Aviation came to Denver mainly in the form of mail. Like much of the inland West, the first airfields served a smattering of passenger flights (both expensive and uncomfortable in the 1930s) and a regular schedule of contract mail carriers. Postal Service air mail contracts built many of the nation's major airlines—and its major airports. One of Denver's simple airstrips, Denver Municipal Airport, transformed from a mail stop to a busy airport when Continental Airlines moved its headquarters to Denver 1937, and then again when a modern passenger terminal was completed in 1946. Along the way, it had been renamed for the mayor who oversaw much of its development: Stapleton.

The Second World War, and then the post-war return, brought both a boom in aviation generally and in Denver specifically. The city's population grew by almost 10,000 a year from 1940 to 1960. During the '60s, Stapleton gained an additional runway and a new terminal as the schedule grew from under forty departures a day to over one hundred. When airline deregulation prompted a total restructuring of the industry, both by consolidation and widespread adoption of a "hub and spoke" model, Denver's central location made it an obvious choice of hub. United, Continental, Western, and Frontier Airlines all made Denver Stapleton a busy node in their growing networks.

With growing traffic, Stapleton showed its age. The passenger terminals were too small, but moreover, the field had become cramped. The runways were too close to each other for more than one simultaneous approach during instrument conditions, a bottleneck so severe that bad weather in Denver would cause flight delays that cascaded nationwide. The airfield at Stapleton could not be expanded: a combination of terrain, adjacent land in private ownership, and legal disputes with nearby residents and Adams County (where Stapleton was located) effectively precluded any runway additions or extensions. By the '80s, Southwest Airlines was rapidly expanding beyond its native Texas—but service to Denver was blocked by a lack of available gates at Stapleton.

By fluke of politics, the City of Denver was abruptly committed to construction of a brand-new airport in 1983: mayoral candidate Monte Pascoe had made a New World Airport the core of his platform. As it happened, he came up third in a race of three, but not before goading the other two candidates—including winner Frederico Peña—into signing a written commitment to see the new airport through. In 1984, planning started for the New Denver Airport. 48.3 square miles of Adams County were annexed to Denver and, in 1989, Denver voters approved a referendum in favor of the new airport by a wide margin. Located northeast of Denver on a huge plot of mostly agricultural land, many of us have been there, at least on a layover: Denver International Airport, DIA ¹.

From the New World Order to contracting scandals to "Blucifer," DIA is an infamous airport. Some level of, well, intrigue was probably guaranteed. DIA was the first major airport project in the United States since Dallas-Fort Worth in 1974. DIA planners, later defending their efforts, noted that they had extensively studied the lessons learned from comparable US projects since the Second World War, of which they had identified only two. One of the largest public works projects to date, DIA's budget started around $3 billion and ended at nearly $5. Along the way, a lot went wrong.

This is not a full history of DIA's awkward early years. That would require a book, and a challenging one to write given that the ensuing lawsuits, political scandal, and media attention mean that many of the facts are disputed. But before we reach our main story, it will be helpful to understand some of the context in which DIA was formed.

By the time primary construction was underway in 1990, DIA was slated to be one of the largest airports in the nation. Despite that, it technically had no airlines. Political details of the project's initiation meant it went ahead without the explicit support of any of its expected tenants. United Airlines would be the largest by far, occupying all of the large B terminal, but negotiations between the City and United did not land a commitment from that airline until over a year into construction. Continental Airlines had agreed earlier, but had just gone bankrupt for a second time in a decade, and Denver came to worry that they would not ultimately be good for the lease payments on the A terminal being built for them. The C terminal, intended for all of the other airlines, remained unoccupied. In the mean time, Denver's booming post-war economy had considerably slowed, turning the airport into an almost completely debt-funded project.

The result was that the airlines, and specifically United Airlines, gained enormous leverage over the design of the airport. That itself is common, but DIA had the unique challenge that the airlines became the dominant stakeholder in its design only after much of the design was complete. While everyone disagrees with everyone else on who was at fault and for what, I think this is a fair napkin sketch: the first two years of serious effort on DIA were led by the City, motivated mostly by factors like tourism and prestige and with little thought for the operational practicalities of a massive airport. In the second two years, United Airlines came on the scene and attempted to reshape the partially-built airport to their aggressive operational requirements.

And those requirements were a formidable challenge. DIA's scale meant that it would be split between four buildings, a ticketing/baggage concourse and the three terminals. This layout allowed room for an ample number of gates. At the same time, congestion on the airfield itself had been a challenge at Stapleton and an issue that the airlines were extremely sensitive to. United Airlines ultimately agreed to operate out of DIA only if the airport could meet United's goal of a breakneck operational tempo with aircraft turned around in under 35 minutes ². To keep taxiing aircraft in motion, the terminals were separated widely so that the "alleys" in between could accommodate aircraft at gates, a row of aircraft waiting for gates on each side, and still have room for two taxiing jets to pass each other. It is, in effect, something like six taxiways between each terminal. The measurements work out such that terminals A, B, and C are about 0.5, 1, and 1.5 km from the ticketing building.

The buildings are not connected at the surface (except, today, terminal A and ticketing). Instead, DIA used an innovative design in which all movement between the buildings happens underground. This allowed a far more open airfield design than at large airports with above-ground halls (consider, for example, Phoenix), enabling a traffic concept where aircraft would land on one side of the field, taxi to a gate, continue away from the gate in the same direction, and take off from the other side of the field.

The building layout and connecting tunnel became one of the project's first weaknesses. Airlines, making their late entry into the project, quickly accumulated design changes that they made hard requirements to their leases. Underground construction is notoriously difficult to modify, though, leading to an expensive set of changes that sometimes required almost complete demolition and reconstruction of parts of buildings. By the time United Airlines signed an agreement, at the end of 1991, the project was already behind schedule and over budget.

Among DIA's most interesting facets are the conspiracy theories. The decision to name the commission that organized its grand opening the "New World Airport Commission" didn't help, on account of its close resemblance to the New World Order which was a more prominent vein of conspiracizing in the early '90s. Early '90s aesthetic sensibilities were factor as well: Michael Singer's officially untitled "Interior Garden" at Terminal C ³, and Luis Jiménez's "Mustang" placed prominently at the approach of Peña Boulevard, have a certain eerie presence. Leo Tanguma's murals in the baggage claim area are rooted in the Mexican Socialist tradition of murals that look to the future with equal parts optimism and uncertainty. They depict themes of war and peace, of harmony and discord, and moreover the tension between them—in a way that is perhaps a bit too visceral for jet-lagged travelers.

As with all conspiracy theories, there is of course a kernel of truth. There really were strange things happening underground at DIA. The project really did have its secrets, and it really did envision a future very different from its present. On the other hand, these quiet happenings were all more pedestrian, more municipal, than the conspiracy theorists like to think. This was a new world airport, not an order. DIA's expansive basement was not intended, as some contend, as a logistical center for hundreds of thousands of bodies. It corrals something more everyday, and in even larger numbers: bags.

One of the most arduous parts of an aircraft's turnaround is the loading and unloading of baggage. The problem is particularly acute at a large field like DIA, where bags have to cover considerable distances. Consider the case of a passenger checking in for a flight out of Terminal C: the passenger will need to travel over a mile to their gate, a problem solved by the $84 million Westinghouse APM100 automated guideway transit system. 26 autonomous vehicles run a never-ending loop of the underground connector tunnel, serving stops at each terminal every 90 seconds. This system has not been trouble-free, but the APM100 was a descendant of the 1970s techno-optimist "transit plowshares program" that saw defense and aerospace contractors apply their expertise to urban transit. While this program mostly failed to improve urban transit, it did a lot for airports, and by the time DIA was underway the APM100 was a well-proven design.

