.... the name came to him one evening while sitting on his back porch, watching fireflies dance in the air over his lawn. One day, he believes, that's what the sky above Earth will look like—filled with spacecraft ferrying people to Mars, in a journey as commonplace as going to the store might be today.

But to get to Mars—really, to get anywhere at all—we've first got to make it easy for people and equipment to claw their way up out of Earth's gravity. After all, as the Heinlein quote on Firefly's website explains, "When you're in low Earth orbit, you're halfway to everywhere." Making that first hundred miles easy and affordable is what Markusic wants to do....