Next exit 0.5 Million Kilometers

The year is 2020. Under a crescent Earth, the assembly crew at the Lunar Gateway Service Area some 62,000 kilometers above the moon?s surface installs new electronics on an infrared telescope and sets it moving, at the speed of a Ford Pinto climbing an on-ramp, off to park itself deep in Earth?s shadow, where a little cryogenic coolant goes a long way and where Earth is always directly overhead for high-speed data downlinks. This spacecraft has, in fact, just entered what Martin Lo (BS ?75), a member of the technical staff at JPL, calls the Interplanetary Superhighway??a vast network of winding tunnels in space? that con-nects the sun, the planets, their moons, and a host of other destinations as well. But unlike the wormholes beloved of science-fiction writers, these things are real. In fact, they are already being used.