Project Jupiter by Fredric Brown

Space travel to Jupiter sounds like a grand adventure, but you will not find it in this book. Written in 1953, it imagines the future world of 1997 and one man's all-encompassing drive to build an interplanetary rocket.

With more galaxies of stars in the universe than there are stars in our own galaxy waiting to be explored, the Moon, Mars, and Venus have all been conquered, and ex-starduster Max Andrews yearns to return to space. While a young Spaceman First Class, he was grounded when he lost a leg on a routine surface exploration on Venus. Now 57, he works as a rocket mechanic at the San Francisco port for inter-city rocket flights. The creation of the atomic fuel drive made planetary travel common, and Jupiter is next—four hundred million miles away, with twelve moons and a poisonous atmosphere.

Max eagerly presents his case to be on the project to California senator Ellen Gallagher. She agrees he has the knowledge to be director but first needs a ten-subject engineering degree. While he studies, she pulls the Machiavellian strings in Congress to find the billion-dollar funding. Over the next three years, they fall deeply in love while battling political opposition. His studies in unified field theory with Maasai mathematician Chang M'bassi allow him to redesign the ship, saving construction and atomic fuel costs. Although the project is approved for a base in New Mexico, a mistake Max made in his youth is going to crumble his dreams into dust, and Ellen is still suffering mysterious headaches—in fact, no one in this book has a good end!

Also published under the great title The Lights In The Sky Are Stars, the facts about Jupiter were fascinating—being eleven times as big as Earth—but this is fully grounded in government meetings and romance, rather than space travel. Perhaps for a shot of reality, Brown gives an unnecessary downward spiral to every character, but there are conversations about space warp drives and teleportation that give a positive look towards the future. Fredric Brown has a worldwide following for his early innovations in science fiction and mystery. I was expecting Jupiter, but Brown is a unique writer, and it was entertaining.

1953 / Paperback / 160 pages