It seemed there wasn’t much left to do in the way of space pioneering. There was a Space Platform, and there were bases on the moon, and drone ships had been out to Mars and sunward past Venus. There were new and better fuels, and the problem involving the Van Allen belts of highly charged atomic particles seemed to have been solved. It looked as if the rest of the job of conquering space would be just plain, slogging hard work of a strictly routine nature. This process would be improved a little, and that would be developed a little further, and progress toward the stars would be made by inches. But things never work out simply. There is always something unexpected and usually disastrous turning up. Just when things looked brightest, somebody worked out the causes of solar flares and devi