The larger problem was baggage. At most airports of the 1990s, and in fact at most airports today, baggage handling is mostly manual. Belts take bags from the ticketing counters to a loading area where workers sort them onto carts. Tugs pull those carts to gates, where bags are loaded onto the airplane as its last set of bags are sorted onto a new set of carts to be towed to other gates or to the baggage claims. DIA was going to be different: airport planners worried that baggage tugs would have to drive multi-mile routes around the terminal buildings to reach ticketing and the baggage claims, and that was after the time and labor involved in sorting. United Airlines wanted transfer bags moved from one gate to another in under ten minutes to meet their turnaround goals, and in part to assuage concerns about such a large airport being a nuisance for travelers, a common theme of DIA boosterism was speed and convenience. Travelers were promised that their bags would arrive at the claim before they did.

As soon as these words were said it was known that achieving them would require an automated baggage handling system of unprecedented scale. There was just one problem: there was no such system, and no one was even planning one.

Airports are a strange form of real estate. They are almost invariably owned by a state or municipal government (or a corporation chartered by one of the two). Airlines pay fees for use of the airfield, but they also pay to lease the gates. In this regard, an airport is a bit like a shopping mall, a landlord that provides extensive services but ultimately exists to collect the rent. Airlines usually do much of the logistical work themselves, or contract service providers to do so. In the early '90s, as it is today, the norm at airports is that airlines handle their own baggage. When you fly Southwest, Southwest employees load your bags into Southwest carts that are pulled around by Southwest tugs. The airport's involvement is limited to a fairly basic set of belts, rooms, and pathways that bring bags in and out of the building.

This was the plan at DIA, to the extent that there was any plan, when United Airlines signed their gate lease agreement for the entirety of Terminal B. For the largest airline, operating from the largest terminal building, and moving bags to and from the biggest section of the ticketing and bag claim areas, the baggage system would be a huge project. United is said to have quickly observed that the airport project was already behind schedule and that little if any thought had been devoted to baggage handling. In line with norms and the City of Denver's expectations, United took on the problem themselves.

Over a decade earlier, in 1978, United Airlines had driven down its baggage handling time at San Francisco's international terminal by engaging a contractor called the Docutel Corporation. Today, Docutel is best remembered as one of the companies with a strong claim to the invention of the ATM. The company's history is a bit stranger: originally a loose spinoff of Texas Instruments called Recognition Equipment, Docutel's pioneering achievement was the invention of optical character recognition (OCR). Their principal client for this technology was none other than United Airlines, which used it to automate validation of boarding passes ⁴. The relationship between United and Recognition Equipment was strong enough that, by the 1970s, Docutel was both a pioneer in ATMs and a major manufacturer of airport automation equipment.

Docutel's solution at San Francisco involved a device they called a "Telecar." Telecars were small electric vehicles that traveled on rails carrying a plastic tub. A belt could push a bag onto a Telecar, which traveled to a destination where it tipped the bag off onto another belt. The San Francisco system was not without trouble: Docutel went bankrupt during its development, and in large part to save the project, United is said to have been involved in brokering an agreement that saw Docutel's airport division bought out by Boeing. This created the confusingly named Boeing Airport Equipment, or BAE. This BAE was unrelated to the British Aerospace BAE, a fact that has evaded a surprising number of histories of the DIA baggage scandal—although I am inclined to cut these confused writers a bit of slack. By the time of DIA's construction, BAE was in fact under British ownership by another three letter acronym, BTR (British Tire and Rubber). Boeing Airport Equipment BAE still exists to some tiny degree as a portion of Schneider Electric. In any case, despite the eventful corporate history, the SFO international terminal automation had developed into a satisfactory system that United thought was an ideal model for DIA.

United's deal with BAE specified a $20 million system that would connect all of the terminal B gates with the ticketing counters and baggage claims, all to be designed and built over the span of 2.5 years to meet DIA's opening date target. This was an ambitious program, and all parties involved admitted considerable schedule risk, but at the time BAE was by far the dominant supplier of baggage handling equipment and enjoyed an excellent reputation. If anyone could make it happen, it was BAE, especially given their similar projects at SFO and Munich's Franz Joseph Strauss airport. What was perhaps understated as a problem is that DIA's installation would be orders of magnitude larger and more complex than either of those systems, and that meeting its performance requirements would require a complete redesign of key components.

These might have already presented an insurmountable challenge even if the project had not, in 1992, been restarted. United's strict requirements for baggage handling, and the trouble they were clearly having fielding such a system on schedule, seemed to have made the City of Denver nervous. Even that was reassuring compared to the status of terminals A and C, where just a couple of years before the airport was slated to open, there was still no progress whatsoever on baggage handling. Financially struggling Continental seemed to be expecting to use whatever the Airport Authority came up with or to improvise something last minute, and it was still up in the air who (if anyone) would use terminal C. As a result of 1980s economic trends, traffic at Stapleton airport had actually begun to decline rather than grow, softening the demand airlines had for an improved facility. Ironically, this lack of interest from airlines made the City view the project as even more urgent and critical, since they would have to effectively "win over" the airlines with a state-of-the-art facility to ensure success. Maybe, then, the decision not to provide a unified baggage handling system as a service to tenants was a mistake.

In early 1992, just a couple of months after United awarded the contract to BAE for their terminal, the City of Denver developed specifications for an airport-wide automated baggage handling system and put them out to bid. Of the sixteen companies the City identified as prospective suppliers, only three responded with proposals. Ironically, BAE was not among them: in part because it was already scrambling to design the system for United, BAE concluded that it was simply not possible to complete an airport-wide system on the timeline the City required. By that point, there were not much more than 18 months before the airport's announced opening date.

Of the three bids received, I have found historical documentation of only one. A coalition of industrial automation companies, including Canadian transit-industrial-complex giant UTDC, proposed a design that was similar to the conventional system of belts, handlers, and tugs, but with extensive use of computers to speed sorting and complete automation of the tugs. UTDC described a system of autonomous electric bag carts they called Destination Coded Vehicles, or DCVs. A bit like London's erstwhile Mail Rail, baggage handlers would load bags onto a DCV and then hit a button that would send it along tracks, through the tunnels, to another sorting area near the departure gate. Each DCV would carry dozens of bags, and they were large enough to also accommodate a few oversized items. At this phase of Denver's tourist development, oversized luggage was on everyone's mind: among the new airport's amenities would have to be first-class handling of skis.

The City rejected all three bids. As best I can find recorded, the major problem was that all three involved more manual labor for sorting, loading, and unloading than the City considered desirable, and that the City doubted the ability of the systems to meet the time goals (despite vendor assurance that they could). The City of Denver strongly favored a design without any manual loading, and so far the closest proposal by far was BAE's contract for United.

Calling off the competitive bidding process, the City entered three days of reportedly heated negotiations with BAE that culminated in a sole-source agreement to extend the United system across the entire airport for $175.6 million. This messy contracting process, with competitive bidding hastily abandoned in favor of a deal negotiated behind closed doors, compounded the quickly discovered problem that BAE was highly integrated and intended to manufacture everything off-site at its extensive plant in Texas. This meant that BAE wouldn't obviously meet Denver's contracting preference rules for local labor, minority-owned businesses, etc. On top of that, a dispute between BAE and labor unions over payrates for mechanics (BAE's contract with the City stipulated a rate of $12 an hour when the union's negotiated rate for City projects was $20) led to a two-day strike by key industrial electricians and mechanics. BAE's contract went through multiple rounds of revisions, amendments, and scope changes, and the lawsuits did not all settle for many years after the airport opened.

