This one put me back into the sci/fi head space.
It's a bit old, but who cares, because the ideas are very intriguing. The reason I picked it up was because Allen Steele, author of Coyote, mentioned it in his reading lists at the back of his series.
It is economically feasible, for instance, to establish a fleet of low-orbital, reusable space craft for the purpose of travelling from place to place on earth. Can you imagine flying to Australia in 45 minutes?
The chapters on terraformation, or changing a planet to make it suitable for habitation, are really stretching my imagination. Who would have thought that Mars could become habitable if you could warm up the planet a few degrees using a giant mirror, and by adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere?
