Introduction to "The Company Wars"

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In the early twenty-first century, starprobes went out, launched by Sol Station, which diring the interval of the starprobes' travel, became a great economic power in Earth's politics.

Sol Station, a self contained orbiting "multifactory," pulled in metals, minerals, and ice from the asteroids, abandoning the practice of lofting anything up from Earth's gravity well. Since the majority of industrial cost on Earth was either in fighting gravity (lifing and transporting heavy objects) or heating things up and cooling them down (smelting and refrigeration), once a spacestation achieved the machinery to separate and smelt metals by solar power (thus becoming a "multifactory," a combination of industries all locked together in the production of goods for export to Earth (medicines, electrical power, scientific data, and processes) and for its own consumption (machinery, construction materials, oxygen from ice, and foodstuffs (from orbiting fishtanks and farms operating at industrial pace thanks to total environment control possible in such facilities.)

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