The schedule would be extremely tight. BAE had, reportedly, been open with the City that they believed the project would take a full year longer than planned. They agreed to the contract only on certain terms: that requirements and designs would be frozen very early on, that BAE would receive first priority over other contractors on scheduling work at the construction site, and that BAE would receive almost carte blanche authority to modify the building designs to house the system.

Of course, in practice, no part of this agreement held: terminal A was only partly leased by the questionably solvent Continental Airlines and terminal C wasn't leased at all, so the City specified an extremely minimal installation in those buildings. As other airlines finally signed onto the project, they immediately demanded expansion and changes. Much of the construction was underway or even complete, so as a practical matter, it was rarely possible to modify building designs and the baggage system had to be shoehorned into every nook and cranny. A combination of poorly coordinated project management and political maneuvering meant that BAE's "priority one" status was far from agreed, and much of the installation schedule was determined by posturing and squabbling between the contractors, all of whom by this stage were desperate to finish their own part while happy to blame delays on anyone else.

Some members of the City's project team had initially been skeptical of the BAE proposal. BAE had won them over, in large part, by building a demonstration system at their headquarters in Texas that included most of the mechanical features of the proposed DIA solution. What went unnoticed by even BAE's skeptics is that the small scale of the demonstration system didn't just minimize the mechanical and reliability problems. It also required none of the complex computer logic that would become one of the project's biggest problems.

As happens in any contracting debacle, there are many places to put blame, and a lot more people looking for somewhere to put it. There is certainly some fault all around: histories of the project always note the constant change orders coming from the City, often either at the behest of the airlines or driven by last-minute efforts to control costs. An oversize ski retrieval belt in the baggage claim area was lengthened for more capacity, shortened to cut costs, lengthened after airline objections, then shortened again. An entire arterial loop was eliminated from the project for cost control, but then airlines still expected its capacity to be available, leading to modifications to mitigate the loss. BAE contends that the project would have gone much more smoothly if the design had actually been frozen as the City had originally agreed. At the same time, given the political and business considerations, the City may have been well-founded in its fear that delivering anything less than the airlines demanded would set Denver up for an inter-airport dispute not unlike that between Dallas-Fort Worth and Dallas Love Field.

Another problem was access. BAE expected to be able to go anywhere, and do anything, at any time. They believed this to be a hard requirement to complete the project. At the actual worksite, things worked differently: each of the four major buildings was under the leadership of a separate on-site construction manager, and the four managers reached four different positions on BAE's involvement in the project. Better-connected local contractors often got their way over BAE, and besides, some of the places that BAE intended to start installation work hadn't been built yet anyway. BAE identifies the problems with project management, on-site leadership, and coordination between contractors as the major cause of delays in testing. On the other hand, the development of the control software, which was completely under BAE's control back at their offices in Texas, had reportedly not even begun when the countdown to opening day ticked under one year.

Knowing that the installation proved so troubling, let's consider what, exactly, BAE was trying to install. The baggage handling system for DIA was based on the Telecar installation at SFO, but there would be many enhancements, particularly for reasons of delivery time.

When a passenger checked into DIA, a ticketing agent would affix a barcoded label to their bag and place it on a belt. The belt terminated at something like a miniature "train station," where it simply ended at the side of the Telecar tracks. When the bag reached the end of the belt, a barcode scanner read the label, which was associated in a database with the RFID tag on an arriving Telecar. To meet the deadlines involved, the Telecars really moved, with a top speed of 19 to 24 MPH depending on who you ask (probably revised downwards over time for reasons that will become clear). What made the system truly sporty, though, is that the Telecars did not stop. Empty Telecars slowed to about 4 MPH as they passed a loading belt, which sort of threw the luggage into the Telecar's bin before it tipped upwards to make sure the bag settled into place.

Because it was a project of the early '90s, BAE opted for a distributed control system based on microcomputers rather than a design based around a large system. This was a quintessential application of real-time computing, after all, an area in which microcomputers were increasingly dominating. Over a hundred 486 machines ran custom control software on OS/2, with Windows-based workstations for operators and maintenance staff in multiple control rooms.

The Telecars were propelled along their tracks by linear induction motors—a fin descending from the bottom of each Telecar acted as the "rotor" while the powered stator coils were fixed in long strips under the tracks. Much like the famed Tomorrowland Transit Authority and its airport compatriot in the parking garages of Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport, the linear induction drive system had the advantage of simplifying the Telecars (which, in contrast to other proposed designs, were not self-powered at all but more like carts that were pushed along the rails by the LIMs), but the disadvantage of requiring a relatively new and unproven motor technology.

As each Telecar rolled along with the magnetic fields of the LIMs, RFID readers detected the golf-puck tags mounted to their sides and a computer checked the tag ID against the database to determine which bag was in the Telecar. Based on another database lookup to determine the bag's destination, the computer decided whether or not to operate switches to direct the Telecar onto various different tracks. A main "bus" of Telecar tracks in the central underground tunnel moved bags between buildings at high speed, where they were switched onto one or more rings that took them around the perimeter of the terminal building.

When a Telecar reached the gate where its bag was expected, the plastic tub on top tipped high up on its side at just the right moment so that the bag would fall out onto a waiting belt. The Telecar never stopped, it only slowed down, to about 6 MPH when unloading. The belt carried the bag to a waiting baggage handler for loading onto the plane, while the departing Telecar joined a pool of spares that circulated around the rings until there was a bag to be picked up.

If you think a bit about the mathematics of such a system, you can imagine the challenges involved in just the management of the empty Telecars. Loading was done by belts that quite literally ended at a cliff at the edge of the track, such that if a bag was waiting at the loading station the belt could not advance until a Telecar passed by to toss the bag into. This meant that any delay in getting empty Telecars to a ticketing counter, for example, caused the bags to back up on the belt until the agents had nowhere to put them. The entire system was like this: later analyses liken it to a deeply complex graph of queues feeding into other queues, in which a delay at any point could cause a rapid cascade through the rest of the system.

Compared to SFO, for example, the DIA baggage system was not only far larger (with nearly 20 miles of track compared to just a couple) but vastly more complex, with hundreds of gates at which bags could be either dropped off or picked up, bags moving between gates either within a terminal building or across terminal buildings, and a steady but very large flow of bags to and from the ticketing counters and baggage claims. To meet the demand, BAE provided almost 4,000 Telecars. Most of them were "standard," but hundreds were special oversized units designed specifically to handle skis while still negotiating the tight turns of the underground tracks.

Besides coordinating the movement of all the bags, the computer system had to coordinate all of the empty Telecars... a big enough part of the problem that BAE seems to have referred to the main software package as the "empty cart management system." The scale of the system also made maintenance complex, something evidently not adequately considered since one of the many last-minute change orders was the addition of a maintenance facility directly connected to the rail network so that Telecars could be repaired without having to be hoisted from the track to a dolly.

The algorithmic complexity was not unexpected. Munich's airport used a similar system based on automated carts, and it reportedly took nearly two years of testing, monitoring, and tuning the algorithm that dispatched carts to achieve reliable performance. That news either didn't make it to Denver or was ignored, since the DIA system was expected to go from zero to production on a shorter timeline than just that testing period. In the early '90s analytical solutions to the problem were unknown, and they remain very difficult today. In retrospect it is obvious that a computer simulation should have been developed to evaluate the control system. It does seem like BAE had intended to do so, but they simply ran out of time, and the software was completed so late that virtually no testing was performed before attempts at commissioning the system.

