Customer Reviews

You Will Go to the Moon

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I agree with all of the reviews posted here I was learning to read in the late sixtes/early seventies and I remember this book very well. I must have read it a few hundred times.
Well, imagine my surprise last week when my dad found it in the attic and asked if I wanted it for my 4 year old. As I dug into the pile of books he found I found not only my copy, but my sisters edition from 10 years earlier. The c-right on my sisters was dated 1959 mine was 1971. The art and the text were redone. The same authors but two different illustrators. By 1971 we had a functioning moon program and we were a more "politically correct" society.
The art in the 59 edition is more in the vein of 50's fantasy. One of the big draws in the 59 edition is that you will be able to see what's going on by watching a Television. The 71 edition is clearly based on Apollo. In the 59 edition there are no female "Spacemen", by 71 one there are female astronauts in the book.
Seeing the two side by side is a great history lesson. and a real trip down memory lane for me.

This is an "impressionable" book of colossal proportions. The subject matter absolutely fascinated, inspired, challenged, and motivated a generation of American "rocket scientists" that would eventually come to operate the Space Shuttle and the Space Station. I am one of those. Born in 1960, I would end up participating in a work-study program with NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center, earn an Aerospace Engineering degree, and operate the Space Shuttle--on the ground, that is! Of course, I am sure it stimulated many others that chose different fields of endeavor.

As a young "Cat In The Hat" reader I was enormously fascinated with this book. Yes, this book was distributed by mail to many young readers, right along with "Green Eggs and Ham." What a time in history to begin learning. Imagine training to read with the imagination of Dr. Suess, to experience the creativity of Walt Disney, and be exposed to a vision of space travel by Wernher von Braun and his followers--all while the Mercury, Gemini and Saturn/Apollo programs hit the headlines and the TV screens!

With over forty years having passed, I suggest reading it again-or for the first time. On the one hand, you will find that much is fulfilled. Alas, on the other hand, the fact that the title is addressed to "YOU" should cause us all to reflect on the promises one generation makes to another...and inspire us all to action once again. This time to enable all those who would like to Go To The Moon!

I'm 25 years old, and have a library of thousands of books, and when I stop to think about it, this book was the most influential.

The book opens a child's mind to the dream of space, and assumes (quite casually) that humanity is headed there, and then tells you exactly what it'll be like. I think back on the book, and it covered fairly advanced topics (multi-stage rockets, centrifugal "force" space stations, etc.) in language and concepts a kindergarten mind can comprehend.

It's apparently out of print (more's the pity), but it's just as applicable scientifically today as it was when published (mostly because our space program hasn't moved forward at the optimistic pace predicted in the early 70s, and has bogged itself down in political nonsense and governmental bureaucracy... but I digress).

If you don't think kids should dream of their trip into space, where they spend time at a half-way station before landing on the moon, then skip this book and buy some of the latest Barney pap.

But if you want your kids to look up at the stars with, not only awe, but *ownership* in their eyes, sift through as many piles of dusty tomes in the nearest used bookstore and *find* this book.

Your kids will thank you. Perhaps from Mars.

This was one of the first books I was ever given, sometime certainly before my second birthday. Twenty-eight years later I get a chill down my spine recalling the detailed, Von Braun-meets-Chesley Bonestell elucidation of how I "was" heading spaceward. I believed it, too - the rest of my life, as exciting as it's been in so many ways, has been a bit of a disappointment by contrast. Seminal and a bit melancholy, too - reality has been so tawdry ever since.

I had had this book as a child, and reading it again brought back memories of growing up during the early days of the space program. At the time, this seemed entirely plausible.
The book presents a very realistic, yet understandable view of a space mission, first to a rotating space station, then on to the Moon. It explains the physics of acceleration and microgravity on the level of an early reader, as well as an explanation of how a rotating space station would provide a simulation of normal gravity.
I would recommend this book to anyone who has a child who will be interested in the upcoming Orion Missions to the Moon and beyond, It would be a lot better than 'Goodnight, Moon".

When I was a little kid, the space race was in full bloom. And I was right there with it. I could name all the astronauts and which missions they'd been on; our teachers would wheel a TV into the classroom so we could watch fuzzy images of Gemini launches; I heard the Apollo 8 astronauts read from the Book of Genesis; I remember exactly where I was when man first walked on the moon.

Along the way, I read this book. And read it, and read it. I didn't see it as a fantasy; to me, it was a contract. After all, it did say--right on the cover--You[, Scott R. Lucado, of Wausau, Wisconsin] Will Go to the Moon. (Okay, my imagination inserted the bracketed text--but if you're reading this, I'll bet you know how I felt.)

And at the rate things were happening back then, it seemed not only possible but inevitable.

But then...somehow, we lost our way. Technology went from being the savior of mankind to being the machine that killed little kids in Vietnam, and that dream of going into dark, empty space died like an orchid pushed out of an airlock.

By the time computers came along, it was too late for space exploration. It seemed we all decided that instead of exploring the blackness of outer space, we would spend our time exploring our darkest fantasies in cyberspace.

So here I am, past 50, gray and cynical, estranged from my youth. But I can still pick up my copy of this book, and once again dream that someday, someday soon, this odd, lonely Midwestern boy will set his ungainly foot onto the dusty surface of another world.

The moon. So very far away, and yet, thanks to this book, almost...almost...near enough to touch.

I grew up with this book when I was a kid and I loved it then so much I read it to my younger brother. Now I've read it to my 7 year old son who liked it and plan to read it to my daughter too. Its just so inspirational to help get a kid interested about space travel and allow them expand there horizons. although the story is outdated, it still is a great read, a real classic !

"Someday You Will Go To The Moon" by Mae and Ira Freeman is a marvelous example of the optimism of Mid 20th Century America.

As a child, I cherished this book. Its illustrations by the imaginative Robert Patterson inspired me and filled my six-year-old mind with wonder and hope for the future.

If you have the opportunity, buy a copy of this book and read it to your children and hopefully you will experience a time when we believed in ourselves as Americans.

We own the 1959 edition of this book, with Mom and Dad straight out of a Gimble's advertisement, and all the astronauts sport Johnny Unitas buzz cut flat tops. After page three and a cheery wave goodbye to Mom not a woman is to be seen in this most male of explorations (unless you count the Garrison cap on the soda jerk at the space station). "Space, the final frontier...." Indeed.

My daughter loves it.

I mean, she loves it.

The illustrations look like John Water's camp to me now, and the text reads like the pulp science fiction/science fact from which it drew its inspiration, and the whole thin veneer of science on the tale is a mess. My favourite is the "Diner" at the space station where two regular guys are getting a cup-o-joe while a soda jerk in a white paper Garrison cap serves them.

But it is a children's book, so it doesn't matter. The Cat-In-The-Hat could pop up on the last page and no child would bat an eyelash until they are 10 years old.

Innocent in a way that the "back to The Future" movies aren't. A delightful book for children, girls and boys alike.

I remember this book well, although not perfectly, from thirty years ago. I thought back to it occasionally, and a few things cleared up.

Even with an illustration of it, I missunderstood the description of the mooncar going through the crater. For some reason, I imagined the car falling down a deep hole, driving across the bottom, and floating back up the other side.

The illustrator did get one thing wrong: The text described tiny rockets firing to turn the spaceship. The picture showed the spaceship going around in a loop, when in reality, it continued going straight in its path, just rotating to point the tail toward the moon.

When reading it, I always wondered how we got back to Earth. It seemed to me a whole lot more dangerous.