The Sneaky Comeback of Mr. Frederik Pohl

     The year is 2022, you've got plenty of money to spare (maybe you sold that metric tonne of antimatter to the Swiss), and you feel like going on a space-vacation. You could take a suborbital flight, but that's only a few minutes of 0-gee at most, you're looking for something a bit more fun. What about those space habitat hotels Bigelow Aerospace has been launching? To confined? Well aren't we a picky space tourist. All I've got left is a trip to Gateway.
     Pack your space-luggage and take a shuttle up to a relay station in orbit. Grab a ticket on the first tug headed to interplanetary space and rendezvous with a small asteroid on an extremely eccentric orbit between Earth and Venus, then wait for your number to come up and board a cramped mysterious spacecraft headed to the stars! Sound like fun?
     Okay, that last bit probably sounded like science fiction right? Well that's because it was, straight out of Frederik Pohl's 1977 award winning book Gateway. But fear not, there is another Gateway that will really exist in 2022, and has a function similar to Pohl's idea. But first, a quick lesson in physics.
     In a planetary system like ours, with one planet and one moon, there exists five points in space with very interesting properties, called Lagrange Points. At one of these points, a spacecraft maintains is position in relation to the rest of the system. For instance, a craft placed in the L3 position would always be opposite the Moon, while something at the L1 position would always be between the Earth and the Moon. Our main interest is L1 and L2, because that's where they'll build Gateway.
     NASA recently announced its plans for constructing a large space station in the L2 position, or L1 position should funded fall shorter then expected. This spacecraft would act as an intermediary for manned craft headed to the Moon or even other planets. Here's the idea: Gateway helps to establish permanent colonies on the Moon, which can mine materials and farm solar energy to send back up to Gateway, which can use it to fuel or even build spacecraft to send out to interplanetary space, and maybe in the future even farther. Gateway would be permanent, meaning it has no "expiration date" like most spacecraft, when it gets abandoned or deorbited.
     So you could take a shuttle out to Gateway and become a citizen of the new Lunar or Martian colonies. Or maybe rent one of those newfangled Alcubierre ships and make a supply run to your buddies living under the Europan ice shelves. Heck at 10c that trip would only take five minutes each way, you could be there and back before dinner! See thats the neat thing about science fiction, as we get better at space travel, the reality begins to sound even cooler than the fiction.