Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!genrad!decvax!decwrl!sun!gnu From: gnu@sun.UUCP Newsgroups: net.columbia,net.space,net.sf-lovers Subject: Let's make a place for Robert Heinlein on the Space Shuttle Message-ID: <280@sun.UUCP> Date: Fri, 17-Jun-83 10:53:48 EDT Article-I.D.: sun.280 Posted: Fri Jun 17 10:53:48 1983 Date-Received: Sat, 18-Jun-83 16:16:27 EDT Lines: 21 If anyone should go up in the shuttle, it should be Heinlein. His works inspired many of the current engineers, technicians, and designers who have put us where we are on the edge of space. He's also quite old (over 80) and won't achieve his 70-year dream of making it into space, unless we send him there quickly. He wrote a story in 1939 about the aged "father of space travel", Delos D. Harriman, who isn't allowed into space because of government regulations and his deteriorating medical condition. Harriman secretly outfits a down-on-their-luck engineer and pilot and they smuggle him to the moon, where he dies, happily looking back at Earth, just after touchdown. The story is "Requiem", and it appears in _The Past Though Tomorrow_, among many other places. I think that the least we, as a society, can do for Mr. Robert Anton Heinlein is to make a place in the Space Shuttle for him -- and soon, before it's too late. John Gilmore