Jerry Pournelle, a science fiction writer who also was devoted to championing scientific progress and space development, dreamed of what’s now fast becoming a reality on and off the Earth.
Sparked by his enthusiasm over the recent successful SpaceX Starship v.3 launch, Instapundit columnist and American legal scholar Glenn Harlan Reynolds has written a heartfelt column paying tribute to the prescient vision of Jerry Pournelle.
Pournelle, a Prometheus Best Novel winner, deserves to be remembered – and not only for his fiction.
“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,” Reynolds writes.
“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.”
It’s not a coincidence that Fallen Angels, the 1992 Prometheus Best Novel winner that Pournelle co-wrote with Larry Niven and Michael Flynn, has a theme emphasizing the importance of science and technology and the need for free men and women to both defend and advance such progress to sustain our civilization.
At the center of Fallen Angels are two astronauts from a stranded and closed-down space station who fall to earth while on one of their desperate flights to beef up the station’s diminishing gas supplies by scooping up nitrogen gases from the Earth’s outer atmosphere.
Just as Pournelle’s fictional characters are rational, reality-based heroes, Pournelle (1933-2017) certainly would have celebrated the ongoing human achievements of today’s space engineers and astronauts as well as the entrepreneurial successes of Space X.
Like Pournelle during his heyday, Reynolds sees the significance and further potential from today’s exciting space developments for a better and freer future for humanity.
“There are still bugs to work out, and capabilities to add, but what we saw on Friday was a full-fledged interplanetary spaceship,” Reynolds writes in his column, which he posted on Instapundit..
“Starship v.3 is big enough to carry cargoes to the Moon and Mars… It will also support missions to asteroids, which are loaded with precious and valuable metals, carbon compounds, and other useful stuff…. A moon base is practical with Starship.”
Like Pournelle, Reynolds appreciates that politics remains a threat to continued human progress – and that freedom and free markets offer the best way to advance in space (and on Earth.)
“After the mission concluded, the SpaceX crew was chanting “USA! USA!” Jerry always said that it was nearly certain that space would ultimately be settled by humans, but that it would make a big difference which humans got there first,” Reynolds writes.
“The USA is the planet’s beacon of freedom and hope — and, frankly, the only country that could have supported the development of a company like SpaceX, with a freewheeling and creative yet utterly results-oriented culture. If we get there first, the coming millennium will look very different than it would if it was, say, China who got there first.
Despite all the genuine social, economic and political problems and challenges we continue to face in the 21st century, such progress is inspiring and heartening.
Many people, including libertarians, still dream of a freer and better future for all as our species continues to advance farther on the new frontiers of our solar system.
And those dreams are closer than ever to materializing, as Pournelle foresaw and as Reynolds reminds us.
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