3
The best thing Mars had—at least, so the Martians mostly thought—was the Skyhook at Sunpoint City, and that didn't come with the planet's original equipment. It had had to be built—by Earthies, as a matter of fact, so they weren't all bad. The Skyhook had a kind of interesting history. It was one of the two critically important human inventions—the other being the Augenstein antimatter drive that made possible the fleets of spaceships that made a Skyhook worth building in the first place—which had been invented long before there was any need for either of them. In fact, the Skyhook had been invented long before there was any possibility of actually building one. The man who devised the first "space elevator" was an engineer from Leningrad named Yuri Artsutanov, and he had done it way back in 1960.
That was pretty far-sighted of Yuri Artsutanov. No human being had managed to reach even the fringe of space in 1960, and the kind of materials that you could possibly build such a thing with didn't even exist then. But it was Artsutanov who proposed that if one were to position a satellite in geostationary orbit right over a planet's equator, and hang a cable thirty-six thousand kilometers long from it, the whole lash-up would amount to an "orbital tower." Then you could run elevators up and down the cable to lift ships and cargoes and people from the planet's surface right into orbit for damn near nothing—or at least for much less than trying to do the same thing with rockets.
It all worked out just the way Artsutanov thought it would. Once the Augenstein antimatter drive came along and made spaceships fast and fairly cheap themselves, it became feasible to junket all around the solar system—once you got into orbit. But that first step was the hardest, and that was what the Skyhook was for.
Not that that first Skyhook itself had been all that cheap. The Earth one had been strung from Nairobi on the surface to geosynchronous orbit, and its construction had cost about as much as an average war. But when they came to do the same thing for Mars the price was slashed way down. The reason for that was that they didn't have to hoist all the materials that went into it from the surface of the planet to space. Mars's Skyhook started in space: ores from the asteroids, fabricated in orbit, made the whole thing, and then Mars was only an elevator ride from the rest of the universe. Those first daring, dedicated Martian colonists, needing everything, could then import just about anything they liked. All they had to do was pay the import bills.