European sapce agency funding was tight. It was a last ditch attempt to secure funding that failed until a young man - Ray Briggs with his last advertising credits won from youtube followed his dreams and built a robot at open university.
The robot was teleoperated and used chinese tech he then crowd funded its launch into space before long he had 2 trillion visitors using his robot via occulus on facebook. Wow.
Hed then raised 2 billion enough to launch the materials for building exohub the first tourist destination in space. Which Richard Bransons Virgin galactic used as its destination for the wealthy to live in space. Branson visited the hub and stayed there for a while and toasted his success.
Exohub was built by him alone using his teleoperated robot equiped with basic tools for assembling the exohub.
At the same time someone else was secretly funding the Dark Star program in the UK which was to develop a stealth satellite capable of using high energy pulses to disable other satellites it was a covert satellite thats primary use along with its siblings was to harvest solar energy and convert it to energy this leveraged the energy market as it was transmitted back to earth at a receiver station in every location that wanted it. It provided so much income that Wales its primary owner became revitalised overnight as it resurected its infrastructure now essential in building rockets to mars.