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.”
