By the time space travel arrived, the Authorities owned it.
They had taken pains to see that it fell to them; they had
learned from their airport operationswhich, almost alone
among their projects, always showed a losstba.t nothing less
than total control is good enough. And characteristically, they
never took any interest in any form of space-travel which did
not involve enormous expenditures; otherwise they could take
no profits from sub-contracting, no profits from fast amortiza-
tion of loans, no profits from the laws allowing them fast tax
writeoffs for new construction, no profits from the indefi-
nitely protracted collection of tolls and fees after the initial
cost and the upkeep had been recovered.
At the world’s first commercial spaceport, Port Earth, it cost
ship owners $5000 each and every time their ships touched
the ground. Landing fees had been outlawed in private at-
mosphere flying for years, but the Greater Earth Port Autho-
rity operated under its own set of precedents; it made land-
ing fees for spacecraft routine. And it maintained the first
Port police force which was bigger than the armed forces of
the nation which had given it its franchise; after a while, the
distinction was wiped out, and the Port cops were the armed
farces of the United States. It was not difficult to do, since the
Greater Earth Port authority was actually a holding com-
pany embracing every other Authority in the country, includ-
ing Port Earth.
And when people, soon after spaceflight, began to ask each
other, “How shall we colonize the planets?,” the Greater