You Will Not Go to the Moon
A three-stage rocket propels a spacecraft and its occupants to a docking with a wheel-shaped rotating space station. The occupants disembark and spend an indeterminate, although presumably short, period of time in the relative comfort of the station's artificial gravity before boarding a second spacecraft. The second spacecraft undocks, makes a single trans-lunar insertion burn, and three days later completes a soft landing on the surface of the Moon. By now you're probably thinking that yes, you've seen that movie at least a half dozen times—maybe even read the book—but this isn't a description of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey , or of Stanley Kubrick's visualization of 2001 . In 1959, nearly a decade before the Clarke/Kubrick book-and-movie combo, Mae and Ira Freeman published a story of an Earth orbit rendezvous Moon mission in their illustrated children's book You Will Go to the Moon . The story's protagonist is a young boy who goes on...