In the latter half of the twenty-first century, a high school student from Las Cruces, New Mexico named Frances Thorne lands a summer job as a custodian at Spaceport USA near Truth or Consequences, to the north of Las Cruces. He is a bright young man and is given a progression of increasingly difficult jobs. Eventually, he is recommended scholarship to MIT to study aeronautical engineering by one of his supervisors named Nathaniel Floatingfeather from the Mescalero Apache Nation.

As a doctoral project, Frances designs a theoretical spacecraft that can both take of and land on a conventional runway while taking large amounts of cargo into orbit. Using this type of spacecraft, he founds the Uplift Aeronautics company based at the NM spaceport. This becomes enormously profitable and makes him a multi-billionaire. His only son Adam is raised at the company complex alongside his father.

When a fluke raises Adam to the company chairmanship, he seeks to expand the company’s interests to research and development. How far this research may take him is anybody’s guess, but he is determined to take his dreams to their absolute limit. And his ideas about limits are much more expansive than anyone could ever expect.