Jerry Pournelle and I were gearing up to write about parasite control. We'd have set a novel on the moon and built it around a concept I've been revising since (I think) high school.

Parasite control is needed to keep any enterprise from ballooning into something unaffordable, particularly any government project.

It's terribly important to achieving orbit. Nothing lifts from the ground unless you can keep people from piling their own projects on it. That was what made the X-plane program work: build one device to test one concept. Build and launch it quick, before the parasites notice.

So there we were, rewriting the space program yet again...and I realized that the books stacked all around my office, some published, some just manuscripts, were all rewriting the space program.

I told Jerry that that ecological slot is full.

My tee shirt bears an obsolete picture of Freedom space station and the legend, "Nine years, nine billion dollars, and all we got was this lousy shirt,"and it's years old and wearing out.
     

If I wanted to write the same novel over and over again, I'd do romances.

Nobody ever did until, in the 1950s, Robert Heinlein published "The Man Who Sold the Moon". And nobody did again for a long time. Imitating Heinlein used to be normal, but the science fiction writers of the day couldn't imitate this. None of us had trained for it. The excitement of travel to other worlds is in our nerves and bones, but where is the excitement in economics?

Then we watched mankind set twelve human beings on the moon for a few days at a time, come home, and stop.

We saw our space station built in Houston, orbiting too low and too slow, at ten times the cost.

Thirtieth anniversary of the first man on the moon, celebrated by grumbling.

My tee shirt bears an obsolete picture of Freedom space station and the legend, "Nine years, nine billion dollars, and all we got was this lousy shirt," and it's years old and wearing out.

Now is economics interesting?

Heinlein's D. D. Harriman used his own major fortune and every possible confidence trick to fund the three-stage spacecraft needed to set a human being (a midget: much cheaper) on the moon. Heinlein showed the way, and the rest of us began to see the problems. Forty-odd years later, the science fiction community has caught up.

You could persuade yourself that that's the answer. One of Randall Garrett's pseudonyms built the economic foundation for an asteroid belt civilization (and I found it so convincing that I borrowed it.) Gerard O'Neill and his students designed huge orbiting habitats, and it all began as an economics exercise.

Meanwhile NASA destroyed our last working moonship, laying it out as a lawn ornament, and tried to burn the blueprints too, in a wonderful demonstration of what you can do in space when money is no object.

In 1980, when it seemed sure that Ronald Reagan would be President and his Science Advisor would be one of Jerry's brighter students, Jerry Pournelle gathered about 50 people at my house for an intense weekend. We called ourselves The Citizens Advisory Council for a National Space Policy. We were from every profession that deals with achieving orbit. Our assignment: to create a space program with costs and schedules.

We met four times during Reagan's eight years, and twice afterward. We generated the Space Defense Initiative and the renewal of the X-plane program.

The addition of a few science fiction writers was stunningly effective. We can translate for these guys! Lawyers, corporation heads, plasma physicists, NASA honchos, rocket engineers: they don't talk like normal people, but they can explain it to me. I myself translated one of our committee papers from lawyerese to English, with Art Dula (the author, a lawyer) hovering at my shoulder, while a party was going on downstairs. It was damn weird, but it came out readable. It's in N-SPACE under my title, which they kept:

"How To Save Civilization and Make a Little Money."

Then it went transcendental.

And then the movie went transcendental.

Is there some reason you can't tell a story that big, and still find an ending?

I think I'm onto something here. When you're out to take the universe, there is no proper ending.

In reality or in our minds, we will always be rebuilding the space program.

The Burning City -- a fantasy set in Los Angeles 14,000 years ago -- took six years to write and was damned hard work in spots, but at least it wasn't rebuilding the space program. I deserve a break today.

Now I'll try to turn "The Moon Bowl" into a novelette.