AMERICA ONE Read Online Free Page A

three-story building in Silicon Valley, close to where he and his Russian friends lived. Often, on Saturdays, and when other business was quiet, he held long meetings with his employees, going over new plans, drawings, ideas and costs for each engine-type, fuel-type, part or panel needed for space flight.
    A year later he had founded his fourth company; the first Internet bartering company; this generated many more millions when he sold it within twenty-four months, and from this day on he only invested his money into emerging internet companies in early stages of growth.
    For the next few years, he used his newly acquired wealth to fund new companies; Google, EBay and PayPal were three of them—and his investments soared.
    Ryan had been avidly interested in space exploration ever since he could remember. Even as a small boy, he watched any television show focused on space travel and exploration by small silver rockets, and then large spacecraft which flew at warp speed all over the universe; “Going where no man had gone before!”
    As a student at USC, he spent any spare hours auditing lectures in the aerospace department, taking notes and noting the best achievers in the classes. It was not his forte, but it fueled his fantasy for space exploration. Ryan studied the new Space Shuttle Program and attended the first launches in Florida. Very few people knew that his real dream was to one day go into space.
    He did not have the physical characteristics of an astronaut. Naturally, he applied for the program, but his less than perfect eyesight automatically eliminated him as a candidate.
    Ryan Richmond was a math savant though; spending years calculating how much money he would need to design, build, and finally propel a rocket into space. He was the first to sign up with a new Russian company offering private trips into lower space orbit. His first chance was in 2009 aboard a Russian rocket taking men and supplies to the International Space Station, but a bad cold days before launch had given the opportunity to the next man on the list.
    The same happened in 2010, when his second ride was scheduled; once again he had a slight health issue. For some reason he always had a medical situation when it was time to fulfill his dream. Slightly less than half of his payment was politely returned to him, and the company ended its flights into space due to internal financial reasons in Russia. All the while, however, he still had his team working on their own ideas, reading, analyzing and inspecting every piece of information they could get their hands on from other companies in the same field.
    Money was no object to Ryan; he would have gladly funded the whole Russian company, but the fact that the company was in Russia was a problem. There were other factors behind the company’s immediate end, and it was nothing a savvy man would get involved in.
    Ryan Richmond received payment for the sale of most of his stock in the internet investments; it was a very large amount, over three billion dollars. Because he sold so much over a period of a couple of weeks, the value of the company’s shares actually declined, and needed a month or two to strengthen again.
    He sold the shares just as a new international private space race began. A rich and famous fellow in England had begun the race with a demonstration of a flight close to the boundaries of space; not atop a rocket, but lifted by a larger aircraft with a smaller airplane heading spaceward from 50,000 feet and nearing the 100,000 foot altitude mark before returning to land.
    Ryan and his team knew as much about the Englishman’s space company as the Englishman. Ryan’s team, now composed of nearly three dozen experts, had thousands of drawings and plans, and were ready to build, faster and better than any other company; especially since the team was enhanced by the addition of two more of NASA’s best engineers who appeared at his design center very soon after the shuttle program