Elon Foretold

www.americanthinker.com

Nobody in the 1850s ever wrote a novel about a man who changes society by figuring out how to mass-produce horseless carriages. Similarly, nobody a century later wrote the story of the man who turns the world upside down by building miniature electronic brains in his garage.

So how did a popular American writer of the 1940s come up with a novel that accurately portrayed the activities and historical role of Elon Musk as a pioneer in the exploitation of space?

That man was Robert A. Heinlein, and his book, published in 1950, was titled The Man Who Sold the Moon.

Sci-fi has largely been a despised and dismissed genre, with some reason. It started out as pure pulp (at least in this country; in the UK, largely thanks to H.G. Wells, it was a serious and respected genre, with most writers producing a sci-fi novel at one time or another). The prose in U.S. sci-fi was subliterate. Characterization was nonexistent, consisting of types – the eccentric scientist, the stalwart space skipper, the evil space pirate, etc. Plots were minimal at best. The writers were either nerds or hacks. The editors were bottom of the barrel, and the readers didn’t care. (They still don’t.) The genre needed a serious shake-up, and at the beginning of the 1940s, that’s just what it got.

Robert A. Heinlein was a former naval officer, ex-mine owner, and ex-political operative forced into writing by illness. He was the farthest thing in the world from a hack. Internationally traveled, vastly erudite in a number of fields, and widely read, Heinlein was well aware of the stagnant status of sci-fi. John W. Campbell, editor of the unfortunately named Astounding Science Fiction, had long been on the watch for a writer capable of breaking up the logjam in the field. Heinlein filled that role and more. Within months, he was leading the genre. Within a couple of years, the primitives were gone, and those who remained were trying to match Heinlein.

As a writer, Heinlein was methodical – both in artistic and professional senses. He was devoted to realism, no easy trick when writing sci-fi. He dropped the generic space-opera settings of the 30s, instead compiling a chart of possible historical events involving the U.S. over the next two centuries to serve as a consistent background for his work. Heinlein later said that he simply extrapolated current trends into the future. All the same, the accuracy of some of the chart’s predictions is spooky. One prime example: the 1960s is labeled “The Crazy Years.”

The Man Who Sold the Moon was one of the keystone novels of the Future History sequence. It dealt with a 21st-century business magnate named Delos D. Harriman, who is convinced that exploitation of space is the next step and intends to put the U.S. on the moon in a big way. In this fictional world – so unlike our own – there is activity in space, but it’s limited strictly to Earth orbit. (I’m not sure that they have a space station that enables Democrat pols to take publicity trips.)

Harriman liquidates his holdings and obtains loans and contributions from other businessmen, using every possible goad and gimmick. (In one case, he shows up at the office of a commie-hating executive wearing a hammer-and-sickle button on his lapel: “From where you’re sitting, this is the exact size of the moon seen from earth.”)

He oversees every aspect of the project from the design of the rocket to the training of the crew, overcoming obstacles, fighting lawsuits and government interference. Harriman is up to his ears in debt, under fire over various scams he’s pulled along the way (One concern USPO envelopes supposed to be canceled on the moon to be sold to collectors that may or may not have actually been on the ship. This will bring a smile of recognition to those who recall the Apollo 15 postage “scandal.”)

At last, the rocket is ready. It lifts off, headed for the bright strand of Lune.

…and it all goes perfectly. The ship lands, spends a short time on the surface, and returns to Earth, to the expected outcry from cranks claiming it was all a hoax.

But Harriman pays no attention. He’s completing an even larger rocket, one that will set up an actual base on the lunar surface.

The book ends with Harriman watching that one lift off. He’d wanted to be aboard himself, but corporate board members, with so much investment money riding on the program’s success, wouldn’t allow it. Harriman was the key man, and if he was lost, everything else would go with him. There would be many other flights, and he would surely be aboard one of those….

But one of his associates, watching him, whispers, “He reminds me of Moses, gazing out over the promised land.” Moses, of course, never entered Israel himself, only resting his eyes on it from a distance.

