Venus used to be a pleasant, watery, habitable planet much like ours. The Martian atmosphere, it turns out, also used to be much more like Earth’s. Both planets built up carbon dioxide, trapping the Sun’s rays and causing the planets to warm dramatically. (Fredric W. Taylor, The Scientific Exploration of Venus; Giles Sparrow, Mars)
It really wasn’t that long ago when the two greatest superpowers were vying to put satellites into space. Now, 50 nations have their own satellites in low Earth orbit. If you’re a Thailand, say, you can call Space Systems/Loral, a Canadian-owned company based in Palo Alto, California, and tell them you want to put a satellite into geostationary orbit for television broadcasting or military communications. You can have the thing in orbit 25,000 miles above Earth within two years.
