Published: Jan 28, 2014 by gavin
I recently read one of Robert Heinlein’s first novels, “Rocket Ship Galileo”, after it sat on my bookshelf for a few years among the other golden age sci-fi I have collected. It got me thinking and I wanted to share some of my thoughts here.
SPOILERS FOLLOW! Stop reading this and go get the book from your local library* if you don’t want to be spoiled.
“Rocket Ship Galileo” is the first in Heinlein’s juvenile fiction series and as such it tells a fairly standard coming of age story. The book starts out with three boys in their late teens who build their own small rockets. The uncle of one of the boys, Doctor Cargraves, a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, comes to see them with a proposition. He has an idea for a nuclear powered rocket engine that he thinks can take him to the moon (remember this was published in 1947, 22 years before Apollo 11 and 10 years before the launch of Sputnik) and he wants the boys to forgo school the next fall to instead help him build his rocket and crew it. From here, the real adventure starts with the boys accompanying Cargraves to an abandoned military test site in the desert to build the rocket and ultimately successfully fly it to the moon.
I found the depiction of rockets and rocketry in this book quite interesting. This was written, and takes place during, the early days of rocketry post-WWII when humanity was trying to determine the usefulness of this technology outside of military applications. In the world of “Rocket Ship Galileo”, rockets are a part of everyday life used for transport of both people and cargo around the world. The rockets used for this purpose are reusable, single-stage rockets that can take off and land horizontally. Of course, in today’s world, technological development followed a different path, with rocketry remaining in the realm of military and space exploration uses**, while airplanes were developed for civilian uses of long distance transportation.
I fully understand why our technology developed in the directions that it did and, although I’m not a rocket scientist, from my understanding of rocketry and aeronautics, airplanes are just better suited for use within the atmosphere. A rocket is least efficient in the thick atmosphere and high gravity close to Earth’s surface, where it would spend most of it’s time if it were used for civilian applications, whereas airplane engines are at their most efficient under these conditions. On the other hand, in the 1940s and 1950s, when long distance airplane travel was costly and not particularly fast or efficient, I can imagine that a developing technology like rockets could be very appealing as a potential next step. This is one of my favourite parts of reading science fiction, seeing how writers take our current technology and project it into the future, like Heinlein’s rockets, Asimov’s vision of Multivac, a supercomputer so large it fills the space underneath Washington D.C., or Stephenson’s ideas of 3D printing at the atomic level in “Diamond Age”.
The part of this story that prompted me to write this post didn’t come out until the final quarter of the story, but when it did it was so jarring that I had to put the book down for a few days before finishing it. When our intrepid heroes reach the moon, as nobody doubted they would, they pick up a radio signal coming from somewhere nearby. When this happened, my first thought was that Heinlein was taking this good, if somewhat clichéd, coming of age story about overcoming adversity and everyone else’s doubts and turning it into a first contact*** story. But it gets so much worse than that, the signal turns out to be Nazis on the moon.
I understand that this came out two years after the fall of the Third Reich and the comeback of the Nazis was still a very real worry. Today, Space Nazis have become enough of a trope that there’s a Wikipedia article dedicated to the subject. I don’t even think a story dedicated to the idea of a group of explorers believing they were the first on the moon discovering a secret Nazi base there would be a bad one. It just didn’t fit into this story and felt completely out of place showing up one hundred forty pages into this one hundred eighty page book. I would have been perfectly content if the book followed Cargraves and the boys through the building of the rocket, a successful trip to the moon where they collected a few moon rocks, and returned home triumphantly. Instead I walked away unsatisfied from a book I, initially, enjoyed so much I nearly completed in one sitting.
* This book was published 67 years ago, it’s crazy that you can’t just download a public domain copy, but that’s a topic for another day.
** If you want to have a roaring good time and learn about modern rocketry and space navigation at the same time check out Kerbal Space Program, a game by Mexican indie studio Squad.
*** Don’t misunderstand, I enjoy first contact stories. Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rendezvous with Rama” is one of my favourite books. I liked the entire Rama quadrilogy, but the latter three books written with Gentry Lee were enjoyable reads for their own reasons outside of Clarke’s first contact story.