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