The experience gained in such space-mining ventures will then be carried over into expeditions to ensnare the larger stony-iron meteorites. These masses of iron and stone will offer less favorable mining possibilities, but they can be turned into rocket-propelled and guided de luxe space-cruisers. By this term, we do not mean that these natural space-ships will house all the luxuries of the ocean-liners advertised in the travel magazines. Rather, we see them as providing roomy, comfortable “underground” living quarters. Furthermore, their occupants will be adequately protected by great thicknesses of metal and rock from the injurious radiations of empty space, and the meteorites that make the term “empty space” something of a misnomer. Initially, such worlds-in-miniature will be much sought after as laboratory sites where the more violent and dangerous of the many experimental tests which venturesome man will wish to conduct can be carried on without danger to the close-packed billions populating the then-crowded earth. Later on, these meteorites-turned-into-space-ships may be used to explore the dangerous and faraway corners of the Solar System, since the very substance of each massive meteoritic rocket-body will serve as an adequate and handy source of fuel supply. When men have learned to live on such “homes away from home,” it is quite possible that the larger of these modified meteorites, after their interiors have been opened up for occupancy by the inroads of the fuel-hungry rocket-motors, may be steered into neighborly orbits about old Mother Earth. Here, these “natural” satellites will assume the unexciting but necessary roles of the extra living quarters that by then will be so urgently needed to accommodate the mushrooming population of the world of the future. People who live in these super-urban outliers of Mother Earth may take the same pride in their natural, if converted, homes as many former city dwellers now take in the old-fashioned sprawling farmhouses they have rebuilt and occupied. Perhaps one of your descendants will live in such a meteorite-orb, and occasionally point the finger of scorn at the more elegant but unpleasantly overcrowded artificial satellites preferred by those migrants from teeming earth who lack the true pioneering instinct. Who knows! FOR FURTHER READING