Spacemaster 1

by John Dudley Ball

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 former Director of Public Relations of the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences; his first was OPERATION SPRINGBOARD.

146 pages, Paperback

First published July 29, 2013

About the author

John Dudley Ball writing as John Ball, was an American writer best known for mystery novels involving the African-American police detective Virgil Tibbs. He was introduced in the 1965 In the Heat of the Night where he solves a murder in a racist Southern small town. It won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America and was made into an Oscar-winning film of the same name starring Sidney Poitier; the film had two sequels, and spawned a television series several decades later, none of which were based on Ball's later Tibbs stories. He also wrote under the name John Ball Jr..

Ball was born in Schenectady, New York, grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and attended Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin. He wrote for a number of magazines and newspapers, including the Brooklyn Eagle. For a time he worked part-time as a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy, was trained in martial arts, and was a nudist. In the mid 1980s, he was the book review columnist for Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. Ball lived in Encino, California, and died there in 1988.