First on the Moon by Jeff Sutton

Written in 1958, more than a decade before the first actual Moon landing, this novel takes us on an adventure that is part scientific speculation and part Cold War thriller. American Adam Crag is tapped to lead the first manned mission to the moon, racing against the Soviet Union to be the first. The reward, per UN doctrine, is the right to claim the entire lunar surface for the country that can be the first to get there and still be surviving when the final UN vote takes place. But as if the mission itself wasn’t enough risk for these astronauts, intelligence suggests the Soviets plan to destroy the American rocket ship before it can ever launch.

But those Americans can be tricky, and they have prepared for just such a contingency. Their primary rocket ship is merely a decoy, and so when it is, in fact, destroyed, their real ship is able to blast off into space and proceed with the mission. But hold on, the Soviets aren’t done yet. Word comes down that one of the American astronauts is secretly, a saboteur!

This novel was author Jeff Sutton’s first. As a former marine (including WW2 service on Guadalcanal) and now a research engineer for Convair-San Diego, Jeff Sutton was used to journalistic and technical writing. He specialized in high-altitude survival and this background novel served him well in all the myriad technical aspects of this spaceflight novel. Of course, much of the plot was speculative I nature, particularly what it would be like on the surface of the moon. The Cold War plot of pitting the two superpowers against each other in actual space combat and moon-surface gunplay seems a bit hokey looking back from our time, but it provided a pretty good action-adventure alternative to what could have been simply an overcome-the-technical-glitches plot.

I pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed reading this novel. The technical parts were pretty spot-on but sometimes the characters acted in an unconvincing manner. For example, the American staff back on Earth desperately tried to determine which of the astronauts was the likely saboteur via background checks and interviews with their childhood teachers and so forth. We get to see some of that, but most occurs in the background. But when they finally think they have their man, they choose not to tell Commander Crag in case they have it wrong. They tell him they don’t want to poison his opinion of any of his crew. What? Why go to the trouble of figuring it out and then not tell him so he can take precautions. Poor Commander Crag must not only have to deal with fixing the rocket ship for a return flight, severe oxygen deficiency problems, incoming nuclear warheads launched from earth by the Soviets, crew morale problems, gun fights with a Soviet Moon landing crew, and more…he also has to battle the stupid bureaucrats back home. Yeah…probably more realistic now that I think about it.

So as long as you can take off your 21st century hat and insert yourself into 1958, this is a pretty good science fiction yarn. Jeff Sutton would go on to write 22 more novels in science fiction, war, political novels, and juvenile fiction. Most of them involved themes involving the space program.