''You Will Go To The Moon'' is a work of

children's literature Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are created for children. Modern children's literature is classified in two different ways: genre or the intended age of the reader. Children's ...

written by Mae and Ira Freeman and illustrated by Robert Patterson, published in 1959, ten years before the first

moon landing A Moon landing is the arrival of a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon. This includes both crewed and robotic missions. The first human-made object to touch the Moon was the Soviet Union's Luna 2, on 13 September 1959. The United St ...

. The first edition was reprinted in England in 1962 under the same title. A second edition was published in 1971, with new illustrations reflecting NASA's Project Apollo. This was reprinted in England in 1973 under the title ''Going to the Moon''. The book is a children's story in the

Beginner Books Beginner Books is the Random House imprint for young children ages 3–9, co-founded by Phyllis Cerf with Ted Geisel, more often known as Dr. Seuss, and his wife Helen Palmer Geisel. Their first book was Dr. Seuss's ''The Cat in the Hat'' (19 ...

series, written using a restricted vocabulary of simple words for a readership age of six. The illustrations show a lunar mission concept based on the Von Braun and Ley space exploration concepts of 1952 (see

Man Will Conquer Space Soon! "Man Will Conquer Space Soon!" was the title of a series of 1950s magazine articles in ''Collier's'' detailing Wernher von Braun's plans for manned spaceflight. Edited by Cornelius Ryan, the individual articles were authored by such space notables ...

), featuring wingèd three-stage rockets ferrying the passengers to a rotating-wheel

space station A space station is a spacecraft capable of supporting a human crew in orbit for an extended period of time, and is therefore a type of space habitat. It lacks major propulsion or landing systems. An orbital station or an orbital space station i ...

, serving as a transfer station to the spider-like lunar surface shuttle. The writing is unusual in that it is written in the second-person

future tense In grammar, a future tense (abbreviated ) is a verb form that generally marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future. An example of a future tense form is the French ''aimera'', meaning ...

External links

{{Portal, Children's literature
Official Amazon page.
Children's non-fiction books 1959 children's books American picture books