The next message was mission-related data—updates to stellar information, mostly. I was struck again by how little progress there had been in astronomy. Dr. Landers had explained that, between my time and the present, there had been very little interest in anything non-military above the Earth’s atmosphere until the still-very-recent invention of the SURGE drive. The new technology had created a different kind of arms race, as every superpower swiftly realized the potential of this new capability.