Delacorte Press, $23.95

Review by L.D. Meagher

June 23, 1999
Web posted at: 12:37 p.m. EDT (1637 GMT)

(CNN) -- One of the elements that makes the "Star Wars" movies so appealing is their unbridled joy at depicting feats of derring-do in the vacuum of space. The trackless void is a fascinating backdrop for heroic exploits. It offers an infinite canvas for the art of imagination. Where George Lucas chose to set his space opera "a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away," Homer H. Hickam Jr. has cooked up a space adventure that takes place much closer to home, and much nearer to now.

Hickam, a retired NASA engineer, has spent a lifetime heeding the siren's song of spaceflight. His delightful memoir "Rocket Boys," which was the basis for the movie "October Sky," recounts his boyhood effort to build working rockets. "Back to the Moon," Hickam's first novel, is imbued with the same sense of adventure and is informed by his long association with the realities of the U.S. space program.

At first glance, the story seems simple, even simplistic. A rocket engineer who was washed out of NASA hijacks the Space Shuttle Columbia and flies it to the moon. In other hands, this story line might have been laughable. But Hickam manages to make it seem not only plausible, but also completely possible. By the end of the book, the reader is wondering why someone hasn't thought to do something like it in real life.

Jack Medaris got bounced from NASA because a rocket test he had run at the propulsion facility in Huntsville, Alabama, went horribly wrong and claimed the life of Kate, his beloved wife and partner in rocketry. Afterward, Medaris went into business for himself as a private contractor for space-related industries. He was contracted to build a robotic space probe to go to the moon and return with samples of a substance first spotted by the Apollo astronauts. The substance could be the source of almost unlimited energy.

On the eve of the probe's launch, a group of uniformed thugs attacks Medaris at his factory in Florida. He is badly beaten, and his plant is torched. Rather than give up on the contract, he hatches an ingenious plot to fulfill it -- by flying the shuttle to the moon.

Hickam populates his story with an assortment of "pad rats," two-faced NASA administrators, double-dealing politicians and "steely-eyed missile men." It's a cinch the small army of people who have worked in and around the space agency over the years will recognize the types -- and perhaps themselves. There's no doubt Hickam sees a lot of himself in his protagonist. Jack Medaris is the same sort of starry-eyed space enthusiast who pours all of his energies into pushing the boundaries of human exploration. Medaris starts out as a man who has lost everything and is ready to make a final, desperate bid for redemption. But he is ultimately revealed as a good guy -- honest, hardworking, deeply caring and in the end heroic.

The space-borne sequences of "Back to the Moon" ring with authenticity. The scenes in Mission Control could be transcripts of actual shuttle missions. And the whole story is shot through with the "right stuff" mind-set that typified the heady early days of the space program. At one point, Jack and his right-hand man Virgil are inspecting what may be a small ding in one of the shuttle's windscreens. They aren't sure it's a problem, but Jack decides to perform "a high-tech NASA repair job on it, just in case.... Where's the duct tape?"

Another, less admirable attitude of the space program also leaks into the pages of "Back to the Moon." The problem is women. NASA has long been seen as the ultimate "boys' club." It has made efforts over the years to increase opportunities for women, but the agency has not shaken its male-dominated image. Hickam's novel suffers in much the same way. The principal female character -- Penny High Eagle, a payload specialist inadvertently caught up in the appropriation of the shuttle -- is depicted as a pop culture gadfly. She's a scientist but has made her mark by staging a series of highly publicized and dangerous stunts. Her role in the novel seems contrived to provide a romantic thread to the story line.

Even more problematic is Hickam's portrayal of the woman who was supposed to command Columbia's mission. Olivia Grant, a tough-talking pilot who clawed her way up the NASA ranks, is single-minded and ruthless. She agrees to help end the hijacking and will stop at nothing, even if it means destroying the shuttle. There are unsympathetic male characters in the book, too. They are depicted as greedy or manipulative or spineless. Only Grant comes across as -- to put it bluntly -- bitchy.

Deficiencies in characterization aside, "Back to the Moon" is a ripping yarn jammed full of gee-whiz technology set against the inhospitable grandeur of outer space. It is also something of a call to arms. Hickam, like many of his former NASA colleagues, feels the United States lost a historic opportunity when it abandoned its exploration of the moon. He believes we can get it back, if we go "Back to the Moon."

L.D. Meagher is a senior writer at CNN Headline News. He has worked in broadcasting for 30 years.