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Freeman Dyson on VSE
Question: Are the recent posts “official”?
Answer: The facebook posts are for anyone who isn’t up to their ears in taking care of the Office and Library or out there actively talking to people with expendable income who want to pitch in personally on the technical jobs required for Space Manufacturing and Off-Surface Human living. Your question looks like a polite way of saying that it would be good to clearly be aware of Opinion or personal perspectives versus Cold Facts and just neat links. If I read you right, you are absolutely right. Every day is for learning, Thank you!
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Opinion Or Personal Perspective:
I remember sitting in Dyson’s office and him telling me the story of O’Neill calling him and saying ‘I am just too sick, you have to do this for me. You know everything about it. Please.’ and how he drove over to his friend’s house and got the model and drove down to DC for the presentation. I asked Freeman why it didn’t work, WHY? The tech was (and is) sound and so helpful and even someone as slow as I am can understand it. And he said, with the glint of a tear showing in the corner of his left eye:
“I am no Gerard O’Neill.”
Primarily, the hope of this post is that you will look into V.S.E., the true background *and technical details* that are hard but not impossible to find if you start looking.
Secondarily, when you have nothing else to think about, consider the risks vs the benefits of great big ideas having, and possibly needing, “a face.”
I can’t tell you how many people over the years have made it clear that they think that they are “The Next Gerard K. O’Neill.” Some of them come right out and say those words, others have better legal and marketing crews. I don’t know, I just don’t know. Do we need a *Next* Gerard K. O’Neill? We already had one and those are big polymath shoes to try to fill. Legend says that GKON himself wasn’t into big huge spinning cities back when he stood at the front of the original 103 classes at Princeton hoping to just teach some Newton, it was when the numbers started coming up saying over and over to him: ‘You can’t ignore it anymore, this weird stuff that your own colleagues do not want you talking about after so many recent years of losing their funding to Apollo can actually work.’  That’s when it all started. The Numbers were the core that he couldn’t ignore. And they still are. But… without a Face…
We have to add, his was a Face, a nice face, that rode out in front of a very well trained speaker – a teacher – who could fit into any group of Humans, rich or poor, officially educated or passionately self-learning, at Congress or at the Rotary Club or at hole in the wall diners like the oft’ mentioned Dutch Goose. “Face” for a technical message does have to be deeper than just the paper holding the image on the magazine covers.
You are reading this because you are interested in Space. Space is more than rockets – at the colleges, community, junior and ivy, I see herds of rocket kids and often wonder how many actual jobs they will be killing each other over in 4 to 8 years, when perhaps Space Agriculturists and Plumbing and Sewage Recycling Engineers may end up with more demand than supply – on earth, as it may be in heaven.
Like many of us, I recently lost a hard working person who was dear to me. And it got me resetting. Life is truly short. If you are serious about your interest in Space then getting it to happen, to truly happen, is all on your shoulders and all about Now. You don’t have to be an existentialist bore at parties but How will you be a part of making good stuff happen? What is the best way? Does it take being or following a Face, or just getting to the very heart of the numbers and putting them in perspective so that they can tell their solutions to regular people all by themselves?
If this Space stuff is truly something that you think matters then Think about it, Ponder it as something bigger than just nozzle design that everyone and their brother are already working on, then Plot a course, and DO. Punt when you have to to survive but keep your pole star in your sight.
And let us all know how it goes because, while books about post mortems of accomplishments are just my tiny corner of the work, exposing and exploring the day to day minutia of the Business of getting beneficial Space done is truly a more important Study for the people, all of the Us together, who are The Space Studies Institute.
-Smith
by the way, it’s January, good time for Senior Associates to pay in our pledges.  Use the yellow button at: https://ssi.org/join. Pay a goodly amount using the bottom button and maybe they can hire someone better than me to put stuff here!