DIA had been slated to open on October 31st, 1993. At this point, only a bit over a year and a half had passed since the start of work on the airport-wide BAE system. By the time that date passed, the opening of the airport had already been postponed twice due to schedule slippage in the baggage handling system. The new date, March 9th of 1994, flew by as well. Testing of parts of the system had begun, but were plagued by electrical problems with the linear induction motors. The somewhat experimental design of the LIMs was certainly a suspect, but since most of the problems were related to tripping protection circuitry (due to voltage surges, phase imbalances, etc.), most of the blame landed on the City due to its ownership of the electrical distribution system. Filtering equipment was ordered to protect the LIMs but, having been ordered after the airport was already supposed to be open, the several month lead time on the specialty electrical equipment guaranteed even more severe delays.

All of these challenges came to a head in April of 1994. By this time, BAE was testing the full-scale system by sending demonstration luggage between scores of imaginary flights operated by major names like "Antarctic Airlines." In one of the more incredible stories in the history of engineering debacles, the City of Denver decided, without informing BAE, to invite the media.

The ensuing "open house" led directly to open season on the project. Reporters were taken into the tunnels below the terminals to observe bags flung by belts into open space, landing with a thud on the concrete floor below. These were, it turned out, some of the better-off suitcases: others were partially caught by Telecars and flung into posts at speed. Telecars rounding tight bends, which were far more common than BAE had intended due to the need to cram the tracks into already-built utility tunnels, tended to toss their contents into the corners of the tunnels where they piled up. The most unfortunate bags were "loaded" directly onto empty tracks or fell out of moving Telecars, until the next Telecar ran them over and tore them open.

The media fiasco was incredibly embarrassing to the project and to the City of Denver. Television stations ran footage of bags that were taking flight well before they reached an airplane. Newspaper reporters described loose clothing piling up like dirty laundry under the tracks. Some lucky reporters witnessed a full-speed collision of two Telecars, crushing what might have been someone's luggage in between them. Occasionally, bad sensors on the Telecars led them to abandon a bag on the side of a tunnel as if they were tired of carrying it.

These mechanical problems were, it turned out, the tip of the iceberg. Less visible to the reporters were the engineering findings of the testing, which concluded that fixing the loading and unloading process and teaching the Telecars to be more cautious drivers would take months and leave them with the bigger problem: software.

The software that controlled the system was, well, buggy. Empty cart management was a huge problem: there were obvious bugs in the software that gave way to deeper systemic problems. Logic errors around tracking Telecars and updating the database meant that empty Telecars in one terminal building were sent to another where they were needed, but by the time they arrived the computer system would forget why they were there and send them back where they came from. Moreover, BAE was far behind on their plans to integrate awareness of airline schedules and passenger volumes into the dispatching system. Instead of planning ahead, the system was reactive, and each landing plane would cause a brief crisis as empty carts were sent as quickly as possible while the bags stacked up on a belt that couldn't move.

The concept of scanning barcodes and associating them with RFID tags on the carts for routing was a familiar one in industrial environments, but it didn't work very well in the chaos of an airport—or at least in the chaos of this particular airport. Between the loading and unloading problems and software bugs, the computer system often lost track of which bag was in which Telecar, leading bags to be delivered to the wrong place. When the system was already running behind, it was difficult to get a bag picked up again for rerouting. The barcode readers themselves turned out to be a problem, they would fail to read the labels on the bags at all, forcing the system to send the bag to an unloading station to be relabeled. This happened to so many bags that the small staff, intended to handle a few exceptional situations, couldn't keep up.

The press demonstration had such an impact that DIA's opening date was delayed once again, this time indefinitely. For Denver's mayor, by that time Wellington Webb, it was a political disaster. The worst part of the whole thing was a single, simple mistake that dated, one could argue, to the original conception of the airport: there was no plan B. The automated system was just supposed to work.

By this point in the project, the City of Denver had commissioned multiple consulting firms that invariable concluded that the automated system would not, in fact, work, at least not on any reasonable timeline for the opening of the airport. It took the April press demonstration, though, to finally spur action. The next month, the City of Denver engaged German consulting firm Logplan to analyze the state of the system. Logplan intended to take a section of the installed Telecar track and run it 24/7 for an exhaustive test, intending to collect statistics to understand what problems were most acute and how to prioritize improvements. Instead, the test track performed so poorly, with so many jammed cars and collisions, that Logplan abandoned the test plan. Instead, they recommended that the City install a complete second baggage handling system of a more conventional design so that the airport could open.

On the advice of Logplan, the City signed a contract a few months later with German-American conveyor belt firm Rapistan Demag. Rapistan installed a very typical design of belts that bridged the gaps between passengers, aircraft, and a large fleet of carts pulled by human-operated tugs. A computer system provided some convenience and speed, but it was, fundamentally, the standard approach to airport luggage that United and Denver had completely rejected earlier in the project. Because the installation of the "backup" luggage system required new electrical supply arrangements and modifications to buildings, it cost about $50 million.

The New World Airport opened on February 28th, 1995, a sixteenth month delay due to the lack of baggage handling. When the airport did open, almost all baggage handling was manual, pulled by tugs both above ground and through tunnels that had been hastily fitted with railroad-style signals to work around the inability of two baggage tugs to pass in the narrow tunnels. Ever since, the story of DIA and its baggage has become one of the most famous case studies in the failure of an ambitious systems engineering project. DIA and the ABE Telecar system are the subject of so many term papers, masters theses, and textbook sidebars that it is perhaps rivaled only by the Therac-25 and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

Along the way, certain myths have accumulated. For example, there has been a tendency to cast the story of DIA as that of an AI ran amok. "The computer prioritized delivering bags," people say, "so it just delivered them anywhere they could go." As with most such myths, there is a kernel of truth: the routing algorithm was complex and had numerous bugs that caused nonsensical routing decisions, and mechanical failures caused bags to be deposited in all kinds of places that were not intended. Certain overload conditions caused "unidentified" bags that had lost their barcode association to accumulate, so that they were all rapidly delivered to a troubleshooting station that turned into a big pile. There was none of the intention, though, that people attribute to this supposed rogue AI. No decisions were being made: rather, a series of happenstances meant that the bags never reached the decision points. The places that they piled up had less to do with the whims of an intelligent machine than it did with the geometry of the track, which was only made to fit by the use of hairpin turns. The Telecars used rollercoaster-style grip wheels that kept them firmly on the rails, but the bags had no such adhesion and sometimes kept going in their preferred direction as the Telecar took off the other way.

Among the conspiracy theories surrounding DIA, the most prominent involve extensive underground construction. Whether DIA was built as a cover story for a deep underground military base, as a concentration camp for political enemies of the New World Order, or just in alignment with the ley lines to leave us all a little unsettled, it was impossible not to notice that throughout construction there was something strange happening underground. Once again, the kernel of truth: there was extensive underground construction, and it was controversial, complicated, and as the scandal grew it even became secretive.

DIA's automated baggage handling system never achieved full operational capability. In the years shortly following the airport's opening, United Airlines worked with BAE to complete a scoped-down version of their original airline-specific baggage handling system. The Terminal A Telecar system was simplified and isolated into a separate system that operated only between gates, which never saw much use. The Terminal B system, that exclusively served United, was used only to deliver outbound bags from the ticketing counters to the gates. Terminal C's Telecar tracks and stations, some never completed, were abandoned.

