“Damn, how I wish Jerry Pournelle could be watching this.”
That was a comment to a blog post I wrote on Friday’s successful SpaceX Starship v.3 launch. I wholeheartedly agree. When I was still a kid, I read Jerry’s column “A Step Farther Out” in Galaxy magazine religiously. Jerry saw it all coming: vertical takeoff and landing spaceships, the need to lower costs to orbit, and the absolute necessity for both reusability and launch volume to make things cheap enough, and reliable enough, to build an interplanetary economy. He wrote about the immense resources of space (both in terms of energy and material), and the wide-open human future they could support. As the blurb for a collection of his work published in 2022 says, “If you wanted a strategy for the technology of going to space in the 1970's, 80's and 90's, Dr. Jerry Pournelle was your man.”
I don’t know this firsthand, but I feel certain that he was a big influence on Elon Musk’s thinking.
Jerry saw it coming, and lived to see the beginning of SpaceX, but like Moses he saw the promised land but didn’t get to enter it.
Now, we’re about to enter it.
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