7 First Men On The Moon Aka

The program you are about to hear is fiction. Science fiction. We make no guarantees, however, how long it will remain fiction. That's flying to Laurel. Here is your guide to these adventures of the mind.

The editor of a astounding science fiction magazine, John Campbell, Jr. This scene is a missile testing base, somewhere in the continental United States. The time, half past two on a Tuesday afternoon, five, maybe ten years from now.

A rather unusual missile is getting worked over. Blast off ten minutes away and the countdown is in its last stages. And it's sitting inside this missile, waiting. The United States is about to make its first attempt to send a manned rocket.

Like a bird, Colonel, waiting to be cut loose and sore out of your field. And you're the one who has to face all the reporters after blast off. Me, I'm glad I'll be up there alone.

How much time left, Colonel? Okay, I sit in this cradle and I wait for the rockets to talk me up in this space. I get five hundred seconds of 4G acceleration, then I sit around and look out the viewport for the next four days while the shipcoats in zero G-free fall.

I'm roughly eight and a quarter minutes past four. On Sunday afternoon, the autopilot is going to turn the rocket engines on again. long enough to land me in the ocean as close to the alarm, which better be as dry as a polymer boy said it is. I climb into my little Jim Dandy space suit, wander around the moon for

a while, take some snap shots, pick up a couple of rocks at souvenirs. And fifteen hours after landing I get back into my ship and I come home. Did I leave anything out? I don't think it's that.