While it would be pleasing to say that everything strange about DIA is a consequence of an early-'90s industrial automation project gone wrong, that would leave out so many other stories, struggles, and scandals. The baggage handling system is an incredible story, but it is also mundane. Airports are enormous infrastructure projects, and even smaller efforts seldom go smoothly. DIA's baggage woes are joined by innumerable other problems with the airport's construction ranging from the quality of the runway paving to financial improprieties. They say that you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, and I very much doubt that you can build an airport without breaking some plans. I hesitate to fault a city government for swinging for the fences.

In 2005, the last operating part of the automated baggage handling system, United's outbound luggage deliveries, shut down. The Telecar system was shut down. United said that they were spending over a million dollars a month maintaining the troublesome Telecars, and it was cheaper to go back to traditional tugs. Most of the equipment was abandoned in place.

DIA was, perhaps, ahead of its time. The kind of technology required by the Telecar system, from robotics to demand-responsive control algorithms, have advanced tremendously over the last 30 years. Orlando Airport's new Terminal C, for example, successfully operates an "individual carrier system" that is substantially similar to the Telecar design. Amusingly, a smaller-scale automated baggage handling has operated at DIA for the last several years, limited to moving bags from the ticketing counters through the security screening process.

Even now, automated baggage handling is rare. The majority of airports still use carts, tugs, and a whole lot of manual labor. DIA's planned system, if built today, would still rank among the few largest in the world—but decisively behind the Siemens-built system at Dubai International Airport, at least on a volume basis. DIA might still be ahead of its time today: Dubai's state-of-the-art baggage network still doesn't meet the original delivery time targets at DIA. But, then, neither did BAE.

If DIA does harbor underground secrets, they won't be secret much longer. This year, the airport announced plans to remove the last of the Telecar equipment from the connecting tunnel and refit the space it used to occupy as a pedestrian walkway. The $300-700 million project is scheduled to start early next year, but from what I can tell they haven't announced an opening date. That's probably a wise decision.

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Today's News:

Experts have long warned that immigration dragnets and the erosion of civil rights for immigrants will inevitably result in the erosion of rights for citizens.

Since the start of this Trump administration, we’ve watched those warnings come true.

The Trump administration says none of this is happening.

“DHS is NOT arresting U.S. citizens by mistake.” “There are no ‘indiscriminate’ stops.” Allegations of “racial profiling are disgusting, reckless and categorically FALSE.” “The pattern is NOT of law enforcement using force.” “ICE does not zip tie or restrain children.”

But that is precisely what is happening, and at a far larger scale than previously reported.

We know because we have once again done what the government hasn’t:

We have tallied and cataloged every case we can find of an immigration agent holding a citizen during the current administration.

More than 500 cases. That includes:

• More than a hundred Americans held after agents questioned their citizenship. Nearly all were people of color.
• At least 70 American children and teens detained, some of whom were handcuffed.
• Of the more than 300 Americans we tracked as detained for allegedly assaulting or obstructing agents, we found fewer than half were actually charged in federal court, and many of those cases were dropped or dismissed.
• At least 63 Americans detained while recording.
• 36 Americans held for at least a day without being able to contact a lawyer or their family.
• Roughly a dozen citizens deported, mostly children.

Collectively, these cases show that as the administration has relentlessly pursued immigrants, federal agents have run roughshod over the constitutional rights of citizens too.

We’re showing you every case — the reality that the administration denies — along with the receipts.

Explore our list of incidents where 506 citizens were detained.

In January 2025, agents held a 21-year-old citizen at gunpoint and put him in handcuffs during a raid at the Philadelphia car wash where he worked.

In April, a 20-year-old was held in a Florida jail for more than 24 hours, despite having proof of his citizenship.

In June, a dual citizen of Mexico and the U.S. was detained while working in California. He was held for four days without access to a lawyer or his family.

During the enforcement surge in Chicago last fall, known as Operation Midway Blitz, there were “no administrative arrests of U.S. citizens,” according to the Department of Homeland Security. “ICE has significant protections in place to ensure U.S. citizens are not arrested, detained, or mistakenly removed.” But we found that federal agents detained more than 120 citizens in Illinois during the height of the surge.

In November, agents took an 18-year-old citizen off the street, eventually dumping him in the woods.

In December, an American in Baltimore was picked up and held for 25 days, unable to see her 5-year-old son over Christmas.

In January, hours after Renee Good’s killing, agents tackled and handcuffed a school staffer in Minneapolis. He was terrified, he recalled: “I feel lucky to be alive.”

In April, when agents stopped a man in Texas, he told them, “I’m a citizen, it’s fine.” He was deported four days later.

In May, a New York teen was thrown to the ground, bloodied and then dumped in an unfamiliar neighborhood. “He just grabbed me and threw me on the floor,” the teen recalled.

In September, agents detained and injured an Illinois man they thought was someone else.

We shared details and footage of many of the incidents with former immigration officials. They reacted with anger and disbelief.

“This is just terrible,” said Eric Balliet, who spent more than two decades at Homeland Security Investigations and Border Patrol, both agencies under DHS, including in President Donald Trump’s first administration.

“I’ve never seen so many U.S. citizen encounters in all my years,” said Darius Reeves, who oversaw the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s Baltimore office before retiring last year. “It’s an embarrassment.”

In tallying these detentions, we included anyone who authorities held against their will for any period of time — whether they were handcuffed, held at gunpoint or otherwise prevented from leaving by immigration agents. The courts consider someone detained if they aren’t free to leave.

Immigration agents do have authority to detain Americans in limited circumstances: if they can reasonably suspect they are in the country illegally, or if they allegedly interfered with or assaulted officers.

ProPublica shared its findings and information on each case with DHS. 

The department defended agents’ conduct. “DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted. We do our due diligence,” the agency said in a statement. It added that anyone who obstructs agents “will of course face consequences which include arrest.”

We compiled our list by scouring social media, court records and local media to confirm and compile incidents.

Our work doesn’t include all of agents’ problematic interactions with citizens. We didn’t count incidents where, say, an agent shot but didn’t detain a citizen. And as with the tally we did last year, the new list is an undercount. For instance, witnesses estimate that more than 200 citizens were detained in an Idaho raid last fall, but we only included the 30 citizens who we were able to identify.

Willy Wender Aceituno, a naturalized citizen who voted for Trump twice, said he never imagined that the immigration crackdown he supported would entangle him.

Then, last November, Border Patrol agents broke his truck window, yanked Aceituno out and threw him onto the pavement of a parking lot, where one agent knelt on his back. (DHS says he “refused to comply” with agents’ commands.)

“ICE isn’t looking for criminals,” Aceituno said. “They’re looking for Latinos. Having papers in this country does not protect you.”

“Upon Probable Cause”

Under the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement generally must have probable cause to arrest someone. But there’s a lower bar, reasonable suspicion, for stopping someone to question them.

The Trump administration has repeatedly said its agents are just questioning citizens, not detaining them — even when they’re in handcuffs or held for hours. DHS also cites a concurring opinion issued last year by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh stating that agents can consider factors like “apparent ethnicity” when making stops. Citizens around the country have been detained because, they’ve said, of their skin color, accents or jobs.

Ever since his arrest in November, Aceituno said his U.S.-born daughter carries her passport at college. “She has a Latino face,” he said, adding, “My daughter’s white friends aren’t carrying their passports.”

