From a distance, hanging against that black infinity, it seems delicate, fragile, a child’s toy construction of gossamer and dreams. It is not until you approach that you realize how large it really is.

Nearly three football fields across, its skeleton is a giant diamond of gleaming alloy girders. Ten sparkling white aluminum cylinders form a raft fixed to its central truss; three of them bear the painted flags of nations: on one cylinder are the twenty-two flags of United Europe; on another is the rising sun of Japan; a third displays the Stars and Stripes of the United States and the Maple Leaf emblem of Canada.

At two corners of the huge diamond are attached two bulbous, blimp-like structures, burnt orange in color and far larger than the white cylinders. Once they were external tanks for space shuttles; now they are extensions of this island in space, moored to the diamond-shaped structure like giant balloons.

The gently tapering nose of one of the ETs points directly forward, the oilier directly aft, us the diamond knifes through the calm emptiness of orbital space. The trailing ET hears the curious circle-and-arrow symbol of the planet Mars.

Robots slide back and forth across the station’s main truss, silent in the airless vacuum, their metal wheels clasping the special guide rails, their spindly arms ending in gripping pincers strong enough to hold hardware that would weigh tons back on Earth. From the topmost corner of the diamond, bristling batteries of instruments aim outward at the stars while others, at the nadir corner, peer down at the dazzling blue sphere of Earth with its white swirls of clouds. On the station’s trailing edge, broad wings of deep-violet solar panels drink in sunlight while smaller, darker companions radiate away the heat generated within the station.

For there are men and women living and working at this outpost in space. This is Trikon Station, the first industrial research laboratory to be built in orbit.