Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

[ An article by Mr. Davidson with the same title but a different subject was published in our Issue 989, September 9, 2018 in case anybody gets confused — Editor ]

“Once we get out to the asteroids, the IRS will never find us!”
—Freeman Dyson

Many years ago, early in my career, I worked for Deke Slayton and David Hannah, Jr., in Houston, Texas. We built Starfire rockets. We launched them from White Sands Missile Range. Our customer was the NASA Center for the Commercial Development of Space at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, and their payload was “Consort” which contained materials science experiments. Starfire was about half the cost of the Black Brant IX rocket it was based on, and about a third the time was involved from mission start to launch. Space Services, the company doing the launch integration, obtained the first commercial launch licence from the Federal Aviation Administration, launched in March 1989, retrieved the payload for the customer, and prepared for a second flight in November 1989. Sadly, the second flight was a failure due to coning in the first stage. The payload was retrieved, and my role with the company ended. I moved on to working with Walt Anderson, Bob Richards, and Todd Hawley at a company called Microsatellite Launch Systems.

In 1977, I joined the L5 Society. It was a group started by Keith and Carolyn Henson in 1975 to pursue the goals of Dr. Gerard O'Neill's book “The High Frontier” and its predecessors such as the Stanford Summer Study and a class O'Neill taught at Princeton that asked whether the surface of a planet was best suited to the growth of a technological civilisation. The students concluded it was not, and that there were many advantages to building cities in space. Also in 1977, a group called L5 Houston, a chapter of the L5 Society, was organised in Houston, Texas by Art Dula, Alvin and Clifford Carley, Steve Nixon, and a few others.

I happened along in October 1985 and the group was still going. I had just started business school at Rice University. In 1988, I helped the group become a Texas corporation. The Nationalist Socialist Space Society (or something like that) was being formed because L5 Society board member Mark Hopkins wanted to merge L5 with the Nationalist Space Institute (formed by arch-Nazi villain and mass murderer Werner von Braun) and purge people he didn't like working with (Aleta Jackson, Greg Barr, e.g.) and so we chose the name Houston Space Society. It was a close contest with Houston Space Frontier Society, but there was another group in town with a very similar name so we went with HSS. In November 1990, foreseeing trouble in our future, our treasurer Jerry Drake got us through the process of becoming a 501c3.

So, you can see, I have a bit of space history in my background. Not a very large bit. I was logistics manager on 3 of those Starfire missions and the voice of launch command on the first one. I knew and worked with Apollo-Soyuz astronaut Deke Slayton for three years. But that wasn't even the big work I did on space projects.

Inspiring Generations

Why did I get interested in space? Well, it is pretty simple. My dad bought the family a little television set in 1968. He got it during the Summer months, so I think we saw the coverage of Bobby Kennedy being executed by the deep state operatives in California. I know we saw the police-instigated and police-operated riots in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention. Our family also watched the Republican convention, at which Nelson Rockefeller lost the nomination to enemy of freedom and mass murderer of Cambodia and Vietnam Richard Nixon. But, being a little boy, the only thing that really excited my attention was watching in December as Apollo 8 rounded the Moon and a man named Frank Borman read from the book of Genesis on Christmas day 1968.

I remember thinking at the time that if people were orbiting the Moon and I'm not even seven, by the time I grow up, there would certainly be trips to the Moon. Maybe I could go there. Maybe I could work there. It would be fun!

As we all know, history did not go that way. My brother Tom said in 1984, when Ronald Reagan's advisors had destroyed the Moon base option, and his state of the union address provided for a ten year plan to build a station in low Earth orbit that he and I would never get to see the Moon. I think Tom may have been correct. But if I have to walk, I'm still going.

Building Interactive Television

Which is one reason the Houston Space Society is raising funds with this project: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-history-of-space-1969-1989#/

We are working closely with Melinda Pillsbury-Foster and Brock d'Avignon, both huge space enthusiasts from way back. Brock's family was instrumental in getting JFK interested in space and a trip to the Moon. Melinda as a little girl talked with actor James Dean. Both have great memories of space projects and space missions. Earlier this year we started Freedom Interactive Television Networks Association together (Melinda, Brock, myself, and Chris Boehr) and you can learn more about the group at FreedomTVNetworks.com if you wish.

The goal is to change television forever. Bring in interaction. Let you the viewer choose who we are going to interview (or choose from a list of good people we can reach), and choose some of the questions we ask, and choose some of the follow-up questions. We're hoping at least one of the interviews can be with audience online to participate during taping/filming. Videoing? It doesn't seem the same. Anyway, getting the digits arranged into computer memory. Point being the audience will be involved. We want that.

We also want the video files to be stored on blockchain (not sure which chain yet) so that they are “mined” into a public ledger and won't be deleted or altered. Censorship Resistance meet Satoshi Nakamoto, you two will get along great together.

That's about it. There's more details on the IndieGoGo page and on HoustonSpaceSociety.net but you can find out what you need by searching and emailing me and following the one link, so I'll leave you to it.

We need your help telling other people. We want to involve you, so we've kept the entry-level price at $9 to get people fired up. We want your ideas for the show. And we want to do a series of these shows, and then a bunch of television series about space history, about new space projects, about space entrepreneurs, about Russian and French and British and Japanese astronauts, about all kinds of people and places and activities. Tell us what you want to see on television, on television you interact with. We'll do our best to get it for you.

 

Jim Davidson is an author, entrepreneur, dancer, actor, and prepper. Find his ventures at EldarCapital.com HoustonSpaceSociety.net FreedomTVNetworks.com DeepGreenFutures.com DialogueKey.com and elsewhere. He is lately working on a new stateless tribe project with some very interesting people.