“Secure in Their Persons, Houses, Papers and Effects”

The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution also prohibits officers from entering homes without a judge’s warrant.

An ICE memo revealed by a whistleblower this year showed that agents had been doing it anyway. The agency asserted that administrative warrants that didn’t involve a judge gave agents the ostensible authority to force their way into homes looking for someone with a final deportation order. Some of those incidents have also resulted in Americans being detained.

In January, Jeyli Salguero, her parents and her sister were asleep at home when armed federal agents broke through the front door and rushed inside.

“The first thing I yelled when I stepped out of my room was that I was a U.S. citizen and I had the right to record,” Salguero recalled. “That’s when they snatched my phone.”

The agents told Salguero’s family they were looking for her brother, who does not live there. After half an hour, the agents released Salguero and her mother, but detained her father, who had temporary protected status, and her sister, who was undocumented. The sister was eventually deported to El Salvador, and her father was later released from detention.

Salguero told us that agents left her and her mom alone in their wrecked house with the Minneapolis winter air coming in through a broken door.

Salguero is one of several plaintiffs who have filed a lawsuit against the government for going into homes without a judicial warrant. DHS has moved to dismiss the lawsuit, saying it has “paused” the policy.

“Against Unreasonable Searches and Seizures”

The Fourth Amendment is also intended to protect people from “unreasonable” use of force during arrests. Previously, we’ve documented how agents have used chokeholds that DHS banned other than when deadly force is authorized. We’ve also documented how immigration agents have broken car windows while pursuing people they believe are in the country illegally. But they’ve been doing it to citizens, too. Many of those citizens have filed lawsuits.

Darren Eichler was working at a Christian cemetery in a Chicago suburb last October when he and his coworkers moved to help a man who was wading in the nearby river. They soon realized — too late — that the man was running from immigration agents, who emerged from the brush near the river and demanded access to a gated area of the cemetery. When the men refused and started filming, agents used bolt cutters to cut open the gate, then fired pepper balls and tackled the men.

Explore incidents where citizens were subjected to crowd control weapons.

Eichler said his face felt like it was on fire and he had trouble breathing. “I pleaded with them for an hour to please call an ambulance.” Eichler told ProPublica. He was eventually brought to a hospital, still handcuffed, while the agents stood over his bed. Eichler’s co-workers were held for several hours at a nearby federal office. No one was charged.

DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment about the incident.

“The Right of the People Peaceably to Assemble”

The First Amendment protects protesters and those documenting agents’ conduct. The amendment guarantees the freedom to assemble — in other words, to protest peacefully — and the freedom of speech, which courts have interpreted to include recording in public.

The Trump administration has, however, aggressively pursued the arrest and prosecution of citizens who were protesting, often claiming the protesters were assaulting officers or interfering with enforcement activities. We counted more than 300 people accused of assaulting or obstructing officers, about 130 of them at protests.

Top DHS officials, including former Secretary Kristi Noem, went further, claiming that filming ICE agents was interfering with arrests. Last summer, three siblings driving in Texas were detained after they stopped to film an immigration arrest. One of the siblings was a young teen. “They tackled me down and an agent put one knee behind my knee, where I felt a sharp pain,” he told ProPublica. He was separated from his mother, who has a green card. “They were saying my mom wasn’t a U.S. citizen, and I was scared they were gonna take her away.”

The siblings have filed claims for damages with the government. Asked about the incident, DHS said it respects “the First Amendment rights of individuals to observe and express themselves. However, if such actions interfere with or obstruct our operations, ICE will take necessary steps to address the situation.”

Our review did uncover instances that appear to show some protesters or other civilians assaulting officers. One person pleaded guilty to throwing pieces of cinder block at an agent. A woman in California pleaded guilty to pulling off an officer’s mask.

Many protesters were accused of crimes but never actually charged. We found 137 instances of citizens who were charged with federal crimes, most of whom were charged with assaulting or obstructing federal agents. In nearly half of those instances, the charges were dropped or dismissed. Three dozen citizens have been sentenced to prison or probation, and another three dozen cases are pending, as of September 15.

Explore incidents where citizens were detained while recording.

Some of those arrested, like clarinet player Oriana Korol, were initially charged with felony assault before pleading guilty to a misdemeanor — in Korol’s case, for trying to kick an officer. She said she did so after officers shoved her and pepper-sprayed her twice in the face. Just moments before, the band had been playing the “Ghostbusters” theme song as part of a peaceful protest.

Video footage shows agents leading Korol away, handcuffed, while one pulls her tear-gas-soaked mask over her mouth. “Please pull it down,” Korol tells the agents in the video. “I’m going to have an asthma attack. I have asthma. Why are you doing this to me? Please.”

The Rights of Children

Unlike earlier administrations, Trump has detained significant numbers of immigrant children living far from the border. Citizen kids have been swept up too — at least 70 of them. We’ve found about 20 kids who were handcuffed or zip-tied.

DHS said that ICE doesn’t zip-tie or restrain children, or separate families. But agents handcuffed a 15-year-old with disabilities outside a school in Los Angeles in 2025. The agents said they mistook the teen for an alleged gang member. A few months later, officers detained more than a dozen American children during a raid on an Idaho horse track. Anabel Romero said her children are still deeply shaken by their detention.

Romero told us how her 7-year-old son warned his older sister about going to another race this month: “He said, ‘Watch out for ICE, make sure you have your phone to film — I’ll come save you.’”

“Without Due Process of Law”

As the government has rushed to deport people as quickly as possible, Americans have also been swept up and removed from the country too. About a dozen American kids have been deported with their parents, allegedly over their parents’ objections.

DHS said: “Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates.”

One American adult in Texas was also deported this spring.

The car Brian Morales Garcia was in was pulled over earlier this year in central Texas. Officers didn’t believe him when he said he was a citizen. And they wouldn’t let him get his birth certificate. Morales Garcia was held for four days without being able to call his lawyer or anyone else. Then he was deported to Mexico.

After suing, Morales Garcia was allowed back into the country just last month using his birth certificate.

DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about Morales Garcia’s deportation. In earlier court filings, officials disputed Morales Garcia’s citizenship and claimed he had admitted to being born in Mexico.

“I couldn’t process what they were doing to me.” Morales Garcia told ProPublica. When he was first stopped in Texas, he had told officers, “I’m a citizen, it’s fine.”

Explore more video evidence compiled by ProPublica and our list of incidents where 506 citizens were detained.

How We Reported This Story

How We Counted Incidents

We found and vetted cases from a number of sources, including English- and Spanish-language social media, DHS statements, court records and local news reports, in addition to our own reporting. We included an incident in our dataset only if we could find at least two sources for it. For additional details about the incident, like whether crowd control weapons were used, we accepted one source in some cases.

When DHS provided a response specific to an incident — including about whether it happened or the circumstances under which it happened — we noted that response in cases in our full list for which we offered detail beyond a simple count of detained citizens. DHS responses that generically denied ever detaining citizens or that are proven inaccurate by our reporting were not included.

As with our count a year ago, most of the detained Americans on our list fell into two broad categories. The first is Americans who were held because agents questioned their citizenship. This time, we found more than a hundred such cases. The second category is Americans arrested by immigration agents after being accused of assaulting or impeding officers at protests or during immigration arrests of others. In that category, we tallied roughly 300 Americans. 

