Rocket Ship Galileo by Robert A. Heinlein

The boys also find evidence of an ancient lunar civilization, and postulate that the craters of the moon were formed not by impacts from space, but by nuclear bombs that destroyed the alien race. One survivor is found, revived, and questioned.

They bomb it from their captured ship and land. They discover that there is a Nazi base on the Moon. Fortunately, they are able to hole up undetected in their hut and succeed in ambushing the other ship when it lands, capturing the pilot. After establishing a semi-permanent structure based on a Quonset hut, they claim the moon on behalf of the United Nations.Īs they set up a radio to communicate with the Earth they pick up a local transmission, the sender of which promises to meet them. Upon completion of the modifications, they stock the rocket, which they name the Galileo, and take off for the Moon, taking approximately 3 days to arrive. They use a cleared area in a military weapons test range in the desert for their work, despite prying and sabotage attempts by unknown agents. It is to be converted to run on a thorium nuclear pile which boils zinc as a propellant. Cargraves, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, to refit a conventionally powered surplus 'mail rocket'. Plot summaryĪfter World War II, three teenage boy rocket experimenters are recruited by one boy's uncle, Dr. It was initially rejected by publishers, because going to the moon was 'too far out'. The novel was originally envisioned as the first of a series of books called 'Young Rocket Engineers'. It was the first in the Heinlein juveniles, a long and successful series of science fiction novels published by Scribner's. Heinlein, published in 1947, about three teenagers who participate in a pioneering flight to the Moon. Rocket Ship Galileo is a science fiction novel by Robert A.

Rocket Ship Galileo by Robert A. Heinlein