This book has the classic Leinster hero: the brilliant engineer who can solve all kinds of problems and is cool under fire.

Unfortunately it also has the classic Leinster female lead, who (even more than the obsolete technology and the wildly different engineering) drives home the fact that this book was written a long time ago. She's not at all a dumb broad, but she sure isn't a feminist, and it feels... well, just very dated.

This book was obviously written in the McCarthy era, as you will have pounded into you when you read about the villains and what the heroes are trying to accomplish. This probably more than anything else anchors this book firmly in the 1950s and (unlike, say, Asimov's fiction of that era, or Leinster's better works) makes it impossible to read as anything other than a period piece.

This plot is actually ok, except for those elements. It certainly held my attention. But this book and its sequels are definitely not Leinster's best (read the Med Ship stories, or The Pirates of Ersatz/Zan, or a few others). The hero is a bit too stereotyped and all-conquering, and the villains are too simplistic. The technology is wildly different from what was actually launched a couple of decades later, but that was less jarring than the social differences and the politics. ( )

The technology is now way out of date - but a fun read. ( )

A cold war era, American, science fiction tale of the heroic assembly of a space station, in the middle of a desert, surronded by bad bad people. The US is alone in this endevour, while the rest of the world cannot comprehend the usefulness to the world peace of having a nuclear armed space station in orbit.

Perhaps this novel was commissioned, perhaps it was a parody (by I doubt it), but it completely implausible from beginning to end. The station is built on the Earth and then lauched whole, the military cannot keep secure a facility in the middle of the desert. And do not get me started on the "love story".

Enjoyable for someone who knows well the genre and wants to take some laughs out of the mindset of the '60s.

This book has a follow-up "Space Tug" that is even worse, if possible. ( )