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Suppose you were put in charge of a vast corporation that proposed to tweak comets out of the Oort cloud and carry them a few billion kilometers away to bring air and water to the planet Mars. It's a huge project Take all its widespread parts together and it barely fits within the extreme boundaries of the entire solar system, but it needs a particular place it can call a home. It needs a headquarters.
If you had to choose where that headquarters should go, where, in all that vast space, would you put it?
Several competing choices might occur to you at once, all of them good. First, you might put the headquarters out in the Oort cloud itself, where the miners tagged the likeliest comets and the snake handlers threaded them with instruments and Augenstein drives and sent them down toward their destiny on Mars. A somewhat inconvenient location to get to, true, but that would be where the raw materials were located.
Or you might put the headquarters somewhere near one of the two Co-Mars satellites, the pair of control stations that sit in Mars's own orbit at its Trojan points, a hundred and twenty degrees away from each other, and each sixty degrees from Mars. That's where the incomings are nursed all the way from the Oort and around the Sun and back up toward Mars itself.
Or, finally, you might even put your headquarters in orbit around the planet Mars itself, where the final fine-tuning and demolition took place before each impact.
All good spots . . . but none of them was the spot the Oort Corporation finally chose. They chose a mountaintop outside of Denver, Colorado, U.S.A., Earth. Right at the bottom of Earth's gravity well. Right on the surface of the revolving Earth itself, so that for half of each day the planet they were sitting on obscured their line-of-sight communications to half the solar system, and so they could communicate with their satellites only by relay.
Oh, that site had defects, to be sure. But it had one great advantage not shared by any possible orbital alternative:
The headquarters of Oortcorp sat firmly on their own planet, where they alone could control it, and where no one could ever question who owned it.