AMERICA ONE Read Online Free Page B

ended.
    Over the next few weeks he drove out to the Nevada desert in his Audi R8 and looked for a place to setup his next company.
    Within weeks of the first private flight by the Englishman, he had purchased 500 acres of desert around an old, unused military air base. The old base was nothing more than old rusty buildings next to a long and cracked 10,000 foot runway which needed resurfacing.
    He already had complete design plans for a new home, and soon after he purchased the property, an army of builders and steel hangar companies drove out with hundreds of large trucks carrying parts of aircraft hangars. They began to build a dozen large buildings, of which several were to be double-walled, and have sealed space-production interiors. They would cost $25 million apiece.
    First, a three-story, 90-room top quality hotel for single people was built with 200 separate and private family bungalows on the grounds, with housing for a total of 600 people. He brought in acres of grass and trees, together with a water-from-air production plant the size of a small building which was pieced together after it was delivered. Kitchens, a restaurant and bar, a bowling alley, a 200-seat cinema for entertainment and a general store went up on one street, just to accommodate his employees.
    Ryan also wanted complete privacy from the outside world and had a sewage plant and his own five-acre solar field installed to make the base totally sustainable, apart from food. After all, the desert was not the best place to start a farm, so sustenance would be brought in.
    Within three months he had enticed several more experts from both the European Space Authority and NASA to join him. The European immigrants soon became U.S. citizens, just as his original team of Russians had done. Next he employed over two hundred young scientists he had known or met during his education.
    Finally, he canvassed the country to find the best security guards he could to keep his new airfield private.
    He applied for all the required legal permits from the federal government and State of Nevada to be a legitimate space exploration company. Local government officials arrived by the dozens and were impressed by what they saw. This kind of company was absolutely perfect for the state and it wasn’t long before he received permits to begin flight operations.
    By the end of his fourth month he had spent a total of $500 million on the airfield alone. A lot of new machinery would go into the twelve hangars. Designed and manufactured during the last decade, it had already been ordered and would take a couple of weeks to be delivered from around the country.
    Ryan was still unmarried, had no children and this part of life was not yet important to him. At 43, he calculated that he still had a decade or so before that area of his life would be as important to him as fulfilling his dreams.
    Six months after he had purchased the land, it looked totally different than what he had originally surveyed.
    Over the last three years, Ryan had paid well over $190 million to one U.S. company alone to manufacture 40 x 10 feet special aluminum panels, over 180 of them for some sort of mammoth building project. Most of his aircraft builders were already working ten-hour days, piecing together aluminum panels and sections of craft.
    The last three important arrivals at the airfield were massive machines which shaped, heated, bonded, vacuum-sealed, and cooled many of these panels. The machines, each the size of a bungalow and each costing over five million dollars, were moved through the gaps left in the first two hangar walls; the walls were then sealed and teams of engineers and builders began to work on them.
    Ryan and his team had studied all the possibilities of reaching space, and how other companies were attempting what he was about to do.
    The British company did win the first leg of the race, and graciously accepted the $1 million first prize. But by this time, Astermine Co., Ryan’s