A writer is a sponge, and not just on the pocketbooks of friends and relatives. A writer absorbs information from many sources, processes it all through a particular world view, and creates something new and different. Below is only a partial list of all whose minds and works I have tapped for this novel. Thanks to
Ray Bradbury, for being an inspiration and for loving Space as much as I do, if not more.
Tom Brosz, erstwhile editor of The Commercial Space Report, for absolutely invaluable information about the various spacecraft used in this book and for providing me with contacts in the aerospace field.
Bevin McKinney, for information about his Roton orbital helicopter.
Bruce H. Neuffer, for refining the concept of the fully assembled SSTO space station.
Oliver P. Harwood, for writing me about how the space bureaucracy suffers from the 'not invented here' syndrome.
Max Hunter, for having a truly revolutionary vision of single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft.
Gary Hudson, for hanging in there all these years. If Delos D. Harriman lives, it is within you.
Samuel Edward Konkin III, for his absolutely nail's-head analysis of the "Space Programme" and for all the wonderful quotes I had to choose from.
Tim Kyger, at the office of Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, for filling me in on who truly controls NASA's fate.
Richard Kyle, for strategic ground support and owning the best bookstore in the world, bar none.
Gary Lane and Charles Mason for information about airmovers.
Roy Lavender for stories about the Apollo project and the glory that once was NASA.
Brad Linaweaver for promoting this book wherever and whenever he could, and for getting me into movies as a diversion from my writing.
William O'Malley, whose Macintosh program Text Retriever recovered several pages of work that I thought were lost to a system crash and an unopenable file -- bless you!
Jerry Pournelle, for all the wonderful information he has on his GEnie® RoundTable, which helped immeasurably with the plotting of various conspirators' flights.
J. Neil Schulman, for seeing early on the importance of this novel and for inventing -- and perfecting -- the paperless books concept so that this novel could bypass the watchful dragons in American publishing.
Sherwood Smith, for providing valuable insight into the book's structure and hours of constructive criticism, for which I am extremely grateful.
Sean Sullivan, for letting me know what it was like to be at Kennedy Space Center that fateful day in January, 1986.
Aviation RT, Science-Fiction RT, Spaceport RT, Writers' RT -- all on GEnie®, the erstwhile General Electric Information Network, and the Internet, for enabling me to find answers to the most obscure ærospace questions.
My parents, Igor and Alexandra, for their support, encouragement, and understanding through all the years of my so-called writing "career."
To all the men and women who have toiled relentlessly, lived and died so that we may someday -- soon, I hope -- live among the stars, this novel is for you. Through your Herculean efforts in the face of bureaucratic madness or baldfaced lies and coverup, you helped lift humanity to new heights.
And, finally, for my daughter and nephew, and their generation, who are so young that the notion of men on the moon lays further in the past than it did in the future when I was their age. I hope that you can seize the planets that we so myopically let slip through our fingers.