They Reached for the Moon by William Oberfield

They took years to build the rocket and minutes to launch it, sending two ordinary men where others had vanished forever. Officially, it was a simple trip around the moon. Unofficially, it was a gamble born of desperation, pride, and a belief that ignorance might succeed where genius had failed. They Reached For The Moon by William Oberfield. That’s next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast.

Before the Moon became a destination, it was only a dream—distant, untouchable, and forever beyond reach. Today, it’s easy to forget what an impossible idea space travel once was, no human would even orbit the earth for another 10 years after this story was written. No human being had ever seen the far side of the Moon until Apollo 8 circled it in December of 1968. For centuries, the Moon belonged to poets and storytellers—not astronauts.

Seventeen years earlier, in 1951, William Oberfield dared to imagine what had never been done. He wrote this story at a time when rockets were crude, computers barely existed, and spaceflight was a lot closer to fantasy than engineering. Yet Oberfield looked up and saw not mystery alone, but possibility.

Only four of William Oberfield’s stories were published, this was the last of them. From the November 1951 issue of Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy on page 80, They Reached For The Moon by William Oberfield…

Next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, Far from help and beyond certainty, a returning astronaut confronts a problem that logic cannot solve. Survival depends on a forbidden experiment that could unlock impossible insight—or erase him completely. Last Resort by Stephen Bartholomew.

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