"After the initial forays of the 1960's, space travel quickly became accessible to the general public. Through the use of Aerospike engines and SSTO vehicles the cost of entering space was slashed year after year. By the late 1970's orbital platforms had been constructed above Earth and were being used to send probes into deep space. As this technology matured it became possible to build full scale vehicle refueling platforms in orbit, thus opening the door for manned exploration of our solar system. Throughout the late 80's and early 90's colonies had been set up on the Moon, Mars, Phobos and Diemos, and in 1997 the first 'package holiday' to the Moon was offered. Buoyed by this investment from the private sector the colonies were expanded further and by the turn of the millennium space tourism had become an affordable reality, with many of the leading air carriers of the time adopting trans-orbital vehicles into their fleets." An extract from "The Rise of Space Tourism" (Hodder & Stoughton, 2074, 1st Ed) Here we see a view inside one of the orbital terminals, Circa 2001. As an Earthbound BOAC Speedbird departs, an arriving TransWorld Express uses its 'whiskers' to find the docking tube. ------------------------ This was inspired mainly by Burpee's comment on 'The Delicate Touch' - It got me to thinking what things would be like if space wasn't so lonely - but also by Duo's 2001 Spaceplane freebie (hence the Pan Am ship docked there). Its taken a good 3 days to render, due to the 90 lights in the scene (a good 45x the number I would normally use), but seems to have come out ok. Thanks for viewing, your comments are welcome. Alex ------------------------ All models made in Wings3D Scene set up and rendered in Bryce 5.5 Lightened up a bit in GIMP (with that number of lights re-rendering was a non-starter)