Delos David Harriman is a character in the fiction of noted science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein. He is an entrepreneurial businessman who masterminded the first landing on the Moon as a private business venture. His story is part of Heinlein's Future History. Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology, or both, upon society and persons as individuals. ... This article is becoming very long. ... An entrepreneur (a loanword from French) is a person who undertakes and operates a new enterprise or venture and assumes some accountability for the inherent risks. ... The term Luna can refer to the Earths Moon. ... A future history is a postulated history of the future that some science fiction authors construct as a common background for fiction. ...

Harriman's first appearance in print was in the story Requiem which described his death while pursuing his dream of landing on the Moon himself. Having opened space to humankind he was, like Moses, denied the sight of his promised land by a combination of health and legal issues. At the end of his life, having temporarily eluded his greedy relatives and lawyers, he pays to have an old orbital ship, owned by two spacemen down on their luck, upgraded for a flight to the Moon. Dodging the law and Harriman's lawyers, they give the old man his last wish. His space-suited body is left on the surface of the Moon. Requiem is a short story by Robert A. Heinlein, serving as a sequel to his short science fiction novel, The Man Who Sold the Moon. ... Moses strikes water from the stone, by Bacchiacca Moses (Hebrew: מֹשֶׁה, Standard Tiberian ; Arabic: موسى, ; Geez: ሙሴ Musse) was an early Biblical Hebrew religious leader, lawgiver, prophet, and historian. ... A pressure suit is a pressurized suit worn by men such as high-altitude fighter pilots who may fly so high that breathing pure oxygen at surrounding pressure would not provide enough oxygen for him to function: see hypoxia. ...

In the later publication, The Man Who Sold the Moon, Harriman is in his prime. Determined to carry out his vision of a private venture rocket to the Moon, he buys, bullies, finagles and deceives anyone who stands in his way. His partners, who respect his successes if not his methods, think of him as the last of the old robber barons, or perhaps the first of the new ones. At the end of that story, published later than its sequel, he is left behind as the first colonization team leaves for the Moon. Cover of Shasta edition collection The Man Who Sold the Moon is a science fiction novella by Robert A. Heinlein written in 1949 and first published on February 23,1951, part of his Future History of stories sharing a common background from Life-Line to Da Capo. This story, which... The term robber baron dates back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, originally referring to certain feudal lords of land through which the Rhine River in Europe flowed. ...

Harriman is long married, but his marriage takes second place to his business. When raising money for his venture, he warns Mrs. Harriman that they may move out of their extensive underground apartments (built for safety during the so-called "Crazy Years") and buy a house on the surface. He also warns her that she may have to relearn the art of running a house without servants. From this we may infer that Harriman has not always been rich. There are hints that he has been broke several times, and made large amounts of money in between the bad periods as well. In this he resembles another character in the Heinlein canon, the billionaire Johann Sebastian Bach Smith. Heinlein himself had a somewhat checkered career after leaving the Navy, before becoming a writer. A billionaire is a person who has a net worth or wealth of or more than one billion United States dollars or euros. ...