Step to the Stars, by Lester del Ray

Step to the Stars by Lester del Ray (1954) was the first "adult" book I ever read. I read it in the third grade. I chose it because I was fascinated with the United States space program and with space in general and this relatively short novel about the building of the first space station must have interested me. The plot involves a U.S. company working under federal contract to build the first space station in the early 1950s. In some ways, the novel is prescient. The principles of orbital mechanics that allow a space station to be placed in orbit were already known. There was already discussion about putting a space station in orbit, although it didn't take place for the next 20 years if you count Skylab or 30 years if you count the International Space Station.

In the novel, various obstacles along the way interfere with the building of the space station. A group of hostile nations called the Combine have placed spies among the workers building the station. They explode bombs and commit other forms of sabotage. The Combine itself is attempting to develop an atomic powered rocket that will allow its own space station to be built and placed in orbit. (When the first launch of the atomic rocket ends in an explosion, the Americans set out to rescue the crew members, who by some miraculous means have survived).

The building of the space station itself causes an international crisis. The military potential of the space station is much discussed in the novel, which expresses mixed views about whether using it for military rather than scientific purposes is a good idea. Nearly 70 years have passed since Step to the Stars was written, and in that time many significant technical, scientific, and social advances have occurred. Solar panels power today's space station, while a mirror that focuses the sun's rays on a steam generator powers the one in del Ray's novel. The novel's attitude towards women is old-fashioned, although the presence of a few women on the space station is significant. One of them, Nora, who enters the novel as a nurse, ends up with considerable responsibility and is promoted to pilot status by the end of the novel. The manager of the team building the space station even says that, with a few caveats, women can perform as well in space as men. No people of color, at least no African-Americans, work on the space station. There is one Mexican among the teambuilding the space station. He is repeatedly referred to as "the little man," and he is occasionally described with equivocal language. Yet the main character in the novel thinks highly of him and gives him significant responsibility.

What seems most old-fashioned and wrong about Step to the Stars is the ease with which the space station is built. A fleet of three or four rockets takes off on a daily basis from a spaceport on Johnston Island to ferry equipment and people to the space station. Building this station takes a year's time. At the end of the novel, we’re told that the U. S. government is planning to send a rocket with people aboard to the moon "next year." We know now from our experience with the last 60 years that putting people into space, building space stations, going to the moon, planning to go Mars, is difficult, complex, fraught with difficulty, arduous, and time-consuming. Most of all space travel involves immense amounts of money.

I returned to this novel for reasons of nostalgia and because I wanted to see how I would view it now, from my adult perspective. It was pretty much as I remembered it. It's not the kind of novel I would choose to read today, but it was the kind of book I needed to get me started as a serious reader in the third grade. I read science fiction almost exclusively for the next five or six years of my life, and then moved to other literature.