It'll still slow down China's deployment significantly, probably putting them last in terms of getting a functional reusable interplanetary craft going. They may benefit to some small extent from watching other people's mistakes along the way, but overall it's a bad break for them. "India's moving forward with the creation of the space elevator. They've named the project Meru, by the way, after Mount Meru, the legendary world pillar in Hindu mythology. Preliminary calculations show that their proposed design will come in under a thousand tons total mass. Modifying the NERVA reactor to act as a power generator-not the best design if you start from scratch, but having the reactor already up in the sky counts for something-they'll have plenty of power for dragging cargo up and down and keeping a station above the world running. You asked me about anchoring the thing down last time-something I didn't know much about-so I checked into it. The design they're using doesn't really require much anchoring force-about as much as the designed transport capability, actually. They're going to be splitting the base and anchoring it to several nearby ships, so it doesn't have a single simple point of failure. Time to completion, about another year." "One year?" Nicholas sat up straighter. "That seems awfully fast!" "Apparently it's within reason. And building up its capacity will be built into the design. In a few more years they'll be able to send a thousand tons per week up or down. With the IRI and Ares having first call on much of that capacity, we will be a lot more comfortable. And after you made sure Ares got a cheap shipment"-she gave him a grateful smile on behalf of Joe and his friends-"they'll definitely make it long enough to survive the crisis." "Which means we're missing just one element-how are we going to get the stuff from geosynch orbit around Earth to here?"