When I was young, the United States engaged in the weirdest secret project in the world. Unlike the vast majority of secret projects, it took place in the open, with a great deal of fanfare, and it was even on the cover of Popular Mechanics several times. The big secret was "Project Jennifer," better known as the ship Glomar Explorer. The ship's real purpose was to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from three miles down on the floor of the ocean, for reasons which you'll discover if you care to dig into its history. I bring this up because the project's public face - the one which was on the cover of magazines and on television - was to mine for manganese nodules on the sea floor. When I found out - years later, after the Cold War - that the big mining project from my childhood had really been a secret government project, I felt rather let down. Instead of radical economics and science, it was just a failed bit of skullduggery.

I put the maganese mines in MoS as an homage to Glomar Explorer. There's no skullduggery here, though.