Murray Leinster 3 hr 43 min read

When young Joe Kenmore comes to Bootstrap to install pilot gyros in the Space Platform, he doesn't bargain for sabotage or murder or love, but ruthless agents mean to wreck the project.

Murray Leinster's 1953 novel is a rousing hard-SF and military-SF juvenile of humanity's first space station. Exciting, wholesome, technically rich. Read it for a classic space-age adventure of the race to build Earth's first orbital platform, and the young engineer who must foil those out to destroy it.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

3 hr 43 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).