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This document and its contents are Copyright © 1986-2024 by FKE and The L5 Development Group. All rights reserved. This Web page, and/or the document it embodies, may not be reproduced, copied, or stored, in part or in whole, in any form or manner (printed, electronic, xerographic, optical, or through use of any other technology), other than for immediate viewing via its original URI at L5DGbeta.com, without the express written permission of the publisher.

FKE's mission is to profitably design, construct, and maintain independent space colonies in the shortest possible time frame, and to develop a trade of goods and services between those colonies and Earth, between the colonies themselves, and with any other civilizations encountered or developed. This objective is to be achieved without direct use of any government funding, whether through grants, loans, or through the sale of stocks or bonds, or of goods and services, to any governments or their agencies.

This book is an introduction to the space exploration and development plan being proposed by FKE. Several broad areas will be considered: the general plan for the space program, a few mechanisms anticipated to achieve financial returns, some new research opportunities planned to be explored in the space-based environment, why this project is being undertaken as a private enterprise, and a discussion of how to get from where we are now into the actual space construction business. Each of these broad areas is explained in further detail in the pages that follow.

FKE is currently working on developing several business plans based on the materials presented in this book, and some of the projects discussed have had considerable actual development work performed. This is not a theoretical commentary of a project that could be developed: We are presenting an effort that is under way, with a tangible measure of progress toward actual completion.

Many people and organizations are discussing space colonies now, and have been for a substantial time. The usual perspective is to talk about the colonies and colonists as "they," "them" and "if." Here at FKE, however, the terms used are "I", "we," "us" and "when." There's a significant difference between the two points of view, and we expect that difference will prove to be a deciding factor when history has determined who built the first colonies!

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Credits and Acknowledgments

The FKE Space Program is built on the work of a great many people, most of whom will inevitably remain anonymous. This is not meant to slight the importance of their work, but simply because there have been too people many to mention them all, and because detailed lists of everyone who worked on any given project are often not available.

The design of the space colonies proposed in this plan for construction at L5 is based on work originally done by the late Gerard K. O'Neill while he was a professor at Princeton University, and of student groups working under his supervision.

Invention of solar power satellites, which will be used to finance construction of the space colonies, is credited to Dr. Peter Glaser of Arthur D. Little, Inc., Cambridge. Mass.

Many of the pictures referenced in this document have been made available by the Space Studies Institute.

Other pictures have been supplied by the NASA Ames Research Center.

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