Alfred Coppel 6 min read

From two widely separated points on Earth, rockets reach up toward the Moon almost simultaneously, not politics but mathematics, and a race whose prizes are the gravity gauge and impregnable sites.

Alfred Coppel's 1951 story is a taut hard-SF and military-SF tale of the first Cold War race to the Moon. Sharp, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a tense early-space-age story where two rival powers launch at once for lunar supremacy, and capable, earnest men on both sides bet everything on being first.

In its time

Published in 1951, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

6 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Earl Mayan