cover spacemaster 2500

"THERE WAS JUST ABOUT one chance in a million that young Dick Simmons could win a place in the Spacemaster Project, but it was the chance he wanted to take more than he had ever wanted anything in his life. It changed his whole life, made a new person of him.

"How he studied, trained, and dedicated himself to the greatest of the American projects for adventuring into space is the story of SPACEMASTER I. It shows how one boy overcame odds a million to one against him.

"All of the details of testing and training programs in this story are based on real-life situations. This is the second boys’ book by the Director of Public Relations of the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences; his first was OPERATION SPRINGBOARD."

John Ball wrote a second SF juvenile, SPACEMASTER 1, after OPERATION SPRINGBOARD. It also featured a large spacecraft in the shape of a flying boat. It differed from the one in OPERATION SPRINGBOARD in that it still had propellers for flying in atmosphere but had an atomic rocket in the tail to boost it into space. I modified a photo of my model to reflect these differences and made this cover for my reprint of the novel.