>* Heinlein, "The Man Who Sold the Moon"? (we kind of have this; but certainly not "Requiem" because no one would actually try to stop today's space entrepreneu

>* Heinlein, "The Man Who Sold the Moon"? (we kind of have this; but certainly not "Requiem" because no one would actually try to stop today's space entrepreneurs from going up themselves, certainly not their kids) D. D. Harriman didn't have biological children. His company's board of directors stopped him from traveling to space in "The Man Who Sold the Moon", and by "Requiem" Harriman can't pass the physical test required for spaceflight, even though rockets are everywhere. I don't think such an outcome is unrealistic at all. If Bezos were still Amazon CEO, and didn't have so much voting power, the Amazon board might very well have decided that he is too important to the company to fly on an experimental rocket. One I've cited before: Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human interstellar civilization thousands of years in the future, in which superluminal travel is impossible (for the humans), so travelers use hibernation to pass the decades while their ships travel between star systems. Merchants often revisit systems after a century or two, so see great changes in each visit. The merchants repeatedly find that once smart dust (tiny swarms of nanomachines) are developed, governments inevitably use them for ubiquitous surveillance, which inevitably causes societal collapse. <https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255 https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255>