The Man Who Sold the Moon

The Astronaut Farmer is being released this February. It stars Billy Bob Thorton as Charles Farmer, a former astronaut driven to space travel travel against the wishes of the government and perhaps his own better sense. Aside from the typical Hollywood heuristics and emotional prattling the issue of whether we will ever be able to travel the stars without the stultifying temperance of bureaucracy and its attendant misgivings and regulatory caution is not a new one. At this point such imagined behavior might seem down right noble compared to some recent antics in the astronaut corps. Robert Heinlein explored the idea of a manned presence in space with a public overseer in his classic The Man Who Sold the Moon published in 1951, before we even heard of Sputnik or strapped a hapless animal to a Von Braun rocket.

The inspiring part of this classic goes beyond the Walt Disney like drive of it's protagonist Delos D. Harriman, as it it underscores the importance of vision, investors and plain old engineering. Aside from these classic formulations a sense of dymanic fortitude in the face of caution and misgiving leads him to keep dreaming that he will eventually leave the Earthly gravity that binds his soul.