Cargraves wants to go to the moon, but no one in government or commerce seems interested. These kids, though, have both the skills and the enthusiasm. So Cargraves offers them their wildest dream, and they jump at it like a shot.
After securing the parents' reluctant permission, Cargraves and his malt shop crew set up housekeeping on government land in New Mexico. Cargraves scavenges a surplus transport rocketship for them to soup up with his zinc-vapor propulsion system; Morrie trains as a pilot and Art and Ross build the gadgets they'll need. Oddly, someone's trying to sabotage the amateur expedition: First a bogus inspector shows up, then a bomb wounds Cargraves and temporarily blinds Ross. Disillusioned, Cargraves cancels the project, but relents when he realizes these youths will go to the moon even if they have to walk.
They hurriedly complete their preparations and then, amid press hoopla, launch their ship, the Galileo. The trip is uneventful; not so the moon landing. They've hardly begun exploring the arid lunar landscape when they discover they're not alone!
Worse, their fellow astronauts are hostile: leftover Nazis with a dastardly plan to crush democracy from the safety of the moon. When they destroy the Galileo, Cargraves and his young friends have no choice but to foil their evil plan if they're to have any chance of getting off this dead, airless world alive.
A teenager's fantasy
Rocketship Galileo might be described as Archie Goes to the Moon, except it's not that nuanced. There's no Betty or Veronica, nor any women at all apart from soft-hearted mothers. (Art's mom: "You be a good boy on the moon, Arthur.") There's no Reggie or Jughead either--all three of these kids are Archie. Forget "One small step for a man": When Archie (sorry, Art) steps out onto the moon, he says, "Swell!"
This gee-whiz tone would be a lot of fun if the story went anywhere or if the characters were fleshed out a little more. There's a solid-gold opportunity here to develop starry-eyed high school seniors into capable young adults, but Heinlein--constrained by the lighthearted tone--barely scrapes the surface. (Tunnel in the Sky does a better job at turning boys into men.) Likewise, the Nazis are little more than a late plot development, easily disposed of by pure American nerve.
It's not just that this is an earlier, simpler Heinlein. Though Rocketship Galileo was his first novel published in book form, he'd already serialized three more serious works before World War II in Astounding magazine (including Methuselah's Children). Though this is not quite the Heinlein who would go on to craft Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Rocketship Galileo also seems to represent an attempt to feel the exuberance of a trip to the moon from a teenager's perspective. Some of that comes through, but unsupported by an understanding of these thinly sketched characters, it ends up having a two-dimensional, cartoon feel.
Even Heinlein's best novels are hit-or-miss affairs (especially when it comes to endings). Here at least he achieved consistency of tone, though at the price of depth and scope. The result is an okay book, but a story that would make an excellent comic.
It's an intriguing notion that the first trip to the moon might have been by amateurs. Unable to foresee the space race spawned by the Cold War (though Heinlein shrewdly predicts the Russians would act before America), and expecting a postwar universal peace, it's reasonable the government would pass on going to the moon, leaving it up to private citizens like Cargraves. -- Mark