In many of these cases, the government accused but never charged these individuals with assault. Sometimes agents detained people because of questions about their citizenship but later accused them of crimes. While public attention often focuses on ICE, the immigration dragnet often relied on officers from agencies across the government.

Since the government itself does not track these cases, our list is almost certainly an undercount. Except in a few cases in which DHS itself confirmed detentions, we only counted citizens we were able to individually identify. So, for example, while witnesses estimate as many as 200 citizens were detained in an Idaho raid last fall, we were only able to identify 30 individuals by time of publication. We encountered the same issues for many smaller raids and protests, such as a raid of a food plant in Cato, New York; protesters detained by ICE at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey; and a raid of a Hyundai-LG plant in Ellabell, Georgia.

ICE itself occasionally has stated higher numbers than we were able to confirm: It told Congress that 131 citizens were arrested for assaulting, obstructing or interfering this year in Minnesota’s Metro Surge. It didn’t name them. We cataloged fewer than a hundred.

We tagged each case with details like whether a minor was detained or a citizen was held after filming. Another trend we tracked was citizens held for more than a day without access to a lawyer or their family. When multiple citizens were detained in one incident or sometimes on the same day and city, we grouped them together.

Because we focused on the expanded presence of immigration agents in American communities, we restricted our count to warrantless arrests that took place outside of airports and away from the borders, where immigration agents have long had more authority. We also excluded cases of Americans who were arrested after a judicial warrant.

We did not include incidents where an agent shot, tackled or pepper-sprayed a citizen but didn’t detain them.

We also did not include immigration protesters arrested by police who were only enforcing local laws. We did, however, include some cases involving police working with immigration agents. We still have little visibility into how many citizens have been detained by police deputized to act as immigration agents.

We also found reports of more than 30 Americans who felt racially profiled by immigration agents, but we did not include them in our database because it was not clear they were held against their will.

How We Counted and Reviewed Court Cases

We searched every named adult in our list to see if they were charged with a federal crime in relation to their detention. We conducted searches, using several name combinations for people with double names or compound names, in federal district courts through the online platform PACER. We looked for a criminal case filed within two months of the noted date of a person’s detention in the judicial district in which the detention happened. We then noted whether we found charges, what the charges were, and whether the person involved was sentenced or had their case dismissed or discharged.

How We Chose the Videos in This Report

We reviewed hundreds of videos of federal agents detaining American citizens across the country. While that included body camera footage, news clippings and helicopter footage, the vast majority of videos were made by bystanders and shared over social media. Many of the videos went viral and were recirculated across the internet by a range of third-party accounts. They touch on everyday American life in a range of settings, including workplaces, homes, protests, car washes, suburban sidewalks and the interiors of vehicles.

We tagged each video with how clearly it shows the incident and whether the citizen detained was clearly visible. We then categorized the videos by the kind of conduct they show, such as citizens being detained after recording. We provided DHS an opportunity to respond to each of the videos we included.

We did not alter videos, nor did we add watermarks, blur faces or overlay captions on videos unless otherwise noted. Videos that include captions or watermarks are shown as they were obtained.

The post More Than 500 U.S. Citizens Have Been Detained, Including Handcuffed or Held at Gunpoint, in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown appeared first on ProPublica.

A whole decade ago I blogged about a taxonomy of cliches in space opera, with a considerable checklists of things to watch out for in the space opera I was just then starting to work on.

This was almost entirely a background task for most of that time. During the period I was poking at the new space opera project I wrote: the Empire Games trilogy, the New Management trilogy, A Conventional Boy, The Labyrinth Index and The Regicide Report. So, nine other novels. Meanwhile the space opera went through two and a half rewrites, spawned a spin-off novel, and the spin-off novel is now getting its second rewrite, because Reasons (it has to be perfect: also, I'm going to go back to the original space opera next and finish that, too, probably next year, not to mention already having the first 50,000 words of a sequel.).

But anyway: the space opera project has resulted in maybe a third of a million words of fiction so far, and absolutely humongous quantities of world-building work. Which is why I'm now revisiting my earlier thoughts on space opera, to try to better understand what I'm doing here.

First, some clarification. What even is space opera, when it's at home?

While there's no short, concise definition of space opera, there's an extensive monograph on Space Opera in the SF Encyclopedia, tracing its roots back to the US pulp magazine sector around 1900 and following it to 1941, when Wilson Tucker defined it as the appropriate term for the "hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship yarn": alternatively, space-adventure stories which have a calculatedly romantic element.

Let's stick a magnifying glass on top of that last phrase. Romaniticism in this context does not have anything to do with the romance genre of fiction (which focusses on love and relationships). Rather it's a shout-out to the romantic movement of the 18th to 19th centuries and its modern descendants, which prioritize passion, intuition, and individualism over social convention—the pursuit of beauty entails an interest in the exotic and mysterious, a celebration of the heroic and the divine, respect for the supernatural, and arguably the will to power and worship of force that took a darker turn in the fascist and totalitarian movements of the 20th century. Stick starships and light sabres and vast vistas of time and space on top of this and you can get an impression of where it's going.

As a romantic genre, space opera requires its protagonists to have enough agency (personal autonomy) to break out of their quotidian setting and have adventures—travel is a big part of this, for it cuts them free of the ties that bind, leaves family behind, and promises escape. To which end, the spaceship is central in space opera just as the sailing ship was key to the age of (ahem) sail. Trying to imagine Moby Dick or Master and Commander without sailing ships is like trying to imagine Star Trek or Star Wars without starships.

You can write romantic adventure-focussed SF without starships (use stargates/wormholes or just set it on a planet where adventure-shaped activities dominate the plot) but what you get then isn't space opera, it's a planetary romance.

(Planetary romance (the sub-genre Jack Vance was famous for) inherently places more constraints on what you can do with your fiction. You can't easily have a planetary setting which combines long travel times, high energy technologies and high population density, for example: long travel times imply no fast vehicles (no high speed rail or air travel, never mind spaceships), which are a side-effect of high energy technologies (internal combustion, gas turbines, big-ass electrical generators and HV grid of any kind) and you can't easily get to any of those things without a sufficiently high population density to support the industries that make them feasible (not just engineering and factories but universities and schools with mass literacy and mining) which in turn implies advanced agriculture—you've got to feed those cities somehow. (Memo to self: hunt down James Burke's Connections on video (they're somewhere on YouTube) and re-watch the series.) It also makes it difficult to justify sub-settings with wildly divergent levels of technology because that stuff leaks—to keep it out you need a North Korean level hermit kingdom, or totally impenetrable jungles that haven't been penetrated by colonialists, or something of that level. (NB: I have found a workaround for this, but I'm not going to spoiler the coming novels!)

Ultimately economics are your enemy if you want to write convincing romanticist fiction without turning into a fantasy-without-the-magic secondary world setting: all it takes is one country inventing capitalism and/or imperialism to muck it up for everybody else). And economics fucks with space opera too: ask yourself what markets plausibly exist for goods and services transported across interstellar distances, and after digesting Paul Krugman's Theory of Interstellar Trade (PDF) you may be left scratching your head.

My go-to answer for economics in space opera is that interstellar expansion/colonization is most plausibly driven by (a) religion ("manifest destiny" is a religious belief, built atop Genesis 9:7), or (b) escapist colonialism (but only if travel is cheap and compatible biospheres are abundant). In third place we probably get pyramid schemes (eg. Neptune's Brood by some guy called Stross: prior art for that one existed in the shape of colonial pyramid schemes, eg. the Darien Scheme which bankrupted Scotland, or the South Sea Bubble, which nearly bankrupted the British government a generation later). Then a long way down the list we get to trade in Veblen Goods, and maybe—if interstellar transport is very cheap—recreation. What the latter two items have in common is that they're status signifiers—the wealthy have been having yachting adventures while the peasants labor on their estates to pay for them for a very long time, and as for Veblen Goods, Faberge eggs are pretty obvious. So we have status as a driver for space opera: a side-effect of hierarchical social structures where the elite seek to maintain their status by signaling their affluence in various ways.

