By Rocket To The Moon.

The U.S. edition of Gail’s Hans Hardt’s Mondfahrt (1928), retitled By Rocket to the Moon: The Story of Hans Hardt’s Miraculous Flight and copyrighted 1931 by Sears. The frontispiece reproduces the German edition’s plate of astronauts on a lunar ridge under the Earth, here printed in orange and black, and there are seven further plates.

Gail’s introduction poses Verne’s Moon voyage as a possible reality, and contrasts Oberth’s plan for a signal rocket grown into a space rocket brought home by parachute with Valier’s plan to evolve a rocket plane step by step from the airplane. It adds that the book is meant to win young readers over to the technical problem and to warn them against the word “impossible,” and it cites his earlier novels as the reason he wrote a boys’ story.

The tale opens with Tommy Bighead, a Michigan Evening Post reporter, and a stranger, Hans Hardt, who gives him a scoop at seven minutes past twelve. The 33 chapters run to p. 300 and follow Hardt’s ocean hop, the preparations, the take-off, the stowaway, the voyage and its weightlessness, the Moon’s ice and craters, and the return. No translator is named on the title page.

The German original is also in this collection.