Alabama’s Port of Mobile and Naval Station Mobile used favorable taxes and other incentives to make themselves major supporters and launch locations for American efforts to colonize the Solar System. And when hyperdrives allowed us to go to the stars, they joined the New Earth and New Washington Colonization Programs that brought us to the stars. That would start a tradition of Mobile supporting colonization efforts, and every major colony America had any involvement in sent components through Mobile. Not necessarily all, or even most, due to the superior launch locations in Florida, Texas, and Panama, but Mobile’s incentives made it virtually impossible for anyone seeking to launch components into space to ignore their facilities. The decades before Contact saw their revenue share steadily decreasing, though, and their days as a major space launch facility appeared to be ending.