21
It costs a lot to make a dead planet live again. It takes a tremendous mobilization of talent and treasure.
The treasure is the physical assets, and they are very considerable: the space stations, the spotter ships, the transports, the Augensteins that pull the comets out of their Oort orbits and deliver them as atmospheric replenishment to the surface of Mars, and all the associated tools and instruments and control mechanisms.
The talent is even more costly, because there's a lot of it and it constantly needs to be replenished. To start, there are the crews out in the Oort itself: six hundred miners and snake handlers, plus the mechanics and supervisors and cooks and doctors and all the others that support the miners; there are two hundred and fifty of them to be added in. In each of the co-Mars stations there are another two hundred controllers, plus fifty support personnel, and the same in each of the Mars orbiters. Total personnel in space at any one time thus comes to just about 1,850.
Of course, that doesn't complete Oortcorp's payroll. There are the administrators and the instructors and all their helpers at Denver base, five hundred and more of those. There are the pilots and crews of the resupply ships that feed the stations in space, not to mention the tens of thousands employed by the corporation's suppliers, the people who make the Augensteins and the drill snakes and all the other bits and pieces of equipment that keep the operational teams working; Oortcorp is certainly a major employer.
But it is in space that the academy graduates are employed. If you subtract the support teams, that leaves 1,400 who are operational crews on duty, plus another five or six hundred operational who are on leave, or in transit; and all of these men and women, nearly two thousand of them, have to be trained at Denver base.
As do their replacements. The operational crews don't last forever. Ultimately they retire, or they are invalided out, or they die. The average working life of an operator is less than ten years, and so the academy keeps busy grinding out replacements. They produce only fifteen or twenty a month—no more than they need.
No more than they need, and every one of them is paid for through the Bonds, and thus is a running charge on the future export earnings of the planet Mars . . . whenever those earnings may start.