Review: Rocketship Galileo
Jun. 1st, 2005 02:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalOr, as I like to call it...
Plot Summary: Atomic engineer and crackpot Prof. Cargraves ropes his teenaged nephew and two of his buddies, all three members of an amateur model rocket society, into refurbishing a trans-Atlantic mail rocket into a Moon rocket. Along the way they have some important lessons in nuclear physics, orbital dynamics, 50's era computer science, and why you should always be careful to keep track of ex-National Socialists after the shooting stops.
Okay this is RAH's first published novel, printed in 1947, what was to have been the first in a series titled "Young Atomic Engineers". At 185 pages it's certainly a quick read, even the diversions into the workings of space-flying autopilots barely slowing the procedings down. The breathless pace also serves to gloss over some of the more, er, loony notions offered up along the way.
I suppose I'm being churlish, given this was RAH's first attempt at YA lit, but overall it comes across as an attempt to ape Tom Swift (who was later aped by the likes of Danny Dunn), with a older, patriarchal scientist/father figure dragging his boys off for an ADVENTURE and blithely throwing in Nazis, a lost Moon civilization, VERTOL belly landing rockets, hyper-efficient atomic drivse (1 G thrust for hours at a time) and other wonders with nary a eyeblink. Given all that, I'm willing to forgive the concept of the NRC just handing over several pounds of thorium to a one-man corporation (and signed for by a teenager) as a nessasary plot contrivance.
What's more interesting is some of the future history background that RAH puts forth. Assuming the RG is set some ten to fifteen years after the end of WWII (Cargraves seems about in his forties), Heinlien postulates a rather rosy view of the world, Space Nazis aside. We've got sub-orbital rockets being used for mail and cargo delivery, enough of them that the FAA is regulating piloting licenses. The UN is certainly stronger than it ever was in the real world, apparently having it's own nuclear ballistic missle force (!) to enforce world peace. Cargreaves even muses about not minding if the Russians beat them to the Moon (even if he doesn't care for their government). Admittedly it was written in 1947, well before the Korean War, and possibly before Russia revealed it's first hydrogen bomb, so the world's potential was probably greater than it's reality at that moment.
Plot Summary: Atomic engineer and crackpot Prof. Cargraves ropes his teenaged nephew and two of his buddies, all three members of an amateur model rocket society, into refurbishing a trans-Atlantic mail rocket into a Moon rocket. Along the way they have some important lessons in nuclear physics, orbital dynamics, 50's era computer science, and why you should always be careful to keep track of ex-National Socialists after the shooting stops.
Okay this is RAH's first published novel, printed in 1947, what was to have been the first in a series titled "Young Atomic Engineers". At 185 pages it's certainly a quick read, even the diversions into the workings of space-flying autopilots barely slowing the procedings down. The breathless pace also serves to gloss over some of the more, er, loony notions offered up along the way.
I suppose I'm being churlish, given this was RAH's first attempt at YA lit, but overall it comes across as an attempt to ape Tom Swift (who was later aped by the likes of Danny Dunn), with a older, patriarchal scientist/father figure dragging his boys off for an ADVENTURE and blithely throwing in Nazis, a lost Moon civilization, VERTOL belly landing rockets, hyper-efficient atomic drivse (1 G thrust for hours at a time) and other wonders with nary a eyeblink. Given all that, I'm willing to forgive the concept of the NRC just handing over several pounds of thorium to a one-man corporation (and signed for by a teenager) as a nessasary plot contrivance.
What's more interesting is some of the future history background that RAH puts forth. Assuming the RG is set some ten to fifteen years after the end of WWII (Cargraves seems about in his forties), Heinlien postulates a rather rosy view of the world, Space Nazis aside. We've got sub-orbital rockets being used for mail and cargo delivery, enough of them that the FAA is regulating piloting licenses. The UN is certainly stronger than it ever was in the real world, apparently having it's own nuclear ballistic missle force (!) to enforce world peace. Cargreaves even muses about not minding if the Russians beat them to the Moon (even if he doesn't care for their government). Admittedly it was written in 1947, well before the Korean War, and possibly before Russia revealed it's first hydrogen bomb, so the world's potential was probably greater than it's reality at that moment.
