William Oberfield 14 min read

They spent a thousand days building the great gleaming rocket and two hundred grooming it, insisting, as if to convince themselves, that this one would come back, though three before it had not.

William Oberfield's 1951 story is a taut hard-SF space opera of the early space age. Sharp, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a tense story of a desperate, doubt-shadowed mission to the Moon after three failures, capturing the fear and stubborn hope of the first reach for space, in a well-turned golden-age piece about courage and uncertainty.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Harold W. McCauley