Writing The Future

Over at The Weekly Standard, I remember Jerry Pournelle:

…he had an outsized influence on U.S. space and defense policy. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, he and others would gather at Niven’s home in Tarzana, California, to hammer out policy recommendations. These meetings evolved into something more formal, the Citizens’ Advisory Council on National Space Policy, which Pournelle chaired. In addition to several science fiction authors, the group included Buzz Aldrin and a handful of other astronauts, retired military officers like Army General Danny Graham, and several figures from the aerospace industry. (I was too junior to be invited, but my then-boss at the Aerospace Corporation participated.) Congressman Newt Gingrich was involved, too. The group recommended to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger the commencement of a missile-defense program, a proposal that helped inspire President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. To the extent that the prospect of American missile-defense technology hastened the end of the Cold War—by making it plain to Soviet leaders that mutually assured destruction would no longer be mutual—Pournelle can be said to have played a small but not insignificant part in nudging the world toward freedom.

RTWT, despite the fact that I wrote it.

9 thoughts on “Writing The Future”

  1. Well done. I grinned at The program was later subsumed by NASA; that was..er…very diplomatic of you. 🙂

    was often informative and always entertaining, despite, and sometimes because of, its author’s lapses into curmudgeonliness. I’m getting the weirdest case of deja vu…:)

  2. Good job. Imagine Clarke and Asimov debating Heinlein and Pournelle? I remember Jerry having praise for Dan Quayle. He understood the lying media long before others caught on.

    DC-X flew almost 2 decades before Grasshopper giving us some clue to lost opportunity costs.

    He had vision, insight and keen perception. He will continue to be right on the issues for the next hundred years.

  3. My uncle Bruce died recently (2 mo?) and my uncle Herb is dying of organ failure right now. Both are younger than my mom. My uncle RP , also younger (he legally change his name to that because he was named after a stillborn older brother Ron) is probably next. It’s never easy.

    Bruce was 2 years older than I (he called my mother,.mom.) Herb used to babysit me. Live long enough and you get to watch everyone you love die.

  4. Anybody know where the name Wade Curtis came from? It probably isn’t a particularly interesting story, but sometimes it is. I was always charmed that it let him show up incognito in Footfall.

  5. Great article Rand. I read his blog every night before going to bed. I did send Stephanie Osborn an email. No reply yet. I sent the email last Friday. I had asked her a question. Jerry would post emails from her on his blog. Her emails were about science, and climate. I emailed her a question about building mirrors in Earth orbit. I sent the email to the email address posted on her site.

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