Did I mention hierarchical social structures and capitalism? The thing about capitalism is that it's a totalizing ideology, like the divine right of kings, or religious fundamentalism. It seeks converts, it refuses to be gainsaid, and it confers a competitive advantage on cultures that adopt it (as opposed to those that reject it). Yet, as Ursula le Guin said, "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings..."

Space opera embraces the romanticist outlook. This is inherently problematic, for it is capable of spawning totalitarian nightmares. To understand this point, I dare you to read Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto from 1909 and not recognize it both as a masterpiece of romantic rhetoric and as one of the founding texts of Fascism—very specifically the Italian Fascist movement (Nazism and Spanish clerico-fascism were later tumors on the rancid politics of violence and misogyny that Marinetti unleashed).

It's not possible to examine space opera, or planetary romance, and not acknowledge the pernicious fascistic imagery in both subgenres. Michael Moorcock wrote a magisterial essay about this nexus in the wake of Star Wars (the first movie): I strongly recommend reading his Starship Stormtroopers before pressing on if you're not already familiar with it.

Pace Le Guin, it is possible to write space opera that doesn't pander to fascism directly, as the late Iain M. Banks demonstrated. But even in his magisterial Culture series the pustules of fascism can easily be seen on the faces of the Culture's adversaries: from the Idiran imperialists to the Empire of Azad, perhaps most clearly in the character of the Affront, it takes a bad dose of fascism to introduce the romanticist element necessary for space opera to be perpetrated. Otherwise you're left with something like Inversions, which is a Culture novel with merely homeopathic traces of space opera remaining. Incidentally I make no apologies for assuming a familiar with the Culture novels on the part of the reader: if you haven't read it already, you're missing out, because it's the nearest thing I've seen to a refutation of the core conceit of might-makes-right inherent in the fascist strain of space opera. Iain wrote A Few Notes on the Culture in 1993 to explain what he was about: in particular, I was struck by this summary: The Culture, in its history and its on-going form, is an expression of the idea that the nature of space itself determines the type of civilisations which will thrive there. ... Essentially, the contention is that our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.

Totalizing ideologies like capitalism or Christian Nationalism aren't immutable, and opposition is possible. They rely on a perception of inescapability on the part of their subjects, and space opera should be the ideal fictional vehicle for escapism from such certainties: if our protagonists can board a starship and flee, there is in principle no reason why they can't shed the chains of a pernicious ideological system.

Now I want to cut to a different question. What about the human-scale story?

Space opera isn't usually a genre of high conceptual merit that tries to tell us something about the world we live in. It can be, in the hands of a determined author who knows what they're doing (I'm thinking specifically of Iain Banks, of Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix, of some of Alastair Reynolds' work—notably House of Suns) but it's more often deployed as a giant shiny backdrop for human-scale drama. Fiction is generally the art of confabulating plausible lies that illuminate the human condition, but stars and galaxies exist on a very superhuman scale: if we took them seriously as a setting they'd dwarf the merely human concerns of the protagonists—the emotional cursors that traverses the story universe—into insignificance, as in the more philosophical works of Olaf Stapledon. (For a fine example, see Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear.) Most of us don't have the imaginative flexibility to conceive of time scales significantly longer than a human lifespan and vistas larger than a single planet (and even that is a recent development: I think before mass intercontinental air travel our imaginative horizons were far more constrained). So a common problem in space opera is for the scale of distances to collapse: modern authors tend to fall back on the durations of international air travel, rather than thinking in terms of age-of-sail voyages, let alone more realistic interstellar durations at slower than light speeds. (Honorable exception to that one: Alastair Reynolds, and to a lesser extent, Ursula Le Guin's Hainish Worlds stories and Ken Macleod's Engines of Light tetralogy.)

A side-effect of the romantic outlook is a demand for individual human agency—that is, that despite the vast scale of the backdrop, the protagonists have the ability to effect change, or at least to change their own circumstances. Here in the real world most of us are trapped by situational constraints: our employment system is parodied as wage slavery for a reason. Opportunities for adventure are scarce, and your chances of self-betterment are minimal. (You can found a business and spend 30 years trying to become a millionaire, most likely to end in ignominious failure, or you play the lottery, be it by explicit gambling or by speculation on the cryptocurrency markets, but the game is rigged against you from the start.) Money in large quantities, as capital, exerts a gravitational attraction and we are individually just dust particles. So space opera tends to focus on protagonists who acquire individual agency, have adventures that take them away from the quotidian grind, and let them change themselves or the worlds around them.

A classic plot skeleton for this sort of fiction is the Hero's Journey template, as popularized by Joseph Campbell and demonstrated by George Lucas in Star Wars, and it's less-familiar-to-many sibling, the Heroine's Journey: interestingly the Heroine's Journey can be seen as an explicit rejection of the frenetic diktat of Futurism even though it's compatible with space opera, as demonstrated magisterially by Lois McMaster Bujold, whose Vorkosigan series is bookended by a Heroine's Journey narrative (starting in Shards of Honor, continuing in Barrayar, finally winding up in Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen)—and which holds the singular record for most Hugo awards for a single SF series (so this isn't just my opinion). Character development lives at the heart of both these templates, and I suspect you can't have a working space opera without the scope for such changes.

To briefly hark back to the Futurist/fascist imagery inherent in space opera: the Vorkosigan series is arguably Ruritanian romantic space opera set against a recognizable 19th century central European flavoured empire. (It's no accident that space opera emerged at the end of the age of empires, the turn of the 20th century.) Our main viewpoint character, Cordelia Vorkosigan, is a woman with modern sensibilities who effects change in that society to great effect, working largely behind the scenes as a noblewoman in that setting—indeed, that's the nature of her modified Heroine's Journey arc. (Assuming, of course, that you buy either the Hero's Journey or Heroine's Journey templates, both which are heavily influenced by Jungian psychology and early-to-mid 20th century conceptions of masculine and feminine gender identity, all of which are highly problematic in my opinion.)

Ultimately, though, the romanticist aesthetic is inimical to social convention and formalism—and also to sustainability. The romantic impulse renders space opera antithetical to solarpunk. A fictional setting composed entirely of wild individualists isn't going to end up as some sort of libertarian utopia, it's going to be a cat ranch: meanwhile someone needs to stay behind and tend the home fires, someone has to mind the grain silos on that "small farming planet", someone else needs to manage the shipyard that repairs the interstellar freighter. There's a lot of implied background in space opera, a civilization with enough surplus wealth production to build and operate starships, and this implies some degree of continuity—continuity of biosphere stability (or there'll be nothing to eat), continuity of infrastructure (including education/apprenticeships, to train/socialize the starship crews), continuity of the society our adventurer-protagonists emerged from. Social structures, governance, and politics are a given in every human society, and the romantic movement emerged from a very specific context that coincided with the age of enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Our protagonists are either privileged enough to transcend the daily grind or sufficiently motivated to take a hideous gamble with their own safety. And this tells us something about the constraints within which space operatic storytelling takes place—and my work-in-progress in particular.

Any questions?