To understand what Heinlein was up to here, we need to grasp the consensus concerning science, tech, and research at the time. This was a few short years after WW II, which in Europe had climaxed with the rain of German V-2s on the UK. The V-2 program, run by Werner von Braun, who, if not a committed Nazi, would do until a real one came along, was the sole example of how to run a successful rocket program (if you ignored Robert Goddard, which everyone did). The V-2 was the product of a totalitarian Gosplan effort accompanied by waste, corruption, and brutality (one entire concentration camp at Nordhausen was dedicated to producing the rockets). At no point did anyone ever stop to ask what use a 45-foot-tall rocket with a warhead less than the payload of a standard fighter-bomber but which cost more than ten aircraft could possibly be. No matter – the missiles were launched, thousands of Britons were killed (along with thousands of Dutch living in Antwerp, always forgotten in this instance) to no purpose whatsoever. And when the war ended, Von Braun and his team got free tickets to the U.S., to ensure that American rocket programs were run in a similar fashion. (Minus the tortured prisoners.)

There are all sorts of ironies in this. One lies in the fact that, once those invaluable blueprints arrived in the U.S., page after page read “Patent: Robert H. Goddard.” Another is that the actual workhorse rocket of the early Space Age, the Atlas, which served as America’s first ICBM, boosted the Gemini astronauts into orbit, and served as a standard booster rocket until only a few years ago, owed next to nothing to Von Braun’s crew and was designed as a private industry venture on completely different principles.

Von Braun landed on his feet as the leading rocket scientist for the newly founded NASA. There he oversaw the development of the Saturn rocket series that took men to the moon. An overpriced, overcomplex rocket that could do one job and nothing else, the Saturn did what it was built to do, but it was a dead end. (Thus fulfilling Dunn’s Law of Large Organizations: “Any government agency sufficiently funded can complete any given project – once.”) Apollo was a proud moment for the U.S., but it should have been prouder.

After Apollo was canceled, NASA remained as an organization established to carry out mammoth, world-class projects with no mammoth, world-class projects to carry out. It soon deteriorated into an outfit devoted to make-work projects such as the ISS, a Space Shuttle designed by committee that never fulfilled its mission, and numerous “paper projects” worked out in great detail and expense with no intention of ever completing them. The sole successful series of programs involved automated space probes that had nothing to do with manned spaceflight.

So things stood until Elon Musk founded Space X. Before that, Musk had been something of an international carnival barker, coming up with a new project every other week while jumping a motorcycle over a blazing pool and firing two pistols at the same time. After that, he was a figure of world-historical status.

Musk, by means of his Starship, perfected the reusable rocket, which NASA engineers had dawdled over for a half-century and more. He oversaw the design and introduction of the Falcon series, an entire new class of rocket boosters capable of fulfilling missions from Low Earth Orbit to Mars at a fraction of the cost of previous models. He established Starlink, the leading orbital communications network, and utilized it not only as a business platform but as a tool of statecraft. To cap all that, he carried out an orbital rescue mission after NASA fell down on the job, that would have been impossible previously.

The parallels between Musk and Heinlein’s novel are not exact, though they can approach the uncanny. (Delos? Elon? Come on now.) But the central shared premise cannot be denied: the demolition of the entire collectivist model that deranged technology – not to mention everything else – during the mid- 20th century. For decades nearly amounting to generations, scientists, engineers, politicians, and planners all preached that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished without the participation of massive (and massively funded) research teams operating according to methods that would not have been at all unfamiliar to the Nazis, or, farther to the east, the Soviets. The day of the lone genius, the driven inventor working in his garage, was over. An old communist slogan said it all: “It is no longer I, but we.”

Heinlein called them on that in his novel. A lifetime later, Elon Musk, a fictional character come to life, has destroyed it, more or less as a side effect while accomplishing what enormous agencies, vast research teams, and governments could not.

It’s a triumph of the individual over the mass. Human nature doesn’t change. Heinlein clearly foresaw what kind of man would be needed to carry humanity into space – when the time came, history produced him.

We have yet to see what Musk’s complete accomplishment will be. On the horizon, red Mars continues to beckon. There was a kind of sequel to Man Who Sold the Moon in which Harriman, an old man who has outlived his time, finally achieves his dream by simply purchasing a rocket and hiring the crew to get him to the moon. He dies there just after they land, worn out by the rigors of the journey. We can hope that time treats Musk more kindly.

As for Heinlein, though still one of the most widely-read authors in the world, he’s neglected by the institutions. (The Library of America features only one of his novels in its collection. Awfully slim pickings for a man who revitalized an entire literary genre.)

But I don’t think he’d mind that. I think he’d prefer seeing that his vision of the future was at last coming to pass.