Riding Rockets Read Online Free PDF Page B

frequently, however, my launches closely mirrored NASA’s. At the count of zero an explosion would rend the air and a sulfurous cloud would be all that remained of my creation. My dad, ever the optimist, would opine that the rocket had gone into orbit or possibly hit the moon. We would remain silent and listen for any sound of a whine or thud of an impact, but there would be none. That was proof enough for my father that the rocket was on its way to the Kremlin.
    During one launch my dad was nearly a casualty. He was whooping and hollering at what appeared to be a perfect ascent until the missile arced into a dive straight for us. “Jesus Christ, Mike! It’s coming right at us!” He was ten feet from the car and did his best to sprint for its cover. With the clatter of steel braces and aluminum crutches he sounded like a machine gone wild. I was powerless to help and abandoned him like a dropped Popsicle. I dove under the car and turned to look up, certain I was going to witness my dad getting shish-kebabed by a five-foot smoking skewer. I made one final, not so helpful cry, “Watch out, Dad!”
    “Balls!” he roared. As a whistling sound gained in decibels, Dad suddenly stopped and jerked himself into a ramrod-straight pose, holding his crutches as close to his body as possible, trying to minimize his target footprint. His face was scrunched up, eyes squeezed to slits, teeth bared. There was a brief whooshing sound followed by a loud whoomph. The rocket embedded itself in the sandy soil no more than ten feet away. A thin curl of smoke corkscrewed from its nozzle.
    “Christ on a crutch, that was close, Mike.”
    Dad christened that rocket the “Kamikaze,” which set him off on another story about how a damn Jap kamikaze had almost rammed his plane. “I emptied my twin 50s at the bastard and never landed a hit. But he missed us anyway, just like that rocket.”
     
    As 1957 drew to a close, I was filled with anticipation. Not because of any party to celebrate the New Year, but rather because 1958 was to be the IGY, the International Geophysical Year. If there was ever a measure of how consumed I was by space, this was it…that I was as impatient for the IGY to arrive as most kids were for the end of school. I had read about it in several science magazines. A host of countries were to cooperatively investigate space with sounding rockets and instrumented balloons, and the United States was going to launch its own satellites. I couldn’t wait.
    My greatest treasure of this epoch was the book Conquest of Space by Willy Ley. Forget Homer and Shakespeare and Hemingway. They were hacks. For me Willy Ley was the greatest writer of all time. His descriptions of spaceflight supplemented by Chesley Bonestell’s magnificent space paintings launched me into orbit decades before a NASA rocket.
    “…there will be zero hour, zero minute, and zero second, and then the roaring bellow from the exhaust nozzles of the ship…the ship will ride up on the roaring flames, disappearing in the sky in less than a minute…
    “The earth will be a monstrous ball somewhere behind the ship, and the pilot will find himself surrounded by space. Black space, strewn all over with the countless jewels of distant suns, the stars. Stretching across the great blackness the pilot will see the Milky Way.”
    To my twelve-year-old brain there was no more wonderful prose written in any language anywhere. I could see that great ball of Earth. I could see those stars. I could see the deep blackness. I read the book again and again. I read it until the pages came unhinged. I consumed Bonestell’s paintings like other boys ogled the breasts of African natives in National Geographic. There were illustrations of astronauts watching a “canalled” Mars from one of its moons, Deimos. Other paintings showed spacesuited explorers walking among the mountains of our moon and on the gravel desert of Saturn’s moon, Mimas. The subtitle on Ley’s book said it