When I was a boy in the midwest I used to go out and look at the stars at night...

When I was a boy in the midwest I used to go out and look at the stars at night and wonder about them.
I guess every boy does that.
When I wasn't looking at the stars, I was running in the my old or my brand-new tennis shoes, on my way to swing in a tree, swim in a lake, or delve in the town library to read about dinosaurs or time machines.
I guess every boy has done that, too.
This is a book about those stars and those tennis shoes. Mainly about the stars, beacuse that is the way I grew up, getting more and more involved with rockets and space as I moved toward my twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth years.
Not that I have forgotten the tennis shoes and their powerful magic, as you will see in the last story here, which I have included not because it concerns the future, but because it gives you some sort of idea of the kind of boy I was when I was looking at the stars and thinking of the years ahead.
Nor have I forgetten the dinosaurs that all boys love; they are here, too, along with a machine that travels back in time to step on a butterfly.
This is a book then by a boy who grew up in a small illinois town and lived to see the space age arrive, as he hoped and dreamt it would