What's the Name of That Book??? discussion

A friend talked about this book long ago. He didn't have it, and couldn't remember the title. I have no idea when he read it. Basically the book starts with the first manned mission to mars. The astronaut lands only to see a college student already there, standing in a home made (somewhat leaky) pressure suit. The suit has an air line that is tracing back through a portal he'd created into the lab in his university.

SPOILER ALERT!
The book then flash forwards several years later. The kid is now the richest person on the planet. Humanity has started colonies on several worlds. Conventional space travel is seen as archaic.

Then humanity meets an aggressive alien race with spaceships. Suddenly, we need a space fleet. The 'kid' turns to that astronaut he'd met on mars to help him build it.

This book seemed very interesting to me, and I've occasionally done searches for it. Obviously I've been unsuccessful. Please help!

Pandora's Star ? Somebody else had a similar search here https://scifi.stackexchange.com/quest...


The book opens with a short section providing backstory. As part of the first mission to Mars, a team of astronauts exits their spacecraft for the first time, only to see another man standing there, connected to an air hose that leads through a wormhole to a laboratory in California. The wormhole generator's inventors, Nigel Sheldon and Ozzie Isaacs, chose to test it by beating the crew, by moments, to be the first human on Mars. The saga then moves onto the Commonwealth era in 2380, when humanity has used the wormhole technology to colonise several hundred planets across hundreds of light years.

That sounds right, thanks. Have ordered it. If it's correct I'll mark the thread as solved.

FYI Brandon, just moving a thread to Solved doesn't inform us that your thread is solved; you have to add a new comment which bumps up your thread. Book shelved.