BFR and Sci-Fi
My blogging acquaintance Colby Cosh wrote a wonderful piece for the National Post, Heinlein’s Monster, in which Cosh notes Elon Musk’s similarity to Heinlein’s character, D.D. Harriman, the none-too-scrupulous protagonist of the short novel, The Man Who Sold the Moon. Cosh hits all the main points about the similarities between Musk and the imaginary Harriman but on the occasion of the second, largely successful, launch of “Starship” aka Big Fucking Rocket or BFR it might be worthwhile to consider the singular difference between the men.
D.D. Harriman loved the Moon. He wanted to go there for entirely personal reasons. As Cosh points out, The Man Who Sold the Moon was part of a story, and eventually novel, sequence Heinlein modestly called “Future History” which, eventually, had man inhabiting planets all over the Universe. Harriman didn’t really care. He just wanted to get to the Moon.
Musk, rather obviously, read more Heinlein and got much further into the “Future History” because the BFR is envisioned as a means to Mars and beyond. The Moon, space stations are interesting, but Musk has always maintained his real interest is in making humanity independent of Earth.
D.D. Harriman, unlike many of Heinlein’s later characters, was a businessman first and foremost. Going to the Moon was a project with big sales potential and D.D. worked all the angles. But it was a project like building a 747 or an IBM 360: essentially a business end in itself.
Getting the BFR operational will involved a few more “rapid unscheduled disassemblies”, the now very reliable Falcon 9 had several as it was being debugged. However, when it is finally reliable, the BFR will be a huge money maker for Space-X and Musk. Space-X is in the launch business and the BFR will give it an order of magnitude more launch capacity than anyone else in the space game.
If you track through the “Future History”, along with running into “The Crazy Years” which, pace, Spider Robinson, I think we fully entered with the election of Donald Trump and the resulting Trump Derangement Syndrome, you have any number of space operas set on the Moon, Mars, space stations and the asteroid belt just beyond Mars. A lot of the Heinlein plots were driven by the need to solve “technical” problems. How to deal an air leak in a Moonbase, how to navigate in space; for Heinlein, space really was “the next frontier”. Musk appears to see space in much the same way.
For young men (very few girls read Golden Age sci-fi) growing up in a pre-computer, pre-screen, era, science fiction was an exercise in imagination. “Hard” science fiction would try to get the “science” right. (As Heinlein himself pointed out, the year long journey to Mars could be done in ten days if you could accelerate the ship at 1G.)
Heinlein was a committed libertarian and what might be called a radical decentralist. He did not like the fact that all humanity’e eggs were in one basket. Neither does Musk as he has said on numerous occasions.
Heinlein also, mainly implicitly, thought that immigrants, people who struck out for the Frontier, tended to have the most valuable human characteristics: intelligence, grit, bravery. He saw “pioneers” as the best of humans drawn from the right hand side of the many Bell curves which make up character.
In our woke times, Heinlein is despised by po-faced leftists just as Musk’s commitment to free speech is scorned by the politically correct. Like D.D. Harriman, I don’t think Musk gives a damn. But not because of business, rather because flying the BFR is the only way Musk sees of freeing humanity of the great risk of extinction. That the idiocies of “climate ambition”, the trans agenda and DEI will be left behind on Earth is just a delightful bonus.