance satellites from the convenience of her home office, though ‘officially’ they merely provide MTI’s CEO the means of communicating with a fleet of space planes owned and operated by her subsidiary company, Project H.O.P.E.

The origins of America’s space program can be traced back to the first Cold War, when the conflicting ideologies of the United States and the Soviet Union blossomed into a full-fledged race into space. President John F. Kennedy raised the bar in 1961 by setting a goal to land an American astronaut safely on the moon—a goal that was accomplished on July 20, 1969.

For the four decades that followed, space exploration floundered.

Part of the problem was a lack of clearly defined goals, exacerbated by President Nixon’s decision to hinge NASA’s future on the space shuttle—a nonexploratory Earth-orbiting vehicle hampered with design flaws that would lead to the fatal Challenger and Columbia disasters. With the rest of the outdated fleet reserved for ‘shuttle duty’ to and from the International Space Station (yet another Earth-orbiting tortoise), the public’s interest in the space program waned.

What NASA officials never knew was that all lunar missions had been permanently scrubbed as part of a top-secret directive that dated back to the Lyndon Johnson era. It was not until 2029 that a private company would break the military industrial complex’s stranglehold on space exploration, the revolt led by a billionaire’s son hell-bent on his own self destruction.